The dark truth is revealed in Westworld 307, “Passed Pawn”

Epic showdowns and revelations abound in the penultimate episode of Westworld‘s third season. “Passed Pawn” saw two of the season’s major plot threads come to a head, and left many characters in a precarious positions going into the season finale. Yet unlike Charlotte’s bombastic escape from the Delos HQ last week, “Passed Pawn” kept things focused on smaller, personal dramas. The result is a powerful episode that manages to tie up longstanding events and set the stage for new ones all at once.

Considering how tightly focused this season of Westworld has been on the core cast, the way this week’s episode started off immediately grabbed my attention. Not only did we see Musashi for only our second time of the season…but by the end of the scene, some other fan favorites like Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) and Hanaryo (the Shogun World copy of Armistice, played by Tao Okamoto) popped up as well. It was a treat to see some of the faces we’ve been missing this season.

But we couldn’t celebrate for long, as Clementine and Hanaryo seem to be working for Serrac to exact quick and ruthless vengeance on the Musashi version of Dolores.

Tessa Thompson in Westworld Season 3. Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

One of the interesting things about this scene is that, by selling Musashi out to Serrac for her own self-interest, Charlotte is beginning to travel down some of the same brutal paths to self-preservation you could imagine the original Dolores taking. This also added some texture to Charlotte-Delores’ murder of Hector last week. As Maeve notes later in the episode, the real Dolores wasn’t actually responsible for that act. Could it be that Charlotte is becoming more violent than the real Dolores? More in tune with her inner Wyatt, perhaps?

The timeline is also curious. We only get one brief glimpse of Charlotte during this scene, and since she’s veiled in shadow it’s hard to pin down if this happened before or after her escape from Delos. On the one hand, it would make sense for her to go down a vengeful path against Dolores after the death of her family, blaming her host-mother for counting her out as a disposable asset and leaving her without support. On the other, it’s hard to imagine Charlotte turning around and handing over a host to Serrac after he murdered her family. Unless she blames Dolores for that too?

Aaron Paul Westworld official Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

With so much to wrap our heads around in that opening scene alone, this episode felt like a return to Westworld‘s more complicated days, when plot twists were the name of the game. Yet the vast majority of the episode’s revelations came from a surprisingly human source. Caleb’s plotline formed the spine of “Passed Pawn,” and the show pulled out the stops to finally show us all the skeletons piled up in his closet.

It turns out that the reason so many of Caleb’s memories are fractured isn’t just because of PTSD…it’s because he was literally brainwashed (twice) at the very facility where Dolores takes him in this episode. The Rico app he used at the start of the season is in fact a product of Serrac’s operation, designed to use “outliers” like Caleb to do the dirty work of keeping other outliers in check. Caleb’s friend Francis didn’t die in a war: Cal killed him in self-defense when the app set them against one another in order to clean up loose ends…while they were kidnapping the head of a pharmaceutical company that had fallen out of Serrac’s good graces.

Vincent Cassel Westworld official Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

Most horrific of all, we find out that the outliers who couldn’t be “reprogrammed” were put into frozen storage within the Sonora Desert facility. All season we’ve been told that the Rehoboam system is bad because it preemptively and unjustly forces humans into certain social classes and limits their opportunities. But here is the real evil: Rehoboam doesn’t just limit “outliers,” it removes them from society entirely.

The irony is that by using an outlier like Cal, who’s been deemed too violent to be part of society, to take others out of that same society, the system is acknowledging its own incompleteness. If the utopia Serrac was peddling was truly contingent on removing people like Caleb, he wouldn’t need them to perform kidnappings and assassinations.

I did say it was a lot to wrap our heads around, didn’t I?

Aaron Paul Westworld official Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

Luckily, the episode balanced out the mind-breaking reveals with something a bit more straightforward: the much-foreshadowed showdown between Dolores and Maeve. From the moment Dolores tells Caleb that Maeve “will probably be the one to kill her,” there’s an inescapable gravity to this duel. Even in a show like Westworld, where characters dying and coming back is a standard thing, I was on the edge of my seat. The back-and-forth battle was some of this season’s tightest combat, with both hosts utilizing every advantage in their arsenals to try and outdo the other. It was brutal, exciting, and unpredictable.

In the final moments, as Dolores crawled one-armed across the facility floor while Maeve came up behind her, I actually thought this might be the end of the line for Westworld‘s main host. It’s a testament to how well-crafted the fight was that this fear could even pop up, considering Dolores has died so many times on the show. Good thing that EMP happened to be within arm’s reach.

Jeffrey Wright Westworld Official Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO

Of course, the episode wouldn’t have been complete without William, Bernard and Stubbs. Not a whole lot happened with these three, but the banter between them was by far the most entertaining part of the episode. Upon finding out that he is in fact one of these “outliers” of society, William responds with shock. “I’m a bastion of society!” For all his soul-searching last episode, William still has a bit of a blind spot for his own misdeeds.

The main takeaway from the trio’s few scenes is that William has divined his purpose in life: to rectify his “original sin” by killing every last host. There’s a certain irony here that fits William so well: Leave it to him to decide that the only way to be a good guy is to go around and commit murder. And going by the cliffhanger the episode ended on, Stubbs and Bernard might be the first casualties in that crusade. I’d be really surprised to see Bernard go…but Stubbs could definitely be on the chopping block. Next week is finale time, after all.

“Passed Pawn” was filled with the sort of twistiness that was more common to Westworld‘s past seasons than its newest. And you know what? It was a welcome change. This season of Westworld has been much more linear, much more straight-forward and easy to follow. All things considered, having some of the old mind-blowing turns come up felt just right.

Other Take-Aways:

• Seeing Clementine and Hanaryo again was a high point, but it begs the questions: which other hosts does Serrac still have? It seemed like his people torched all the hosts that were in cold storage in “Decoherence,” but the appearance of these two makes the details of that purge a lot blurrier. Who knows what other hosts Serrac has up his sleeve?
• One thing I found myself wondering during this episode is what Bernard’s place is in the grand scheme of things. Early in the season, it was reiterated that Dolores had brought Bernard out of the park with her because he figured into her plan somehow…yet thus far, he’s felt an awful lot like a passenger swept along by events. Here’s hoping that Bernard has a big role to play in the finale.
• Charlotte’s agenda is another big question. Before Musashi is killed, she tells him that she’s “streamlining” things by getting rid of him. After how much development the Charlotte version of Dolores has gotten this season, it seems pretty likely that she’s going to figure into next week’s events in a large way.
• The technological dystopia continued to evolve this week. Soldiers taking an emotional suppressant in order to kill more effectively, drones that marked people to kill based on their jackets, and all of the dark secrets of the Rehoboam system freezing people…the more we see of the future that Westworld has built, the more it becomes impossible to avoid how awful it is. As Bernard aptly puts it, this world is a powder keg that only needs a spark to go off. One more week until it blows!

Episode Grade: A

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