Westworld Season 3 Episode 8: ‘Crisis Theory’ Recap and Review

“Some people see the ugliness.”

The alternate title to this episode is Dolores ain’t fucking around and I have been stuck inside long enough to ready myself for it.

We get a lot of Dolores’s flashbacks at the beginning. She tells us she has lead many lives and all of them have brought her to this moment. A stranger approaches her dead body and checks on her. We have not seen this stranger dressed in black before. Caleb makes haste on a motorcycle.

William is still holding Bernard and Stubbs hostage. He shoots Stubbs and Bernard hides but eventually comes after William and beats the shit out of him. San Francisco PD arrives and tries to arrest Bernard. Bernard turns on them and only stops when one of the cops reveals himself as a Dolores clone. William meanwhile escapes. The clone hands Bernard a piece of machinery and an address and says things are about to get dangerous.

We see the divergence map and shit is going crazy out there. Los Angeles is where the map keys into though and Caleb arrives in L.A. to what looks like a war. He cracks his way into a distillery. In the building, he opens up a locked door and finds a coffin. I mean its kind of a coffin but it also is a holding tank for another version of what vaguely looks like Dolores and a fuckton of weapons. He has her pearl and installs it into her. Dolores wakes up and tells him that he has been working with hosts since the beginning when he was in the military. She is utterly terrifying and badass as mostly robot. Just a rad scene between Dolores as she puts herself together and Caleb as he begins to understand what this is all about. The two have a discussion about free will. She tells him free will exists it’s just FUCKING HARD. Hell yea lets go. It is Caleb’s choice if he wants to free everyone else.

Back in a hotel, William awaits another executive who is surprised to find him in the lobby covered in blood, drinking an expensive whiskey. William wants his jet and the coordinates for Delos assets. He tells the executive he is going to save the world.

Serac lets all of us know that Dolores’ pearl was taken. Mostly he is venting to Maeve. He tells Maeve to get Dolores so they can find the sector 16 data. Serac knows about Caleb now. Maybe just maybe Maeve is wisening up.

Dolores and Caleb are traipsing about in LA. She has a gun and they try to go through a door but she gets an alert that there are hostiles. She kills them all and they decide to take the stairs instead. Once on the second level, they meet up with a whole host of people who are working for her. They are their bodyguards as they move downtown and they only refer to Caleb as sir.

Walking Dolores runs into Charlotte. Charlotte tells her she has plans of her own. The escort group gets attacked and we realize that what Dolores was seeing was a hologram. Dolores contacts directly with the criminal app and the app offer a ton of money for one of the attackers to kill the others. He does. Dolores and Caleb split up.

Dolores exits the room and immediately meets Maeve and a group of soldiers on a bridge outside. Dolores tells Maeve she doesn’t want to fight her and that she needs to trust her. Dolores kills the group of soldiers. They do not shoot very straight. She uses one of them to escape the bridge by falling on him.

Caleb is down on street level and people are rioting. Big burly guards find him and promise to escort him wherever he wants to go. He tells them Insight and they are all on the move.

Maeve confronts Dolores on the street level with her sword. The two have the fight of the season. Dolores tells Maeve she was the first actual host that worked so they are copies of her. Then some more fighting. Dolores spares Maeve and tells her future is her own as long as she doesn’t get in the way. Charlotte is there now and she can control the real Dolores and she does. While a part of Delos, Charlotte created a backdoor to control Dolores. She freezes her and Maeve prepares to cut her head off.

The riot is in full swing. Caleb and his burly entourage make their way to Insight. Now we see the riot robot Charlotte used. He is dropping tear gas on the rioters and generally wreaking havoc. Caleb runs into his friend who is one of the criminals he has worked with before. We find the other criminal friend he has worked with before as well. They want to shut down the power grid. A drone lands a way away and they mention that the drone is the easiest way to Insight. they have to push through the riot to get there. On the way to the drone, one of his friends is shot. The other criminal stays behind to look after him. Caleb flies away.

Bernard stops his car in front of a random house. He tells a very bloody Stubbs he will find somewhere to patch him up but he needs to talk to Dolores first. He knocks on the door and someone answers the door and invites him in. There is a greyhaired woman who comes into the room to talk to Bernard. The nurse who is assisting her says she has a visitor. Bernard tells her they knew each other in another life and that he needed to make amends. My guess is this is Bernard’s actual wife. She calls him Arnold and tells him it is ok. He cries. They share a moment.

Dolores has been transported back to Serac’s home base. He is accessing her data. He brings her back online and asks her for the information and when she refuses he starts to delete her memories one at a time. It is the type of torture that hits me right in the heart.

Caleb approaches and a group of guards tries to kill him but he makes short work of them. He takes the keycard from the last guard who he allows to live and gains access to the building.

Inside there are a few more guards who he takes care of quickly. Before he can connect a flash drive to the tower a guard tries to strangle him and Caleb dispatches him. Maeve shows up with her sword. She demands the thumb drive. He gives it to her. She takes him down the escalator. Dolores and Caleb are back together again. Serac tells Caleb he is not the enemy. That choice is an illusion. The Frenchman argues Caleb is just a killer fulfilling a role in a story that Dolores told him. He then forces Caleb to ask the system what happens if he uploaded the flash drive. We learn it would end up in a series of mass casualty events culminating in human extinction. Serac then destroys the drive.

Maeve grows weary of all of this and starts to predict speech before it happens. Oh, shit the computer is telling Serac what to say. The machine is using Serac not the other way around. Maeve tells Serac she is done worshipping other people’s gods. Serac tells her to obey. I do not believe that will sit really well with her. Maeve tries to convince Dolores to stop fighting. Maeve holds her hand and relays the last memory in Dolores’s mind.

Serac moves to Caleb and threatens to shoot him unless he relays who has the key. He tells his guards to shoot Caleb and then to erase Dolores. The machine starts to erase Dolores’s final memory and some weird power surge happens. Maeve ends up in Dolores’s memories. Maeve asks her if she really wants to kill them all. Dolores tells her she does not but that she wants to destroy their world so that they can rebuild it. Dolores tells her she does not have the key and that she created the situation where Caleb does not have to fight alone. Her final memories are moments of kindness. Moments of good. The last thing Dolores has is hope and beauty. These moments got me. Got me good. “maybe they can find it themselves”. “I chose to see the beauty”.

Maeve wakes up and kills the guard. Serac tries to freeze her and she destroys the machine he is trying to use and the lights go out. Maeve is back and she is pissed! The lights come back on and everyone is dead. Serac is bleeding but still alive. We learn Dolores chose Caleb because he could choose to be good or bad. He has been both and can choose not to be bad. We get a flashback to when Caleb was in the army and chose not to abuse the hosts in the scenario and Dolores was there.

Serac tries to tell them they do not have a choice. He tries to use the supercomputer, but he has been locked out. We learn the last memory erased from Dolores was Solomon’s passcode allowing Caleb access to the supercomputer. The computer only answers to Caleb, and he tells the computer to access the final command. Caleb gives the rest of the world a choice.

Bernard places Stubbs in a tub full of ice and gives him an airplane sized bottle of booze. Bernard tells him they do not have a lot of time. He tells Stubbs he can tell that Dolores has gone. That he underestimated Dolores and that she was trying to save humanity. We then learn Bernard has the key. He is going to try and find out how to save humanity. He takes some sort of headset out of his suitcase and places it on his head and turns it on. He has access to the database. Stubbs asks him what he sees and Bernard shuts down.

Caleb and Maeve exit the building, and we get a great instrumental of Dark Side of the Moon. HELL YEA. Maeve tells him, In this world, we get to be whoever the fuck we want to be as buildings explode around them.

The stinger of the episode has William trying to break into a Delos building in the Middle East. He shoots a security guard and heads downstairs. He finds a slightly burnt up copy of Charlotte. He points his gun at her and before he can kill her she tells him he is going to kill the humans for her. She then unleashes a host man in black that kills him. We get a pan of thousands of host bays opening up into what can presumably be a host army. When he wakes them up we also get a Bernard covered in dust finally waking up in the hotel room we left him in.

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