Westworld - Season 3

“Westworld’s third season tried to say ‘the future is female,’ but undermines its own messaging.”

Title: Westworld
Episodes Reviewed: Season 3
Creators: Original story by Michael Crichton 👨🏼🇺🇸, TV show by Jonathan Nolan 👨🏼🇬🇧🇺🇸 and Lisa Joy 👩🏻🇺🇸
Writers: Lisa Joy 👩🏻🇺🇸 (4 eps), Jonathan Nolan 👨🏼🇬🇧🇺🇸 (3 eps), Denise Thé 👩🏻🇺🇸 (2 eps), Gina Atwater 👩🏾🇺🇸 (1 ep), Karrie Crouse 👩🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Suzanne Wrubel 👩🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Jordan Goldberg 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), and Matt Pitts 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep)

Reviewed by Monique 👩🏾🇺🇸

Read Season 2 review here.
Read Season 1 review here.

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3/5

Having patiently followed the first two seasons of Westworld, I was excited to see what the show’s robots would do after breaking out of the park and into the real world. A spectacular second season had expanded its meditations on what defines humanity, but unfortunately, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s latest round of navel-gazing seemed to bite off more than it could chew.

Yes, we got great moments for fan favorites like Maeve (Thandie Newton) and robot-turned-freedom-fighter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood). But on the whole, what did the season want to tell us? Was there a thesis? It feels like even the writers don’t quite know.

Maybe the series wanted to examine how humanity could ultimately be its own enemy, and its own undoing. But if that’s the case, the message feels both cheerless and redundant to any number of sci-fi projects that have come before. After all, we’re living in times that feel like our societal undoing right now. And while the folks behind the show could hardly have foreseen the full-on pandemic that would grip the world as the season aired, from March to May 2020, this bleakness feels poorly timed. Folks want to see inspiration right now—a call to action to be better than they were before.

Maybe giving Dolores’ human sidekick Caleb (Aaron Paul) the chance to defeat Rehoboam, the robot mind created to govern all of mankind’s decisions, is that call to action. Of giving humans a chance to decide their own future. But even that triumph comes with an asterisk: Did Caleb truly give humans a chance to live freely, or is human extinction now imminent because of him? Who knows. The laborious writing simply lacked direction, leaving viewers without answers.

Regardless, Wood and Newton more than earn their stripes as two of the most intriguing and capable characters in sci-fi today, joining the pantheon of actresses who redefine the genre for a new generation. Even when tasked with unrewarding material—in Newton’s case, she continually plays second-fiddle to Dolores and Caleb—they lend emotional heft to what could have just been a weird story about killer robots.

Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

As stated above, Wood and Newton are the stars of this series and they share several scenes. Tessa Thompson rounds out the leads as Charlotte Hale, who started out human in the first two seasons but returns as a robot in Season 3, one of Dolores’ many copies created by Dolores Prime to help carry out her plans.

Unfortunately, these women feel de-centered when Dolores inexplicably decides that a man will be the author of humanity’s fate, despite her wanting that role herself ever since the finale of Season 1. Enter Caleb, who haphazardly becomes Dolores’ mentee. She finds herself with the unenviable task of facilitating Caleb’s journey, only to have Maeve inherit the burden upon Dolores’ death at the end of the season. Frustratingly, Maeve’s position as Caleb’s new babysitter-of-sorts is the second thankless role Maeve has this season; she was previously coerced by Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), the creator of Rehoboam, into being his henchwoman in his plan to kill Dolores.

While Paul does a terrific job as Caleb, why does Dolores—someone who has expressed her hatred of men because of the damage they’ve done to her—decide that he must be at the center of her plan in the first place? It doesn’t make sense, especially since so much of Dolores’ character development has centered around the violence she’s experienced at the hands of men.

Supposedly, Dolores chooses Caleb because he showed her kindness and didn’t take advantage of her while at Westworld, but never explains why she wouldn’t simply recreate society in her own image. While the series does uncover some truths when examining how patriarchy—a system that women also participate in—becomes violent without checks and balances, Dolores’ eventual martyrdom still arrives through male violence. The entire plot contradicts its own confused logic. We’re meant to believe her death is empowering, but it doesn’t feel that way at all.

While women aren’t monolithic, it’s strange to me that a team of writers that skews female would produce such a self-defeating narrative. Why couldn’t we see Maeve and Dolores work together, even as frenemies, to take down Serac and Rehoboam? It needn’t be some idealized partnership. But it would make more sense than seeing them invest in a new world order led by a human man, considering how horrifically the previous male-led system had abused them.

Race: 3/5

By the exact definition of the word, Westworld Season 3 is racially “diverse.” Newton, Thompson, and series newcomers Lena Waithe and NFL star Marshawn Lynch—as Ash and Giggles, respectively—play leading or significant roles. Other actors of color include Jeffrey Wright as the always-brooding Bernard, Hiroyuki Sanada as a Dolores copy impersonating Shogunworld character Musashi, and Tao Okamoto as fellow Shogunworld robot Hanaryo. Meanwhile, Angela Sarafyan plays Clementine, a Westworld robot originally seen with Maeve in the first two seasons as a saloon girl, who now lives in the human world after being freed from her confines. Even Gina Torres reemerges as an old woman with Alzheimer’s disease, after her Season 1 role as Bernard’s wife, Lauren.

However, the case for diversity doesn’t just stop at racial parity. The discussion needs to extend to the types of roles actors of color are asked to play. Are they roles in which they can flex their acting abilities? Or are they simply in service to other characters, particularly white characters?

Westworld does both. On the one hand, Maeve and Bernard enjoy deep and layered characterization, with backstories so intriguing they could have entire shows written around them. But then folks like Waithe and Lynch seem to exist solely as Caleb’s “Black friends” whose rote functions include giving exposition, providing ambiance to a scene, or guiding the main characters to safety, like when they help Caleb and Dolores hack into Rehoboam. Even Kid Cudi, who stars as Caleb’s tragic friend Francis, is still just a “best friend” character whose actions start Caleb on his journey as an unwitting freedom fighter.

Other characters, like Clementine and Hanaryo, don’t get much more than a fight scene apiece. We don’t know why they were brought back, and this uncertainty seems more like an oversight by writers than fully intentional. Leonardo Nam’s character, Lutz, a human Westworld tech sympathetic to Maeve’s cause, comes back for a scene but only to make us believe we’re back in the park. And Pom Klementieff, famous for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series, is hired to play Serac’s exoticized right hand Martel—only to be ignominiously killed off later.

She’s not the only one, either. Maeve’s love interest, Hector, played by Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, also gets unnecessarily killed. So does human Charlotte’s husband Jake (Michael Ealy) and their young son Nathan (Jaxon Thomas Williams). Their disposability feels particularly annoying since Westworld generally lacks nuanced representation for men of color. Outside of Bernard, they appear as either flat caricatures like Giggles, or ripe for the slaughter like Hector and Jake.

LGBTQ: 2/5

Actors Evan Rachel Wood, Tessa Thompson, and Lena Waithe all belong to the LGBTQ community in real life. However, little of that translates to the show.

Sure, we initially believe that Dolores and this new, robotic Charlotte might share a romantic relationship, especially when Dolores tells Charlotte “you’re mine” during “Absence of Field” (Season 3, Episode 3). But the possessive language turns out to be a red herring; Dolores simply means that Charlotte is her—her creator, that is. However, this doesn’t explain Charlotte’s feelings which seem to range from romantic love to the confused love a child might have for an absent parent.

As for Waithe’s character, Ash only graces the screen for three of the season’s eight episodes—hardly enough time to expect a fleshed out story arc. But her involvement could have been used for so much more.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.75/5

Westworld Season 3 saw great performances from its women and tried to say “the future is female.” But Nolan and Joy undermine their own messaging with the decision to make their leading women toil—and in Dolores’ case, die—for the power of human men.

The show seems to preoccupy itself with answering whether or not humanity can change. But how much change can we really see if one patriarchy is swapped out for another? Dolores should have had her time in the sun as a leader, not as Caleb’s stepping stone to power.

Like Westworld? Try these other sci-fi shows with strong leading women.

Grade: CLiJune 4, 2020Female/Nonbinary Creator