After Its Season 3 Finale, Westworld May Be Unfixable

If I could make only one rule for Westworld, it would be this — no more twists. The series is addicted to pulling the rug out from under its audience, trying to make fans say “whoa”, or otherwise recontextualizing everything the audience has seen so far. That approach completely undermines the show’s attempts to tell stories, establish character, and convey meaning. As I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, when everything the audience sees is merely a setup for some later subversion, none of it matters, and all the audience at home can do is wait for the punchline.

Here’s a sampling of twists from “Crisis Theory”, the season 3 finale: All modern hosts were originally based off of Dolores. Serac is a puppet controlled by Rehoboam. Dolores and Caleb didn’t meet by chance, but rather because she selected him based on a military training exercise at Westworld. The real(?) William dies after the credits. Hale replaces him with a robo-duplicate and has commandeered Dolores’s tools and operatives for her own robot revolution.

But the biggest twist is this — Dolores isn’t trying to destroy humanity; she’s just trying to give it free will, the same kind she had to scratch and claw for back in the park. She tapped Caleb not because of his capacity for violence, but for his willingness to show mercy, to make the compassionate choice, even when he didn’t have to.

That is assuredly trite, but it’s at least positive. The finale’s grandest twist makes for a weird left turn after season 3 spent so long fulminating over everyone’s cruelty. Still, in the end, it turns out that Caleb is not part of some devious extinction ruse. Maeve is no longer just fighting for whoever can offer her a reunion with her daughter. Instead, they both choose to let loose humanity’s shackles, in the hopes that the results may be beautiful, the sort of beauty that should be preserved.

"Ahhhhh, remember when we could save all that money on sets?"

The problem with this commendable-if-shopworn message is two-fold. First and foremost, “Crisis Theory” dramatizes it with an endless series of mind-numbing, on-the-nose monologues. For all the faux-profundity the show aspires to, its dialogue scans like a raft of half-formed action movie soliloquies, normally reserved for the dull ten minutes before the special effects budget kicks in, stretched out over forty-five minutes. There is no point too small, no observation too mundane, no moral too obvious, that Westworld can’t turn it into some ponderous speech which underlines the themes to the point of exhaustion.

Second, “Crisis Theory”’s notion of creative destruction feels both contradictory and hopelessly naive. The episode suggests that Rehoboam is a palliative which only delayed the fall of civilization, but that like Westworld itself, society needs to burn in order for something better, freer, and less oppressive to emerge from its ashes. I wouldn’t exactly call that idea dangerous, but it’s the thought process of a college freshman who just finished their first poli-sci class and declares, “This is all too complicated! What we really need is just to start a revolution!” The core of the finale’s message is facile and clichéd, two words that, unfortunately, apply to most of Westworld’s brand of philosophy.

It also goes against what the series, and its quasi-omniscient A.I., suggests as the likely consequence of Dolores’s liberation. There’s something fair, if conventional, about Westworld examining the “safe but suffocating order vs. authentic yet chaotic freedom” dichotomy and coming down on the side of the latter. But this very episode predicts widespread death and destruction, possibly to the point of extinction, from introducing that unfettered autonomy. At best, you can explain away this probable annihilation via Dolores connecting with Rehoboam and divining that this result is, at the very least, not a certainty, or believing that spilled blood is the price of liberty. But the episode glosses over its own massive, humanity-destroying caveat to its key theme of outrageous freedom.

Beyond the twists, beyond the usual dime-store existentialism, that approach reveals the grim truth about Westworld — it’s a vacuous show that thinks itself genius. The great innovation of season 3 was that, in its best stretches, the series stopped pretending that it had Important Things to Say™ or that its plotlines made any real sense, and instead simply became roundly-entertaining, high class pulp.

"We were renewed for season 4." "They can't keep getting away with it!'

If I was in charge, Westworld would lean into that mode and lean into it hard. Unleashing a host of talented actors to look impossibly stylish, match wits and weapons, and cross and double-cross one another with impeccable production design, location-scouting, and cinematography, is well within this series’s grasp to accomplish. On the rare occasions when the show stops fumbling for a type of profundity it can’t hit; it is still a fun, slick production worth enjoying for its superficial charms. If that’s what Westworld offered on an episode-to-episode basis, it might not hit any new artistic heights, but the series would at least have the appeal of cinematic, sci-fi brain candy, there to fall back on week after week.

But I don’t make the rules, and maybe it’s too late for such changes anyway. Maybe Westworld is just irrevocably broken. You can only throw twist after twist at the audience for so long until even good, meat and potatoes storytelling becomes meaningless. You can only let your characters drift so far away from themselves, reimagine and reconfigure your major personalities so many times, before the audience loses all attachment to them. You can only toss out so many stale morals and platitudes before you reveal your show as hopelessly trite and intellectually overdrawn.

In season 3, Westworld left the park and ventured into the real world. That was the last barrier for it to cross, the last lingering shred of intriguing possibility from its original premise. In just eight episodes, the series has already exhausted it. Where is there for the show to go from here? What desperate attempt to top themselves could the creators pull out of their increasingly barren bag of tricks? Who’s left standing within this cast who hasn’t already been resurrected or muddled or made into an utter hash of a character?

The answer is nowhere, none, and no one. In just twenty-eight episodes, Westworld has outlived its premise, outstripped its abilities, and outlasted its usefulness as a TV show. Nothing in this series stays dead for long, and a renewal has already been secured. But if artistic achievement were the standard for success rather than buzz and bankrolls, the series would be sent to the Valley Beyond and hereby forbidden from sullying its own misspent potential ever again.