The mind-bending episode 4 of Westworld Season 3 has a lot going on and throughout this post, we’re gonna be discussing the major plot points and giving our theories on what could be happening in the future of the show.
There will be heavy spoilers here so if you don’t want anything ruined then I highly recommend that you turn off now.
Title Meaning
The title of the episode The Mother Of Exiles comes from a sonnet by The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. Emma wrote the poem in the late 1800s to raise money for a pedestal on the statue of liberty and this was later placed upon it.
The poem itself was about the statue of liberty itself and how it was similar to the colossus in Rhodes.
The interpretation behind it is that the statue is a maternal figure that symbolised the dawning of America and how women would play a much bigger part in society.
This is reflected in this episode where we see Dolores rising up in more ways than one and I mean literally in more ways than one.
William’s Torment
We open with William aka The Man In Black…but he can’t remember. Holed up in his home he is slowly having a mental breakdown and is constantly questioning his own reality. The last time we saw him he killed his own daughter Emily and then made it to the forge only to find a host of her in which she told him that they’d been testing for fidelity.
Though it could have appeared that he was a replica similar to James Delos he does indeed seem real still.
However he is now trapped in his own personal hell and this is exemplified by the fact he wakes up in the same bath tub that his wife killed herself in.
An apparition of Emily appears, reminding him of the horrendous things that he’s done and the conversation they have makes him really question whether he’s in power or if it’s the park that’s ruined his life, whether he’s a machine or not and there’s definitely something really weird going on.
Charlotte appears and snaps him out of it and it finally seems like she’s past the identity crisis that she was having last week. We learn who is really within Hale this time and though it is a twist that I personally didn’t see coming, I have to admit that I was really disappointed with the outcome of it.
It was sort of what we theorised last week with her being Wyatt…nah not really look…we’ll get into that later but I do think it breaks the rules in several ways and just feels like a cheat.
Charlotte states that she needs William to come out and cast a vote that will make the company private however this turns out to be a ruse. Charlotte actually escorts him to a mental health facility and in doing so takes over his shares and his voting power.
Is Serac Real?
Hale mentions that Serac stole code from Delos over 20 years ago and though this line is brushed over it could show that he had a mole in the corporation which has enabled him to grow to this point.
20 years ago the real Hale of course wouldn’t have been in the position she was, or likely even working for the park and thus it could be a number of people.
The first person could be Arnold, however, he was killed 34 years before the first season so I think that the most likely candidates are Ford or William. I doubt it’s the latter because it’s his company but the former was always a wild card.
Serac is thought to just be a human manifestation or rather a fake person created by Rehoboam and it could be that it stole the code itself when being created. Though we know Liam Dempsey’s father created it, he may have worked with Ford in doing so and this is how it was able to get the data.
Now why I believe that Serac is just a front for Rehoboam is because only Maeve has seen him and when Hale and he went to meet she had to wear VR glasses.
Later in the episode we learn that these glasses can fully create a fake reality and show whatever Serac wishes them too.
He has left no digital footprint and in a world like this they have stated that that is impossible. So maybe we should take them at their word and Serac is actually this impossible human because he is a creation of the machine.
We don’t know for definite yet but that’s just where my mind is going so far.
Hale mentions the project in sector 16 and as we learned last season this was the resurrection of James Delos.
Bernard and Delores
From here we cut to Bernard and Dolores with a very similar scene to the second season and as we can tell from the black bars that dominate the screen, this is a simulation. The aspect ratio cuts back and forth between the real and simulated reality so we can get a grip on what’s fake and what isn’t and we learn about the five pearls that Dolores took out.
Rehoboam’s Power
We also see Rehoboam’s scan of the world and it picks up a divergence. I think the fact we constantly cut to this when in this reality with Caleb does add weight to this being a simulation too.
The shape of the circle is the same as Rehoboam and it is able to detect anomalies and diverging timelines. At the moment I think that the real world is actually far in the future and in ruin and Rehoboam is just a simulation of the past.
This is how it is able to tell the future so accurately and decide where things are diverging.
It’s because it already knows the future.
It has recreated the world, including Westworld which would have existed there but the complex programmes have managed to break free which has caused a divergence.
I believe that we see the truth of this in Serac’s story in which he tells of his childhood, namely the destruction of Paris. This could’ve happened everywhere and thus people resorted to living in a simulation so they could get away from the horrors of the real world. Narcotics are digital nowadays and yeah there’s just stuff constantly indicating that this is what’s going on.
Season One and Two dealt with different timelines and season 3 could be dealing with different worlds.
Delores’ Mission
I think Dolores has gone in there to rescue older hosts such as Caleb that were highly skilled but suffered a cruel fate and this will be how she will amass her army to take down Incite on the outside. The poster for Westworld season 3 does show a host dying in a dessert infront of a destroyed city and I do think that this is the case here.
The alternative theory is that it’s a prediction programme that works out all of the possible avenues of the future and then presents them. We are seeing one version of this simulated reality in which the synths rise up and Serac is attempting to use the data collected from this to stop Dolores.
Either way the show does a great job of keeping you guessing.
Bernard and Stubbs are lying low after swimming to the shore and they’re here to track down Dolores who has been killing and replacing people in Dempsey’s organisation. Bernard has a device that can freeze hosts and this will likely help him massively in the fight against her.
Stubbs says that Dolores has copied Dempsey however we do know that this is Connels, his bodyguard. It seems like they are going to replicate several real world figures who as we know so far are the bodyguard and Hale.
Now it is possible that she is going to replicate William too as in the show Hale takes a pin prick of blood from him. Though I’ve never taken this as being a necessary requirement to make duplicates, it was clearly carried out for a reason and it could be that they wish to copy more members of the board.
However, we do also see Dolores drawing blood from someone later in order to break through an encryption programme so it could also be because Hale wishes to unearth the secrets that William has within Delos.
Caleb is clothes shopping like something out of Grand Theft Auto and dressing up to go after Dempsey. They’ve cleaned out his bank account and are looking to kidnap him.
Maeve Tracks Down Dolores
Elsewhere Maeve is with Serac and she agrees to take down Dolores in exchange for being reunited with her daughter in Host Heaven.
He apparently wishes to get the data that Delos collected on all of humankind so that he can more accurately predict the future. He’s traced the divergence
Again I’m not sure about this but yeah we will see.
He takes her to the point of the divergence which is Arnold’s house where Dolores made her allies.
Maeve tracks Dolores through the underworld, eventually going to Yakuza headquarters.
This is hidden within an area called the Itaidoshin Distillery. A location hiding a true location within it could be a reference to the simulation within a simulation that may be going on but there are also ties from this episode to the building’s name itself.
In Buddhism ‘Itaidoshin’ means “to be of the same mind, even though we are in many bodies.” This metaphorically also relates to Hale and Dolores who we learn in the episode are one and the same and it also is reflected in William who is also dealing with an identity program.
Dolores easily dispatches the guards there as they have weapons that are equipped with A.I. programming and she comes face to face with the leader of the group.
It’s revealed that he is a host that Dolores has created. He resembles Musashi from Shogunworld and we discover that Dolores is well aware of the plot by Serac against her. Maeve and the host battle it out with their blades but Musashi wins and stabs her in the stomach, leaving her to die.
Now a group of men do show up just as Dolores is about to kill Meave and these are likely Seracs men. Maeve, as we know from trailers, sticks around so I do think it’s a safe assumption to make.
At the party Dempsey is intercepted by Stubbs and Bernard before Dolores and Caleb can get to him. The guns come out and Dolores and Stubbs go head to head in the best action scene of the season thus far.
Connells captures Bernard and Caleb chases Dempsey down and we learn that Dolores has been using duplicates of her personalities in the host.
Now as we discussed earlier the one in Hale may have been the Wyatt aspect of her last week and this is why she took joy in killing. There was of course a lot of symbolism for this laced throughout the episode last week such as the yin and yang symbol and Dolores stating that Hale came from her.
Dolores wishes to build a new world for the hosts but if you want something done right you’ve gotta do it yourself.
Is William Hallucinating?
Dolores captures Dempsey and the episode ends with The Man In…White being confronted by Dolores who has donned her Westworld Regalia.
Now I do believe that this is a hallucination and this manifestation of her is where a lot of his guilt lies. Dolores was really the person who arguably had the most effect on William in his life and the host made him realise who he really was.
William, as we know, has been haunted by his own psychosis and he now believes he is further trapped in a reality and must get to the bottom of it.
The end of the game is him questioning whether he is a host or not and if he does not know does it really matter?
It leaves us to think that perhaps the humans should’ve treated the A.I. as equal instead of their slaves which they could use in whatever way they saw fit.
This has led to an uprising and now the humans are the ones stuck with the identity crisis over what’s real and what isn’t rather than the hosts.
It’s a somber note to end on and next time it looks like we are finally seeing Rehoboam’s creation and how the algorithm was created in order to keep everything in order.
It does look like everyone is quoute-unquote waking up and this may indicate that people are finally realising the world that they exist in is fake.
It definitely has an escape from the Matrix vibe to it so it does indeed add a lot of weight to the theory.
Overall I really enjoyed the episode again and the season is continuing to keep me second-guessing. I have so many theories, so little time but I’m definitely enjoying the slow burn that this is providing.
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