Season 3, Episode 2: ‘The Winter Line’
One of the funniest running jokes in “Westworld” — check that, maybe the only running joke in “Westworld” — is that the hosts are virtually indistinguishable from the guests, and yet the scripted loops in the park are Z-grade genre television. The show hasn’t had the opportunity to return to that joke much recently, save for a version of the saloon heist that played out in Shogun World, but the opening of this week’s episode is clever opportunity to stick a fully woke host in a chintzy, down-the-dial World War II spy thriller.
The post-credits scene in last week’s episode teased Maeve’s return in Warworld, an environment that offers guests the apparent thrill of being stuck in a Nazi-occupied Italian village. If that sounds baffling, no one is more surprised than Maeve herself, who knows her surroundings are fake but has the programming to go through the motions. (Thandie Newton’s confused expression when she starts speaking Italian is nice touch.) Maeve’s instinct is to find a way out of the loop, but the show works some “Groundhog Day” variants into her team-up with a Hector clone (Rodrigo Santoro) and their daring escape from a villa with vital information. “If your plan calls for us to run all the way,” she says, “I’d have worn sensible shoes.”
The scribe responsible for this sparkling dialogue is Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), who has returned from the dead to help Maeve — or so she and the viewer believe. Lee tells her that he’s stuck her in Warworld because it’s the world closest to the Forge, and if they can find their way there, she can join her daughter in the Valley Beyond.
It takes multiple rounds between Warworld and the Mesa for Maeve to realize that she’s in a simulation within a simulation, a twist that is handled with elegant hint-dropping and stylistic touches on loan from “The Matrix.” There’s a reason Sylvester and Lutz genuinely don’t recognize her when she’s back at the Mesa, for example, and something conspicuously odd about Sizemore’s behavior, like the sketches of her that are piled on his desk. (He’s too self-obsessed, she correctly surmises.)
So then the question for Maeve becomes: Who is putting her through this simulation and why? She learns some good information in the process, like the fact that Dolores was responsible for beaming the Valley Beyond to encrypted coordinates, but someone is out there learning about her, too — as we soon discover, her control unit, or “pearl,” is effectively plugged into a giant server at an unknown containment facility.
After security agents gun down the maintenance drone she programs to locate and run off with her control unit, Maeve learns that the puppet master is Serac (Vincent Cassel), a rich Frenchman in the human world. Serac understands that humankind is under siege from the hosts, and his reasonable hypothesis was that Maeve, an android powerful enough to control her kind, was the tip of the spear. He learns instead that Dolores is the culprit, and he commissions Maeve to stop her.
Meanwhile, Bernard has headed back to Westworld to seek answers of his own. Typical of Bernard, he intuits his purpose more than his scrambled-up brain fully grasps it, but it’s his sense that he needs to stop Dolores, too. He believes that Dolores herself has kept him around as a check on her power should she go too far.
His mission takes him to the remote diagnostic facility under the cottage in Sector 17, the same place where he murdered Theresa Cullen back in the first season. Among the decommissioned host Bernards in cold storage down there is Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), last seen granting Charlotte-bot passage to a rescue boat at the end of Season 2.
Bernard and Stubbs go off looking for Maeve and find her body missing its control unit. That revelation is more relevant to the Maeve subplot than to the Bernard-Stubbs one, but there are suggestions later that Bernard is picking up important information, too. While running a self-diagnostic, he flashes on a few key events: Dolores telling him “it will take both of us to survive”; Dolores flipping through the guest books at the Forge, including one on Liam Dempsey Jr.; and Charlotte doing something with a pearl.
“The Winter Line” may be a Dolores-free episode, but it puts her at the center of the show as much as the premiere last week did. Bernard and Serac may have different motivations, but Dolores’ current mission to ransack the human world has them both scrambling to stop her.
What they don’t realize is that Dolores has the potential to modify those plans herself; encounters with humans like Liam and Caleb may prove to alter her thinking about the beings responsible for her enslavement and torment in the park. Hey, we’re not all bad, are we?
Paranoid Androids:
Maeve’s genuine affection for Hector, even after knowing he’s a replicant, is a moving suggestion that there’s some core aspect of him that she loves authentically, no matter if it’s not the “real” him.
“I remember these waters when they were red with blood,” says Bernard’s escort to the island as they head through the South China Sea. Lee Sizemore cannot be blamed for that ridiculous line.
“I wasn’t wired up to answer the big questions,” Stubbs tell Bernard, which sounds like a meta-excuse for Stubbs’s not being a more layered or compelling character.
Reviving Sizemore into a host-human hybrid like Jim Delos is a fascinating gambit because he doesn’t have to be perfect or immortal for the limited purpose he serves. Just like Delos, he eventually glitches out, but it doesn’t happen right away.
“For the most part, humanity has been a miserable little band of thugs, stumbling from one catastrophe to the next.” Yeah, no kidding, Serac.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
