WESTWORLD Season 1 Episode 3
Episode Title: “The Stray”
Writers: Daniel T. Thomsen & Lisa Joy
Director: Neil Marshall
There are spoilers ahead for last night’s episode of Westworld, but don’t pretend that you didn’t know that!
We heard the voice of “God” last night on Westworld, or didn’t you notice? Whether God or Arnold are real, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) heard someone in her head that clearly wasn’t herself, and she followed the command she was given to blow away her would-be rapist. It feels like Westworld is giving us the pieces of the puzzle a little earlier than expected, as we now know about some of the mythology behind the park, including the currently unseen Arnold. Anthony Hopkins is an actors’ actor, but even he can only do so much with the exposition dump that Dr. Robert Ford made in this episode. Ford was much more effective when he yelled at one of his technicians for treating a Host like he was real. That scene offered some ambiguous details about Ford’s view of the world that he co-created with “Arnold,” but it’s not clear if he really believes his own spiel.
There’s a lot to enjoy about Westworld, even if the individual stories haven’t necessarily been jelling together. Dolores’ unfolding consciousness is compelling and it’s become oddly hilarious to see Teddy (James Marsden) die every week. He’s definitely the “Kenny” of this show, but the most striking thing about Teddy and Dolores is that they were made to suffer. Ford essentially said that their narrative always ends unfulfilled, with the bandits murdering Dolores’ family and Teddy before raping her in the barn. In a way, that flies in the face of what Ford has previously told us about the park. Near the end of last week’s episode, Ford said that the park offers guests “a glimpse of who they could be.” Do almost all of them want to be rapists and Black Hats? It’s one thing if the guests choose to torment Dolores, because that implied that a different outcome could possibly occur. But apparently that wasn’t true, at least until now.
So far, the only guest we know who wants to play a White Hat is William (Jimmi Simpson), who went out of his way to save Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) from a dangerous fugitive. It wasn’t enough to make William take Clementine up on her offer to show him some gratitude, but being a hero holds an obvious appeal for him. You’d think that would be the primary appeal of Westworld, instead of drinking and f***ing everything. Even Teddy’s latest female guest didn’t turn down Clementine’s offer.
Related: Androids Dream in New ‘Westworld’ Trailer
One of the popular theories going around is that William is actually Ed Harris’ Man in Black in an extended flashback sequence. The ending of this episode appeared to dispel that by sending a desperate Dolores into William’s arms. But the show could still be playing us. The Man in Black was largely absent this week, but his presence was felt through brief flashes of memory. We still like the idea that William could become the Man in Black, and the show seemed to be toying with that idea by throwing in a lawman who kind of resembled Ed Harris as a younger man.
Behind the scenes of the park, the slow burn of Bernard’s storyline is being carried by Jeffrey Wright’s performance. Of course, it always helps when an actor can play off of both Hopkins and Gina Torres in a single episode. But if there’s anybody who seemed to deserve our sympathy in this future of sin, it’s Bernard. As for Elsie and Ashley, we would have been fine if “The Stray” host had murdered them both. Their banter was like a poor Jurassic World riff, and it did nothing to make them interesting. It was intriguing that the stray host may have been inspired to search the stars and carve out the constellations. But that’s plot and not character. Westworld has plenty of the former, and not enough of the latter.
Make no mistake, this is a very solid and well made TV series with some of the highest production values that we’ve seen in a long time. But Westworld is not great television…yet. That said, it does seem to be moving in a very promising direction.
