“The Winter Line” is classic Westworld at its best

If Westworld‘s newest premiere was all about showing us how new and exciting the show is going to be this season, then tonight’s episode was all about reminding us why we loved it in the first place. “The Winter Line” was classic Westworld, complete with a new park (or at least, the illusion of one), mind-bending twists, and a reveal for a character we’d previously thought was human but is in fact a host.

After that titillating post-credits scene last week, it comes as no surprise that this episode heavily features wild card host and generally-most-interesting-character Maeve. Thandie Newton delivers another stellar performance as she gradually unravels the mystery of her newest prison. Maeve has always been one of the most entertaining characters on the show, due in no small part due to her tongue-in-cheek way of looking at the whole “nature of her reality.”

In a refreshing turn, “The Winter Line” leaned into that entertainment factor pretty hard. This episode took itself way less seriously than the average hour of Westworld, which blew a breath of fresh air over the entire affair. Even Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) seemed like he was having a good time. He actually smiled this episode, I swear!

Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

A large part of “The Winter Line” is spent in Warworld, a World War II themed park that gives the episode its name. Admittedly, I was a little nervous going into this one. There are a lot of time periods the writers could have chosen as the basis for a new park, so I was really hoping that a WWII-themed one would feel warranted and fit thematically into the show as well as Westworld and Shogun World did. I had my doubts.

To my surprise, Warworld worked really well, largely because the episode treated it with a light touch. Rather than attempt to avoid the inevitable sense of camp that was going to come with a World War II-themed outing, the show leaned into it The sets were also amazing. That castle looked like something straight out of Game of Thrones, and Ramin Djawadi’s score for the Warworld scenes brought on a round of Westeros-inspired nostalgia.

Westworld season 3 Thandie Newton as Maeve Millay

As Maeve regains sentience, we return to the plight of the hosts to find out what happened to them since the climactic events of season 2. At first, it seems like they’ve all just been repurposed to appear in Warworld while Delos rebuilds, but as the episode goes on, it becomes apparent that there is much more afoot.

By the end of the episode, when Maeve awakens in the real world, it becomes abundantly clear that last week’s episode, “Parce Domine” gave us the key to this week’s. Remember when one of the rich people Dolores meets at a party asks “what if it’s all just a simulation within a simulation?”

Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

Warworld, it turns out, was just a simulation being run by Antirod Serac (Vincent Cassel, above), the same man who controls Rehoboam, the robotic brain that powers the Incite corporation. The factory floors Maeve visits, all the characters around her…they’re all just part of an elaborate hoax Serac is running in order to trick Maeve into revealing how she sent the hosts through the light door at the end of season 2.

Little does he know it was actually Dolores who saved the hosts and locked them in an encrypted world safe from the reach of humans. Once Maeve realizes that whoever is running the simulation is trying to get that information from her — information she doesn’t even have — it’s a slippery slope to her “winning the game” and breaking out.

The breakout sequence is a really cool melding of the old Westworld and the new. While it starts out with Maeve and Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman — who also delivers a stand-out performance this episode) overloading the system in order to break the simulation, it’s the latter half of the sequence that really excites, as Maeve takes control of one of the maintenance droids in order to facilitate her escape. That sequence grounded us firmly back in the real world — and just like last week, any scene in the real world comes loaded with new and intriguing tech.

If I’ve talked a lot about Maeve thus far, it’s because she took up the lion’s share of “The Winter Line.” Like the premiere, this episode had a tight focus. The only other plotline involved Bernard’s return to the real Westworld, which was filled with callbacks to earlier seasons and glimpses at the less-than-ideal state of the facilities since the host revolution.

There were some definite gems in Bernard’s plot, and generally it was a lot more enjoyable than his material in the premiere. To start, we learn that Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) was a host tasked with protecting all the other hosts in the park. Hemsworth and Wright’s back-and-forth banter was a highlight, and Hemsworth’s “robot acting” was fantastic.

One of the most exciting things about “The Winter Line” was all the set-up it did for an eventual confrontation between Maeve and Dolores. Bernard is searching for Maeve to help him stop whatever Dolores is planning, and Serac wants to enlist her help for the same end. There were also some strong structural parallels. Like Caleb last week, Maeve wakes up three times throughout the Warworld sequence (counting the post-credits scene of “Parce Domine”) — though in her case, each awakening sees her as more and more in control of her reality. Self-awareness has always been at the center of Maeve’s character, but unlike Dolores, she hasn’t let it force her into the role of a victim or fuel her with an unending need for vengeance. Maeve just does what she wants.

My only concern about this episode is over the pacing for the rest of the season. With only eight episodes this season, it was a bold choice to make viewers wait a whole extra week to see what’s happening with Dolores and Caleb. Maeve’s entire plotline served more or less as a vehicle for how she would get into the real world, and while it was really cool, it probably could have been streamlined.

That being said, I love that “The Winter Line” serves as a self-contained story about the Warworld simulation. It added both immediate rewatch value (the episode watches so differently a second time through), and long term rewatch value with the Stubbs reveal.

And really, isn’t the rewatch what Westworld is all about?

Other Takeaways:

• This episode included cameos from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, plus Drogon! There were also references to Westworld creator Michael Crichton’s other masterwork, Jurassic Park. Leave it to Westworld to give us a cameo with layers on top of its layers.
• Lee Sizemore’s examination of a writer grappling with the fact that he’s actually a character in a simulation was a blast to watch. Actor Simon Quarterman sold it so well.
• Speaking of Lee, it was another great parallel to last week that Maeve became aware of the simulation and started fighting it because of a failure to correctly imitate what he was actually like, just like Caleb catching the Francis sim being out of character and then unsubscribing to whatever service that was. The idea that robots can’t quite imitate real life seems to be a theme this season.

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