This review contains spoilers for Westworld Season 3, Episode 7, “Passed Pawn.” To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our review of Westworld Season 3, episode 6.
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Part of IGN’s Westworld Season 3 guide
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Since his introduction in the first episode of Westworld Season 3, Aaron Paul’s grave, brooding Caleb Nichols has been characterized as a man without direction or purpose — a disconsolate nobody in a world that doesn’t have any use for him, scarred by trauma, cruising through his daily routine on autopilot. A veteran with an ambiguous background, he was clearly wracked with grief and extreme PTSD, and when he crossed paths with Dolores, bullet-riddled and on the run from foes, it made sense that he would meet the call of duty, compelled to act by a sudden sense of importance. Rather than continue to simply drift through life, he found meaning, and what made Caleb so fascinating was the underlying contradiction: that it took a fake human to make him feel he’d found something real.
Of course, we are talking about Westworld, and it always seemed a distinct possibility that what we thought we knew about Caleb would eventually turn out to be false — a canny bit of misdirection we’d be shocked to have revealed to us at some critical future juncture. This seemed so likely, in fact, that one of the prevailing diversions of the season has been theorizing about Caleb’s real identity, and theories have indeed been rampant since the start: Perhaps Caleb is a host, or stuck in some kind of simulation, or dead, or a clone, or Dolores, and so forth ad infinitum. And while one of the clearest virtues about the third season of Westworld has been its swiftness in dispatching lingering secrets, the writers have kept Caleb’s identity a mystery, to sometimes frustrating effect. It had become obvious that something was up with this character. But what, exactly?
Now we know, and for my money, the long-anticipated answer — he was injured in an ambush in a battle against insurgents, honourably discharged from the military, deemed an “outlier” by Rehoboam’s imperfect predecessor, rehabilitated by augmented reality therapy, drugged into a stupor, enlisted to kidnap and murder other outliers, and finally decomissioned after killing his partner and friend, with no memory of any of it — wasn’t worth the wait. Somehow both overly complicated and ultimately simplistic, it necessitated way too much explanation to be unveiled as a proper dramatic revelation, while at the same time it feeling too slight, as it related to the story overall, to land with the wallop of, say, learning that William and the Man in Black were the same person. It’s not an egregiously dumb or clunky twist, and it sets up some intriguing motivation for Caleb, but considering the build-up, I found it rather disappointing.
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I appreciate the connections the show has endeavored to draw between Caleb and Dolores. Like a host in Westworld, Caleb’s been long trapped in his own private recurring loop, totally unaware that the direction of his life has been determined by someone other than himself, that what he believes are his memories have been invented and implanted, that any sense of control or independence he has is nothing more than an illusion. And like Dolores, Caleb has suddenly and painfully been awakened to the truth of his situation — and has been invigorated to do something drastic to break out of it. I like the shift in emphasis this twist heralds. We’ve seen machines discover consciousness. Now we’re seeing that the consciousness humans take for granted might not be worth as much as they thought. Are hosts more free than humanity? Is anyone free at all?
These are interesting questions that greatly expand Westworld’s science-fiction premise. But posing these questions has not been without challenges this season, particularly concerning balance. On one hand, characters with whom we are already familiar are converging in the world outside the Delos theme parks, pursuing incompatible goals and confronting one another in a direct continuation of the story we have been following over the course of three seasons. On the other hand, we have a new hero, a new villain, and a very elaborate sci-fi conceit involving a nefarious supercomputer, predictive algorithms, Big Data, experimental rehab, app-based crime, and a system by which social undesirables are either cured or expunged. Intriguing though all of this may be, it’s a lot of information to convey at once, while still developing older characters, delivering spectacular action set pieces, and just generally maintaining the momentum needed to keep things moving briskly.
Westworld’s third season has strategically avoided this problem by declining to explain how Rehoboam works in detail or how Caleb is involved in Dolores’s plan to destroy it. As a result, it’s impossible to reveal this and more without dedicating huge chunks of time to long, exhaustively detailed flashbacks and stilted exchanges between the understandably confused Caleb and the since-defunct machine that helped brainwash him in the first place. “Passed Pawn” just has an unbelievable amount of exposition, primarily because the big reveal hinges on too many discrete components. It’s not just that Caleb is actually responsible for killing his best friend. We have to be told he was an outlier, and we have to be told what outliers are, and what happens to outliers, and that he used to hunt other outliers, and that one of his outlier-hunting missions went wrong, and that he had his memory wiped thereafter.
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The effect is like having a friend explain the plot of a movie you’ve never seen: long-winded, circuitous, hard to follow. And meanwhile, as if Caleb’s inquiries and reminiscences weren’t enough, we have Bernard, Stubbs, and William back at the asylum poking around a conveniently informative computer terminal, eager to add their own expository conversations to augment the plot dump. (This is never more transparent than when Stubbs explains away William’s entire third-season subplot by deducing that Dolores used his blood to locate the secret New Mexico facility, which you would think would be unnecessary given that she has Serac’s memories downloaded.) The only illuminating insight the three of them offer on the situation pertains to Dolores and her “poetic sensibility.” Dolores is exhorting Caleb to help her liberate humankind. Bernard, conversely, thinks she must be duping him into destroying it.
On the subject of destruction: the only person uninterested in going over backstory or mulling over plot seems to be Maeve, who arrives at the compound right as Caleb’s having his crisis of identity. She’s mercifully equipped with a samurai sword and an artillery drone (although absent her newly recruited host pals, glimpsed only in the opening scene as they dispatch one of the clone-Doloreses in the form of Musashi), and as if to deliberately to break up the exposition party, she proceeds to engage Dolores in the one-on-one fight we’ve been promised since the beginning of the season. Action has been one of the highlights of Westworld lately, but though this brawl is predictably well-staged, I did find it a touch too heavy on cutting — when Nolan himself is at the helm, the show has looked unmistakably cinematic, but alas this climactic bout struck me as a tad too televisual.
Dolores and Maeve meet their mutual end (at least for now) by way of that much-beloved sci-fi trope, the EMP blast, leaving Caleb to follow the newly devised instructions for revolution on his own. (Of course, there’s also Hale-Dolores, still in the wind.) With only one final episode left this season, there seems to be a lot of ground to cover and a lot of individual pieces left to bring together — namely Caleb, Serac, and Bernard, Stubbs, and William, left in a cliffhanger with a shotgun at a gas station. (The less said about their naivety in allowing this to happen the better.) I sincerely hope, as an avid fan of Westworld’s third season, that the finale makes this all worthwhile and retroactively justifies the digression into plot. I assume that the climax will echo Dolores: violent delights, violent ends.
Source: IGN.com Westworld Season 3, Episode 7 Review: 'Passed Pawn'