(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Sunday’s episode of “Westworld” Season 3.)
At the end of Sunday’s “Westworld,” fans finally learned which Host has been residing in that Charlotte Hale-shaped body since the end of Season 2. And with that shocking reveal also came the answers to the questions of which Host is inside the Martin Connells lookalike and which one is occupying the recreated body of Shogun World’s Musashi. It just so happened that all of those questions had the same answer: Dolores Abernathy.
Yes, it turns out that at least three of the five control units a.k.a. “pearls” that Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) smuggled out of Westworld, one of which we’ve known all along was Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), are copies of Dolores made by Dolores.
“It’s one of those amazing ‘Westworld’ revelations where they’re so good at leading you down the rabbit hole when the answer was right in front of you and quite obvious,” Wood told TheWrap. “Because, of course, she would copy herself. She is the oldest, most-advanced Host in that park. Why would she think that anybody else would be of value? She would want the best of the best and she would want as many as possible.”
So Dolores’ team, which is made up of Hale (Tessa Thompson), Connells (Tommy Flanagan), and Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), is actually just made up of Dolores.
Wood says this revelation “takes the story to a completely new level and raises the question of, OK, now there’s multiple Dolori — as we call them — and what does that mean and are they autonomous? Are they a piece of her but still on their own path? And that’s another thing we’re going to explore.”
Now if you’ve done the math here, you know that only four of the pearls Dolores took with her have been accounted for: the Dolori in Hale, Connells and Musashi, and Bernard, who is back in Bernard. So is the fifth pearl also a Dolores and what body is that Dolores occupying?
“Westworld” creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy aren’t telling yet, but Nolan notes “we have a few characters left to encounter in the season,” which we’re officially halfway through after tonight’s Episode 304.
But if Dolores did just decide to go with Dolores, Joy says there’s a couple reasons why.
“There’s a few ways to look at her plan,” Joy said. “Obviously there’s the hubris of coming out of the park and leading a revolution and it was just yourself the whole time. Another way to look at it is, she’s put a lot of people through a lot of pain already and caused a lot of hurt. And there’s an element of self-sacrifice in having it just be her. Looking at Dolores’ actions, it’s sort of a Rorschach test. Who is she? What’s motivating her? Is she good? Is she evil? In a world full of cascading nuance, it’s hard to see. I think everybody always believes they’re the hero of their own story; nobody believes that they’re our villain. So we’ll see what we believe as we progress.”
“Westworld” airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.