Evan Rachel Wood (Dolores) dives into that surprising Westworld twist

The latest twist on HBO’s Westworld, a show famous for its twists, came during last night’s new episode, “The Mother of Exiles,” and it changed the game. Finally, we learned which host pearls Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) smuggled out of the titular futuristic theme park in the season 2 finale. We already knew that Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) was one, so who were the others?

Beware: SPOILERS below.

Still here? Great. As it ends up, the other hosts Dolores brought out were…more of herself.

Yes, Dolores, a robotic host, copied her consciousness onto other host brains, and is now installing these copies into hosts built to resemble real human beings with power and influence. It’s heady stuff, but that was ever the name of the game when it came to Westworld. “I believe what we’re going to be playing with this season is showing the audience that, you know, they are code, and their bodies are not who they are,” Wood told Deadline. “And we explore that a lot also with [Charlotte Hale, played by Tessa Thompson] and the feeling like you’re in the wrong skin, and there’s a lot of metaphors floating around, but yes, I think she can exist in multiple ways.”

In a show where the first and easiest answer is rarely the correct one, I was pleasantly surprised to see showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy solve the mystery of the pearls so soon, although there’s still one pearl left unclaimed. No mystery is ever completely solved on this show.

Photograph by Courtesy of HBO.

And before you go thinking that maybe Westworld is playing timeline tricks with us again, and that maybe the multi-Dolores stuff is happening later than we think it is or something weird like that, Wood is here to set you at ease. “I think a lot of this happened simultaneously,” she said. “I think we did jump a bit at the beginning of episode 3, kind of going back to when Dolores first sort of rebuilt Hale, probably months before Caleb, but no, I think, as far as I know, for now, and what the audience should feel is that they’re all in the same timeline.”

But back to that unclaimed pearl, I’m sure fans are already theorizing on who it is, and Wood’s not going to help you figure it out. “Well, who do we know is a host now?” Wood mused, no doubt leading us down the wrong path for kicks. “There’s one in Charlotte Hale, one in Martin Connells, Tommy Flanagan’s character. Bernard is one. So, there’s one more unaccounted for, I believe.”

Wood didn’t immediately mention Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), so does that mean he’s got the pearl that belonged to Dolores’ old robot boyfriend Teddy (James Marsden), as Maeve (Thandie Newton) guessed when she confronted him?

"It’s Dolores. Dolores kills Maeve as Musashi. She’s in Musashi, she’s in Connells, and she’s in Hale. She’s all the pearls that were copies of her. And if you’ll notice, Connells’ tie is this blue that matches the blue dress, and Musashi is also dressed in blue. They all have these little hints of blue in there."

Very clever, Westworld, you’re not fooling me anymore. I’m kidding, I’ll be confused after next week’s episode, probably.

Image: Westworld/HBO

Paul Cameron, the director of “The Mother of Exiles,” talked to Collider and explained what it was like filming the “Dolores is everyone” reveal. “I kind of knew the arc of the series a little bit, and one of the greater challenges in the episode is the reveal of Dolores and the multiple characters, and how we were going to handle that was no small feat,” he said. “Having Tessa Thompson, Tommy Flanagan, and Hiroyuki Sanada all revealing themselves as Dolores in the episode, there was a lot of discussion of how we wanted it to feel, how we wanted it to converge.”

"I think we stuck to the script pretty well, and when we went to the edit I think the final tweak that Jonathan and I did was to try to tighten up the moment of the reveals between all the characters. Outside of that, we didn’t change much, but it was a big question of like, what aspects of these characters actually have the aspects of the Dolores character? Are we revealing that, what is that, what’s the sensitivity to it? I spoke with Jonathan at length to really simplify a couple of nuances with each character, to tonally make the reference to that character being Dolores during the reveal, but to keep it very subtle and not expand on that too much."

It was tricky for the actors, too, not least because they’re apparently not told a ton about where the story is going ahead of time. “[T]hey were all very, very also challenged by, what is this reveal going to be? What was it going to be like?” Cameron remembered. “Am I playing her as a character, what parts of her character am I taking on? Where’s this going to go down the road? Of course I knew where things were going down the road, but I couldn’t reveal anything except for what pages they have at any given time. So, that was interesting.”

It looks like the next episode, “Genre,” looks like an origin story for Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) with a side of high-intensity action involving Aaron Paul’s Caleb. Westworld airs on Sunday nights, only on HBO.

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