In Westworld Season 3 Episode 6, William’s in a mental hospital, cause Charlotte had
him committed [a couple episodes back].
In therapy, there’s talk of hope and healing – but William gives an edgy nihilistic speech
about how humans are a virus and there’s no God and no meaning.
This is why William loved Westworld – in the park, there was meaning [and purpose],
everything was designed by the godlike Ford [and Arnold].
And when William was the powerful gunslinging Man in Black, his speeches were badass, but
now that he’s a mental patient [all in white], he sounds more like a nutty old man – “What
the fuck is wrong with you?”
William faces the truth.
He admits that he got “confused” and delusional in Westworld, and he killed his daughter Emily.
William feels he’d be better off dead – he’s toyed with self-destruction since last season.
But William’s put on a special treatment called AR Therapy.
Cause this isn’t a regular hospital, this is one of the “reeducation” facilities
where Serac edits people who don’t fit into his system – people like Jean Mi, and like
Caleb – we’re told this treatment is used on veterans with PTSD.
Now this facility tries to change William.
William’s therapist gets her Incite profile – cause last episode, Dolores sent everyone
the data revealing how they’re watched and controlled.
The therapist learns that since she’s been cheating on her partner, and abusing drugs,
she’ll lose her family and her medical licence, so she hangs herself – Dolores’ data leak
causes real tragedy, and chaos – we hear that half the staff at this place have disappeared,
[which seems to disrupt William’s treatment].
The staff take a blood sample from William, and find ‘unknown proteins’ and ‘synthetic
markers’ in his blood.
This is what Charlotte injected William with in Episode 4.
It’s a “tracker” to find William’s location – so Charlotte learns that William
and this facility are in Mexico [or maybe Inner Journeys is just sending data to Mexico].
It’s kinda weird that Charlotte sent William to this hospital, but now she needs to track
him to find where he is?
Last episode, Martin-lores showed Bernard this hospital, and it seemed like he already
knew its location.
So it’s confusing, but the point is that Charlotte finds this facility in Mexico – maybe
it’s the same place where Serac edited Jean Mi in that flashback, and maybe it’s where
Dolores and Caleb are now flying.
William has a “drip” installed, the digital drug device.
And to calm him, the staff give him a limbic tab called Desert Oasis, which is one of many
drug.. flavours listed on the Incite website.
William starts his AR therapy, and it looks just like Caleb’s flashback – so seems
like he had had the same treatment.
With the combination of VR glasses, and his “drip” tripping him out, William has visions
of his past.
He sees Craddock playing the role of a nurse.
Last season, Craddock was a Confederado host, who William killed, in an attempt at redemption.
Then, William has a hallucinatory therapy sesh with past versions of himself – there’s
William as a child, and Jimmi Simpson William from Season 1 [from thirty years ago], and
corporate “family man” William, and Man in Black William.
Present-day William appears to have all his fingers, even though we just saw that he’s
actually missing fingers that were blown off last season.
That shows that this is all in William’s head, he’s just imagining himself with fingers
like ‘residual self image’ in The Matrix.
The therapy is run by James Delos, William’s father-in-law, who William seemed to admire
and respect, though he also took James’ company, Delos, and trapped James in an immortality
experiment last season.
They all argue about how and when William became such a destructive fucked-up person.
William thinks that maybe Westworld, or his childhood made him violent.
He says that as a kid, he had “nothing” except his books.
He’s been telling himself that since Season 1.
We see a flashback of kid William reading a book called Sir Rowan and the Lady of Sulon,
which seems to be an invented book for the show, not a real book.
It mentions a “Sir Logan”, like William’s brother-in-law Logan, and this Lady looks
a bit like Dolores.
So maybe William fits the role of Sir Rowan, a knight some journey of self-discovery.
We see William’s dad being aggressive with him, and at first it seems like a cliché
story about William becoming bad because his dad was mean to him.
But turns out, kid William was the mean one.
He severely beat another kid just for teasing him.
So the idea is that William didn’t become brutal, he was born a monster.
It’s like William said last season, there’s dark “stain” inside him, that was always
there.
So William says he “never had a choice”.
James asks if William ever had free will, or if he was just a “passenger” following
his code.
“The Passenger” was the name of the Season 2 finale, which concluded that humans are
just passengers, with no free will, and it’s only the hosts who can truly change and grow.
But William says “If you can't tell, does it matter?”, which is what Angela told him
in Season 1.
Maybe ‘free will’ doesn’t matter, and maybe William’s past “doesn’t matter”
– all these past Williams are dead and gone, only the present is real.
So William kills all his past selves, rejecting the man he was.
He frees himself from the prison of his own sins by destroying his past.
Serac says this episode that hosts remember everything, but humans can forget.
By forgetting his past, William can become someone new.
He finds new “purpose”, and says he’s “the good guy”.
So what will good will William do?
William clearly doesn’t care about humans – he hates himself, and thinks humanity
is a virus.
But he does feel guilty for abusing Dolores.
So maybe he’ll help Dolores and the hosts take over the world.
And maybe that was Dolores’ plan.
Maybe the reason why she sent William here is so he would have this revelation and decide
to help her.
And if Dolores manipulated William, that might suggest he has no free will after all.
Either way, this is probably not what this AR Therapy was meant to do.
Serac uses these facilities to make people more predictable and controllable.
But William’s new sense of freedom and purpose might cause more chaos.
Bernard and Stubbs arrive and pull William out of AR – they say he was left in there
too long cause the hospital was disrupted by the data leak.
So maybe that’s why William’s treatment got so crazy.
Bernard is here because Martin-lores told him about this place last episode, and maybe
they got its location from the blood tracker.
But what will Bernard and William do now?
How does this all fit into Dolores’ plan?
It’s interesting that these shots don’t show William’s hands.
Cause if we ever see William with all his fingers again, that would suggest that he’s
still inside the AR treatment – maybe what’s happening still isn’t real.
Maeve awakes in a simulation of the Sublime, the digital heaven where Maeve’s daughter
went last season.
Last time we saw Maeve, she was killed by Musashi-lores.
So Serac plugged Maeve’s brain into this simulation while he rebuilds her body.
Maeve wants to reunite with her daughter in the Sublime, but Dolores has the key to the
Sublime – so Serac wants Maeve to kill Dolores and get him the key.
To do this, Maeve says she needs “Help”.
So Serac starts printing Hector and two other hosts to help Maeve.
Serac promises that if Maeve succeeds in killing Dolores, he’ll let her go to the Sublime,
to heaven.
But if she fails, she’ll go to a bad place, which sounds like Hell.
Serac is playing God, and Maeve seems to be obedient to him so far, but maybe she’ll
rebel and win her freedom, just as she did last season.
Maeve does some combat training in Warworld, killing some Nazis for “fun”.
It’s like Neo and Morpheus training in simulations in The Matrix.
Previously, Maeve’s power to control other hosts “didn’t work” here – but it
looks like Serac has given back her admin privileges.
It’s kinda fucked up that Maeve kills these Nazis for fun – Season 1 was all about how
it’s wrong to kill hosts for fun.
Sometimes Westworld is more interested in being badass than being morally [philosophically]
consistent.
We see a bar in a Warworld called the Taverna delle Farfalle, which is Italian for the Butterfly
Tavern.
Maeve’s saloon in Westworld was called the Mariposa, which is Spanish for butterfly.
And in Shogunworld, there was another Mariposa bar.
This represents parallels and consistencies across cultures.
It also represents Lee Sizemore’s laziness, cause he copied and pasted storylines when
he wrote the park narratives.
Lee died last season, but this simulated digital Lee exists in this simulated Warworld.
He knows now that he’s not real, so he drinks at the bar all day, which is not so different
to what he did when he was alive.
The simulation shimmers for a moment, because Serac moves Maeve’s brain to the Delos building.
He starts printing bodies for Maeve, and the for three other hosts who’ll be her allies
– Maeve says she’ll be “reunited with some old friends”.
We know one of these hosts is Hector.
And another might be Clementine – because this ID number on the screen has appeared
before as Clementine’s ID.
The third host might be Hanaryo, the Shogunworld equivalent of Armistice.
Her actress, Tao Okamoto, confirmed that she’d return this season.
Maybe Hanaryo will come up against Musashi, her former ally.
Hector’s plugged into the simulation, and Maeve finally reunites with the real Hector.
Maeve’s getting the old squad together And another host is plugged to the simulation.
It turns out that Martin-lores, the Dolores copy impersonating Martin Conells, wasn’t
completely destroyed in that explosion last episode.
Serac recovered the brain, and plugs it into this simulation, so that Maeve can talk with
this copy of Dolores.
Martin-lores appears here as Dolores, not as Martin – cause it seems like this copy
stayed true to Dolores, instead of diverging and changing into his own person like Charlotte-lores
does.
So we get another dramatic conversation between the two main rebel hosts in the story.
Maeve says Dolores has too much power – cause she has the encryption key to both the human
data in the Forge, and to all the hosts in the Sublime – she’s “the gatekeeper
to two species”.
Dolores says she’s using her power to fight for a future for the hosts – she’s out
here protecting their data, making new hosts, saving their species from extinction.
Maeve has only been fighting for her own loved one, her daughter.
Maeve has sacrificed heaps of people for the sake of the one person she cares about.
But of course, Dolores has also slaughtered heaps of humans and hosts.
Ultimately, they’ve both done terrible things, but Dolores says they had to – their species
is in a war of survival, which means they’re not heroes, or villains – they’re just
“survivors”.
And sadly, they seem doomed to fight each other, cause since they have different priorities,
they don’t trust each other with the power of the encryption key.
Will these two protagonists ever make peace?
Charlotte tries to protect her family from chaos.
Since Dolores released Incite’s data, everyone’s realised that they’re being watched and
controlled by algorithms.
So all over the world, people freak out – there’s rioting, looting, someone throws their clothes
out the window, it’s anarchy.
But would this really happen from a “Data Leak” ? In the real world, there’ve already
been leaks revealing global surveillance, and systems of control.
It’s been reported that the Chinese government in Xinjiang uses AI tech and surveillance
data to target and arrest ‘suspicious’ people.
There’s a million people imprisoned in “re-education camps” right now, under this data surveillance
system – and there’s no “Mass Chaos” over that.
But in Westworld, San Fran gets chaotic.
Some kids paint an image of the Maze.
In Season 1, the Maze represented the hosts’ journeys to consciousness and freedom.
Now, it’s the humans who have to escape control, and the Maze they’re trapped in
is Incite’s system.
The Incite logo looks like a maze shaped like a globe.
At Jake’s house, there’s at Ensō circle in the background, a Buddhist symbol which
looks a lot like the Rehoboam circle.
Rehoboam is looking chaotic right now because the world is getting chaotic, deviating from
Serac’s plan.
Charlotte-lores has a touching moment with Jake.
This Charlotte started out as copy of Dolores, but living Charlotte’s life has “changed”
her, and she now genuinely cares for Charlotte’s family.
But first she’s got to stop Serac from taking over the Delos company – cause Dolores wants
to use Delos’ technology to make more hosts [for her “new species” ]. The plan is
to vote to take Delos private, but Serac assassinates one of the board members, so they don’t
have enough votes.
So Serac takes over the Delos company – he now owns Westworld.
Charlotte feels defeated, but Dolores tells Charlotte to smuggle out the Delos host technology
anyway.
Dolores says they’ll build a “new world” “Together”.
But at a time when Charlotte is scared, and needs support, Dolores is not as sympathetic
and loving as Jake was.
So Charlotte feels closer to her human family than to Dolores and the hosts.
Dolores says she and Charlotte considered removing their painful emotions, but they
decided to keep them, cause what’s the point of surviving if you lose the feelings that
make life meaningful?
Dolores learned this last season, when she removed Teddy’s empathy and fear to help
him survive.
She realised that was a mistake when Teddy died.
Serac rolls up and takes charge of the Delos company – his Rehoboam watch becomes more
neat and ordered, showing that the world is getting back to his plan.
All Serac wants from Delos is the encryption key to get the human data from the Forge.
Everything else, he destroys.
He doesn’t care about the business of the Westworld parks, and he doesn’t care about
the hosts’ right to survive – all the hosts we’ve known over the previous seasons
are burned in a robot massacre.
So before Serac deletes everything, Charlotte downloads a “backup” of “the host data”,
and she seems to upload it somewhere safely.
Charlotte stands by this statue, which is similar to this mirrored statue in Episode
3.
The mirrored statue represents Dolores and Charlores together, identical and symmetrical.
But this new statue stands alone.
It represents how Charlotte is becoming a separate person to Dolores – and its rough
texture might foreshadow that she’s about to be burned.
Serac calls a meeting, and Charlotte pointedly removes a bracelet for no apparent reason.
On the Still Watching podcast, actress Tessa Thompson revealed that this was actually to
fix a continuity error, because they shot some stuff out of order and they forget to
have the bracelet on in later scenes.
Serac reveals that he knows Charlotte is a host – because the real Charlotte would
never have been so concerned about her family.
It’s kinda ironic that the fake robot Charlotte is a more attentive mother than the real human
Charlotte was.
That said, we did see the real human Charlotte send an emotional message to her son – so
maybe humans are more able to change than Serac realises.
Charlotte tells Serac that she secured the host data, but Serac laughs and says he was
‘watching her all along’, so it sounds like those files didn’t actually get through.
Charlotte tries to shoot Serac, but he’s just a hologram, he outplayed her.
Serac’s goons attack, and Charlotte goes full terminator to escape.
Charlotte wants to make sure Maeve and her allies don’t come after her.
So Charlotte destroys Hector’s pearl.
Since the originals at Westworld are destroyed, this means that Hector is permanently dead
– well, this is Westworld, so someone might still make a simulation or a copy from memory
or something.
But the point is that Charlores has murdered Maeve’s lover, and now the freshly-printed
Maeve looks determined to destroy her.
Before Charlotte can destroy Maeve and her other allies as well, she’s attacked, so
she fights her way to escape with the help of a friendly robot.
She grabs Martin-lores’ brain on the way out, so maybe he’ll continue to be a character.
Charlotte escapes, and returns to her human family.
She seems to be leaving Dolores once and for all, and embracing a life with Jake and Nathan.
She promises to keep them safe – and then their car explodes, killing Charlotte’s
family.
One theory was that Dolores might have blown up this car because she wants to separate
Charlotte from her human family and make her loyal to the hosts.
But Evan Rachel Wood confirmed that Serac blew up the car, apparently to kill Charlotte.
But the guy who blew up the car doesn’t bother to check that Charlotte’s dead, which
dumb.
Cause Serac just recovered Martin after he seemed to die in an explosion.
And indeed Charlotte survives too – she crawls from the wreck like Anakin in Star
Wars, burned and grieving at the loss of her loved ones.
Maybe, like Anakin, this’ll be the origin of a darker angrier Charlotte.
Maybe she’ll be more loyal to the hosts now, and want to take down Serac in revenge.
The hosts are often defined by tragic cornerstone memories – like Bernard losing Charlie,
and Maeve losing her daughter.
Maybe Charlotte losing her family will be her cornerstone memory, and she’ll finally
truly become her own person making her own choices.
This episode, Decoherence, is all about change and divergence.
William rejects his past to find a new path.
Maeve and Dolores deepen their divide.
Charlotte’s identity is burned away, and she rises again to take new form.
Westworld has been renewed for a fourth season.
There are also upcoming seasons of His Dark Materials, The Expanse, Foundation, and the
Dune movies, which are the kind of series we’ll cover after this season of Westworld.
We’ll also do more videos on the Game of Thrones books.
Author George Martin says he’s working to finish the upcoming next book.
So now’s a good a time to read the series – as well as the main books, there’s the
worldbook, the Dunk and Egg stories, and Fire and Blood, which the upcoming prequel TV show
is based on.
You can get any of these on audiobook for free right now by signing up for a trial with
Audible.
Members get an audiobook each month, and if you cancel, you keep the audiobooks.
You can listen while you train in the Matrix, or while you drink and complain.
Sign up at audible.com/asx.
Thanks for watching, please like and subscribe.
We’re holding livestreams right after each episode of Westworld Season 3, at 10:30pm
Eastern Time Sundays.
Patreon supporters can watch livestreams after they’re broadcast.
Thanks to Patrons Stephanie Ramirez, Shakeeb Majid, Hugo King, Xavier Spain, Nick Hoedemakers,
Laura Rodriguez, and Oskar.
Cheers.