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Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
The end has just begun, and humanity has only themselves to face as well as the Machine. “Be prepared. There is chaos in the streets.”
This penultimate episode of Westworld‘s third season is titled “Passed Pawn.” It is directed by Helen Shaver (The Land Before Time, The Color of Money, Poltergeist: The Legacy) and written by Gina Atwater.
Some spoilers ahead for those who have not yet watched the episode or seen the show, so watch the episode first then return to this article afterward!
The second-to-last episode of Westworld: The New World provides some chilling information on its central characters of the season, most importantly Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul) and William (Ed Harris) while providing some interesting cinematography on the side. Additionally, it is also supported by some unsettling dialogue, storytelling, and development of characters.
Nichols discovers he is one of Rehoboam’s many first test subjects in their revolutionary reconditioning therapy treatment, proving it to be effective with “a possibility of regression.” Meanwhile, William is broken out of his recovery center by Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) and Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth).
Nichols was manipulated by the Rico mobile application — which, as shown in previous episodes of the season, led people to take down crime — and utilized through Rehoboam’s conditioning and pharmaceuticals, the latter of which resulted in some “disassociative memories.” This just comes to show the drastic measures digital technology and its creations will take to ensure humanity will turn on itself unwittingly.
Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) fights a returning Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), prompting Nichols to become a leader of the revolution at Dolores’s request. The plot thickens when it is revealed that Rehoboam created the Rico app and “used it to regulate criminality.” Caleb Nichols is written here with a new stratum of character development, where, like William, his mind may have been tampered with. Through flashbacks and information conveyed by Rehoboam’s artificial intelligence Solomon, Nichols is an outlier of the system, “the fatal flaw that would bend the world on its axis.”
This week’s episode of Westworld delivers intriguing lines, apocalyptic and tragic. Dolores and Nichols travel to Sonora, Mexico, a desert environment that reminds the former of the Westworld park’s atmosphere and landscape. She says, “I lived in hell. There was beauty in it.”
William’s conversations with Bernard and Ashley are intriguing. He is reminded that humans are both the cause and the effect of their issues. Bernard tells him,
Serac though his machine could save the world, but it couldn’t save humans from themselves, so he began trying to reprogram them like hosts. [He needed humans’ data.] The end of the world came knocking, and you let it in.
William later responds with,
I know my purpose now. I found it right here. I faced my demons. They whispered to me, and you know what they said? I’ve wronged a lot of people in my life, hurt the ones I loved the most, but of all things I’ve done, there’s only one stain I could not blot out, only one original sin … you. Kill me now, or I’ll kill you later.
The hosts have taken humanistic personalities, but they are still cogs of the mega-machine created by the capitalist society and consequently the products of subjectivation, as Italian sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato puts it in his theoretical text Signs and Machines. Stubbs, former head of Westworld’s park security, says that his job was “watching over the unruly flock.” This is also a function of surveillance technology that progresses throughout the series through technological individuals such as Dolores.
In the end, Dolores confronts her former acquaintance, to whom she says, “If we can’t be free in this world, we can’t be free in any world.” This statement is true not only for technological devices (and entities, for that matter) but for human beings as well. Westworld time and time again teaches its fans that we need to realize our place in this world and that we can aspire to do more than for which we are made. Caleb, earlier on in this episode, poses a question that we need to ruminate: “What kind of revolution are we waging here?” This also applies to current events, divided by two or sides that believe they are making change. When the apocalypse wipes out a fraction of the world’s population, who is left to right?
“Passed Pawn” is an interesting title for an episode, and perhaps lends itself to Aaron Paul’s character, who is just another pawn on the chessboard, or a gear rotating the larger assemblage. As Lazzarato writes, “In machinic enslavement, the individual is no longer instituted as an ‘individuated subject,’ ‘economic subject,’ or ‘citizen.’ He is instead considered a gear, a cog, a component part in [the assemblages].” For Caleb Nichols, he is controlled and regulated, not only by Rehoboam or the Rico app but also by hosts like Dolores. The dynamics between the episode’s characters, along with the thrilling fight between Dolores and Maeve, make for a good watch.
We need to be free. “New strategy, new story for the human race.”
9.5/10
What do you think? Have you seen this series? If not, do you plan to binge it sometime in the near future? Let us know! For more Westworld and HBO-related news and reviews follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_).
Source: Maurizio Lazzarato’s Signs and Machines
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
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