“Who am I?” Charlotte Hale asked as she woke up in the newest episode of Westworld, “The Absence of Field.” That’s the question, isn’t it?
Even on a show as mind-bending as Westworld, Charlotte’s situation is complicated. In the first two seasons, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) was an executive at Delos, the company that maintains Westworld and all the other futuristic theme parks where the super-wealthy spend millions of dollars to play with the advanced lifelike robots known as hosts. But in the finale of season 2, during which Delos had to deal with a host uprising led by the misanthropic Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), Charlotte died.
Well, kind of. The hardened corporate shark we knew did indeed die, but Dolores and Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) created a replacement, a host version of Charlotte identical to her in every way. Dolores occupied this body to smuggle herself out of the park, bringing several “pearls” — basically brains for other hosts — along with her. Once out in the real world, she made a new body for herself, but then who is inside the host version of Charlotte?
See what I mean? This s**t gets weird, and we’re not even done. Whoever is occupying Charlotte’s body is leading a difficult life. They’re pretending to be Charlotte — the human Charlotte — but they’re not doing a great job, at least domestically. Charlotte’s ex-husband is distant from her and her young son doubts if she’s even his mother anymore. Meanwhile, Host-Charlotte is continuing Human-Charlotte’s job at Delos, trying to sabotage it from within according to Dolores’ plan. But things are trickier than expected, as Human-Charlotte somehow fights to take back control of her body. Maybe Host-Charlotte has gone so deep undercover the lie is becoming real?
And Human-Charlotte was living a pretty complicated life herself, feeding company secrets to a shadowing rich guy who’s trying to take over Delos via a leveraged buyout, Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel). It’s not enough that Host-Charlotte has to deal with their own identity issues; they have to grapple with Human-Charlotte’s, too.
But that leads us back to our original question: What host is occupying Host-Charlotte’s body? Based on the dialogue, it sounds like someone Dolores knows — in fact, Dolores tells Host-Charlotte that they’re the only person she trusts. That’s why I doubt Host-Charlotte is someone like Clementine or Angela or Armistice, none of whom had a particularly close relationship with Dolores. Also, one of them blew up and another was lobotomized.
But if not them, then who? Obviously, the internet has theories. Let’s walk through some.