Westworld: Is Dolores trying to kill all humans, or liberate them?

Dolores Abernathy is making her moves, and humanity better watch out. The most recent episode of Westworld, “The Mother of Exiles” revealed that the misanthropic robotic host (Evan Rachel Wood), was replacing people of power and influence with robotic copies of themselves. What’s more, she’d copied her own brain and installed it in these new hosts, meaning that there are multiple versions of Dolores out there working together trying to bring down humanity.

Or at least that’s what we think she’s trying to do. She’s keeping the details of her plan close to her vest. Speaking with Deadline, Wood talked about Dolores’ motives. “We know after episode 3 that she wants to start a revolution,” she said. “And so I think that’s the first time as an audience we’re going, ‘Oh, okay, a revolution is not domination. What is she talking about, and what does that look like?’”

"And I think given her conversations with Caleb [Aaron Paul] and revealing to him that the system is plotting out people’s lives for them and that free will doesn’t exist, she’s seeing that the real world is a lot like Westworld, and she says she’s going to cut the cord to the system and show the world what it really is. Now, again, this is either heroic or a nightmare or both because revolutions are bloody, and revolutions are scary, and revolutions are not always what they are or how they’re portrayed. They’re not always heroic. The change is difficult and change is painful, and so I think it’s still up for debate whether or not  Dolores is there to help or hurt. We’re not sure yet."

It sounds like Wood is saying that Dolores doesn’t actually want to kill all humans, but instead liberate them from the influence of the systems that control their names, namely Rehoboam, a super-computer developed by the shady Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) that uses big data to plot and control a person’s entire life without their input. This would explain why Serac is out to destroy Dolores.

“Because the system can’t read her, and he lives his life by the system, and I think that’s why he’s really afraid of Dolores, because she has the processing capability that his machine has, maybe not as many thoughts per second, but she’s really the only one that can go toe to toe with it, because she probably relates more to that piece of machinery than she does to any human,” said Wood. “She understands it. She speaks its language. So, given the power that she has and the books that she read in season 2 that were, you know, decoding the humans, and given that access, I think we’re really going to see things blow up.”

Photograph by John P. Johnson:HBO.

So we mentioned earlier how Dolores had installed copies of herself in several hosts and set them to work enacting her master plan. That came as a big twist in a show famous for them, and Jeffrey Wright (Bernard Lowe) doesn’t see the shocking reveals slowing down.

“I don’t know if there’s been a shift in the approach, at all,” he told Collider. “The show evolves, from episode to episode and season to season. I think the show still aspires to be complex and, to some extent, challenging, and requires focus, and can’t just be gratuitous background noise for the audience. So, the elements of discovery and reveals will continue, but they will continue in different ways. I don’t think that we have been or ever will be apologetic about that, in any regard.”

In 2019, HBO renewed Westworld for a fourth season, and just recently, showrunners Jonathan Nolan and List Joy said they hoped to make at least one more season past the third, but Wright isn’t about to confirm anything. “Yeah, I know how many seasons they had, originally, in their large brains,” he said. “They have an arc that they built from, at the start…There very well could be [more than one season beyond season 3], yeah. That’s certainly was the intent, from the start.”

"While there is a very detailed blueprint for the storytelling, what’s wonderful about a long-form series like this is that they do reshape themselves, as the writing unfolds and the performances unfold. There’s no source material for our show, so the possibilities remain fairly wide open and fluid. The only restrictions are the vast mad imaginations of Jonah and Lisa."

This season, because he needed help tracking down and subduing Dolores, Bernard buddied up with the former head of Delos park security, Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), who it’s revealed was also a host this whole time; it’s been known to happen. Was that a move based purely on the need for survival?

“Well, certainly he knows that he’s been scapegoated [for the disastrous robot uprising in season 2],” Wright said. “He knows that he’s a fugitive and a wanted man, so he’s vulnerable to that. He’s uncertain about what Dolores is up to, so he’s vulnerable to that. He’s just looking for allies, from the newly sentient synthetic side to support him and work with him, toward what end, we don’t know yet, but it’s for that larger intent, which he’s still recovering.”

Westworld season 3 continues Sunday night with “Genre,” only on HBO.

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