Westworld season 3 premiere recap: Parce Domine

Westworld is back for its third outing with a solid premiere that laid the ground for more amazing things to come and gave the series a soft reboot.

Westworld is back, and with the season premiere itself, which honestly feels so fresh and reinvigorating like it is almost a pilot and not just a season premiere, the show has given itself a soft reboot.

We were not even in the park for 99% of the premiere. There are also new sets of characters that don’t have anything to do with the first two seasons of the show (from what we know so far).

But even with this massive shift in the show’s fundamental narrative, the show is still fueled by its core motor functions.

Season 3 picks up almost three months after the slaughter-fest at the park. The massacre had over one hundred casualties, most of them were board members and park employees. The android version of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) reveals this during a board meeting at Delos. We also know that she is working for Dolores. That said, we still don’t know whose consciousness and psyche is inside her.

After a cold open, where Dolores extracts some useful information from a rich jerk concerning a company named Incite, we get to see Aaron Paul‘s Caleb. Caleb is a struggling veteran who has PTSD. He is just trying to get by. He makes an honest living by day and does illegal jobs for hire during the night. Although he doesn’t do “personals,” he mostly does low-risk courier works.

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He is trying to move up in the world by applying for better jobs that suit his skills better and pays for more than just bills, but nobody hires him because his stats are not good enough.

Throughout the episode, we see him talking to his fellow veteran friend Francis which later turns out to be a therapy simulation. He later unsubscribes to the service because he wanted to find something real to live, and moments later, he bumps into Dolores.

Meanwhile, Dolores is “dating” Liam Dempsey, played by John Gallagher Jr., who is the head of Incite. His father created this A.I., which is basically a God, and that’s what Dolores is after.

She later finds out that he’s just the head for the namesake and doesn’t have any control over the system. His father’s partner has locked him out of the system. And nobody knows what the system is up to other than its original architect, whose name he can’t reveal because he’ll kill him if he does so. After all, the system has probably already predicted so.

Dolores cozies him up to reveal the name to her, but just before it could happen, his bodyguard Martin played by Tommy Flanagan (Sons of Anarchy), sedates her and reveals to Liam that she is a fraud, they thought she was a human though.

Liam’s people took Dolores to a remote place to murder her and make it look like an accident, but their drugs did not work on her (obviously!), and she soon wakes up and butchers everyone.

Martin manages to flee the scene, but Dolores soon catches up to him. And obviously, Dolores already thought everything through, as we see Martin struggling for his life and soon being killed by an Android version of himself.

This was all part of Dolores’s plan as she replaces the real Martin with this host version of him to find out about the reality of the system and to get her hands on it.

Although backup soon arrives and Dolores has dealt quite a blow and is wounded. We see her escape to a tunnel to save herself, and that’s where Caleb bumps into her.

Elsewhere, Bernard is laying low as an agricultural worker under an alias named Armand Delgado, since he has become a fugitive after being falsely accused of the park murder spree.

His peaceful life soon gets interrupted as two of his co-workers find out about it and, after confronting him, tries to capture him. Bernard revokes that emotionless part of himself to beat them up. He eventually ends up leaving that place to go to Westworld, possibly to recruit Maeve, who we see in the post-credits scene, waking up in a Nazi World War 2 world at the park.

Notably, Bernard is also running a regular diagnostic on himself to find out whether his code has been tampered with or not by Dolores recently.

While this season’s premiere might seem like a complete departure from what the show used to be, it feels wholly refreshing and captivating and all for the better of it. The narrative shift works well and is exciting. The storytelling is more linear and suits the current storyline. The futuristic world-building is beautiful, and Aaron Paul is such an excellent addition to the show.

We just can’t wait to see where this goes next.

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What did you think of Westworld‘s season 3 premiere? Comment your thoughts down below and let us know. Westworld airs Sundays on HBO.

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