I found Maeve having powers that works on all machinery outside the park a bit of a stretch, and I found the stuff with William tedious. Dolores and Caleb were pretty good, though. I did like the Eyes Wide Shut in Da Fewcha scene, including the paraphrase of "You're always paying it for, it's just that our prices our on the door" from the pilot.
Yeah. Humanworld ain't much different from Westworld.
What was this that Ashley mentioned, though, about Murderworld apparently? Wow.
A bit disappointed by the reveal about everyone being Dolores, as well.
Yeah, in some ways it feels the simplest/easiest answer and also makes this kind of an authoritarian one-person show. I felt disappointment too, and the reveal didn't really create any kind of emotional shock or catharsis for me, like some of the show's best reveals.
However, maybe they plan to do something with it. I've mentioned Chalker's "The Four Lords of the Diamond" scifi series, the four books all start with an agent/spy whose mind was cloned and them imprinted on a criminal host body sentenced to spend their remaining lives on one of the four prison planets. (Once you enter, a host organism infiltrates every cell in your body, preventing you from physically leaving the planet system again or you die horribly.) So all the books start the same, and each imprint realizes their body is different -- which means they are not the "real" person they remember themselves to be but simply a clone, and part of each book deals with each clone's response to that PLUS how the body they've been imprinted on impacts their identity as well as their experiences starting to differ themselves from the original agent.
We saw some of this last week with Charlores or whatever we should call her now. She's Dolores but also not. Or at least shouldn't be. She has life ties and experiences and and a body that is not Dolores.
Also, what the hell is in those barrels? Alcoholic milk? (edit, oh, apparently it literally is the host goo, not just a metaphor. I guess that way, they can make as many bodies as they need.)
Yeah, almost certainly host goo. As soon as they broke one open, i was like "damn."
A lot of things seemed flat and one-dimensional to me , although I don't really have the problem with what Maeve is doing (just how she's doing it). It makes sense given that her core was about her daughter ever since she started remembering her.
The whole episode was pretty much just plot and straightforward at that.
Well, Ford actually planned for Maeve to leave. That was what was scripted, I thought that came up in Season 2 when Ford says goodbye to Maeve and how this made her his favorite, the most realized of his hosts he felt.
I had mixed feelings about Maeve's decisions. I felt like she had found closure in Season 2 by getting her daughter to the promised land, at the exclusion of being with her, and so now she would not do anything to jeopardize her daughter's happiness/bliss. Reuniting with her, I felt, was a train that had left the station long ago. However, I could see her spending her time making sure that no one could ever threaten her daughter again. I would be careful if I was Serac. Maeve will not be told what to do. She also will not allow anyone to threaten her daughter. And she WILL find a way to break that push button.
Do you think Dolores actually gives a shit a bit Caleb? I noticed that he never seemed to find out what she was last episode, and this was confirmed, here. I think she does, and that's what's interesting about them. The reason I think so is that she doesn't really need him beyond saving her in the first episode. She already has a copy of her inside the Scottish guy, and that guy already got the hash code. She could have found another way to get all the money.
It's hard to tease out the specifics because Dolores is such a hash of the good daughter but also Wyatt, the ruthless killer. She has become all about drive, she has a mission and everything is secondary to that, and she is very coldly passionate about it and cannot afford to fail. She even just clones herself into the hosts we've seen so far, rather than trusting other hosts and making it a group enterprise.
However, it would be a mistake to assume she DOESN'T care and is simply being Machiavellian and/or using people to achieve her goals without caring. It's a typical accusation leveled against TJ people, for example -- but just because she is goal-oriented doesn't mean she doesn't feel anything or doesn't care. Even when she violated Teddy's nature, she was devastated when he offed himself.
(hmm, possible she doesn't trust other hosts because she thinks she'd have to change them to get them to function at the level she needs, but she saw how that turned out with Teddy and how it was psychically traumatic/violent towards him, so this is why she is just violating herself instead? Maybe it's a sign of mercy and compassion towards other hosts, not just mistrust? I mean, hell, she brought back Bernard. She must have SOME reason for doing that besides just nicety or self-check.)
I think in Caleb Dolores has come to realize more firmly that humans are as much a victim of the controllers as the hosts were. IOW, Caleb and the average human is not her enemy -- it is the elite rich, those making the decision, those controlling the fates of individual people who predict who won't be worth anything to them and then forcing that future true by denying them the resources to determine their own faith. She totally didn't need Caleb but chose to involve him, because I think she is smart enough to recognize that she needs to bring some humans to her cause, their cause is one and the same, and also because she can relate to him. Dolores will continue to evolve, as she always has. I think her feelings are more complex than simply being a villain or a catalyst, she's bigger than that.
I also do find it interesting to contrast Serac with Dolores. There isn't really a clearcut good guy here, and yet, I find myself more team Dolores. Perhaps she's narcissistic about how much what she's doing will benefit the other hosts, but she seems less full of shit than Serac. like that they gave him a sympathetic motivation, though. He kind of reminds me of Ozymandias from Watchmen, in some ways. They both aren't above killing, but he doesn't seem to show much hesitation when it comes to killing the people that he's supposedly trying to save. To me it seems like it's more about control for him than benevolence. It's convenient that the world in which he's able to control everything also allows him to live the good life, isn't it? He's not living next to the rocket launch sites in Victorville, that's for sure. I've been bothered by what Dolores did to Teddy, but to keep that in perspective, for hosts, it's not permanent, while for humans it is. And ultimately, she did give him the life he wanted.
Yeah, in some ways Serac and she are similar -- both ruthlessly committed to the survival of their species, driving by some level of earlier trauma, and utilitarian and willing to use whatever means accomplish the goal, which can involve using.
I don't think we've actually seen Serac give a shit about another individual before though. We know Dolores so much better. We know how much she loved Teddy and her father. (Maeve is the same, she loved her daughter and respected the freedoms of other hosts.)
So far Serac just seems to be an ass in terms of caring about other individual humans. We haven't experienced that yet, at least -- the only empathy we saw from him was about the loss of Paris, but that wasn't necessarily from caring about individual people. In fact, I now recall that bit after they interrogated the Asian guy, and Serac "rewarded" him by shooting him in the head because he had sold out humanity, right after ripping answers out of him by threatening people he loved. Maeve held her expression in check but I think this mortified her; I'm having trouble recalling her doing something comparable, I think she still has empathy even when she's being "ruthless." Like, she will kill human beings, but I have trouble remembering her torturing them, then reneging on a deal.
She realizes pretty quick that Serac cannot be trusted and has no love in him even for his own kind. And yeah, there are similarities to Ozymandias -- both are driven by fear of the end of humanity, both have taken dire measures, and neither seems to value individual human life, there's no compassion in them for individual others.