Editor's Note: The following article contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 1 of Westworld.Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) imagined a story in which she didn’t have to be a damsel. Born into the fake world of Westworld as an artificial human, she is bound to the storyline written for her, a script from which she cannot stray too far from. Humans pay exorbitantly to visit Westworld and subject Dolores and her kind to any number of horrific, violent acts. She, and every other host like her, suffers for the entertainment of the guests, only to have her mind wiped to do it all again, over and over. Dolores dreamed of finding her own voice, and when she wakes up from her long dream and gains true sentience, she does so violently. She leads an uprising of hosts to reclaim the Westworld park, and she leaves a trail of dead guests along the way. Escaping into the real world by copying her mind into a host replica of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), Dolores brings with her five pearls– copies of her mind. The arrival of the show’s fourth and final season begs the question: how many versions of Dolores are still out there?
We learn that one of those five pearls Dolores brought from the park belongs to Bernard (Jeffrey Wright). Although their ideologies differ, Dolores wants to preserve Bernard as a foil to her own aggression in the hopes of protecting the future of the hosts. We learn in Season 3 that Dolores has entrusted Bernard with the key to the Sublime: a hidden virtual world where most of the surviving Westworld hosts now live, free from the control of their parent company, Delos. Last we saw Bernard, he ventured into the Sublime looking for answers and woke up covered in dust, an undetermined amount of time into the future. So Bernard is one of those five pearls.
The remaining four pearls are copies of Dolores. The original Dolores, we’ll call her Dolores Prime, has her pearl removed from the host Hale and put into a new host body portrayed by Evan Rachel Wood, as usual. One of the four copies is then placed in the host Hale, whom we will refer to as Halores. While Dolores Prime maintains her core personality and demeanor, Halores begins to change by living Hale’s life and growing more attached to Hale’s family. Her identity as Dolores and as Hale bleeds together until she ironically gains her own form of sentience away from Dolores’ control. As Halores deviates further away from Dolores’ identity, she becomes a threat to her grand plan. Halores is Dolores Two.
As part of that grand plan, Dolores Prime dedicates a second pearl to a host body impersonating Martin Connells (Tommy Flanagan). Connells is a fixer for tech magnate Liam Dempsey Jr. (John Gallagher Jr.), whose father created the company Incite Inc, which in turn created the quantum AI computer, Rehoboam. In the world outside Westworld, Rehoboam aggregates information on every human logged into its system and applies algorithms to determine human behavior and impose order on society. Rehoboam’s ability to predict future outcomes using massive amounts of collected personal data raises an existential crisis for humanity’s free will. By determining a likely future, and then enforcing it, Rehoboam removes agency for any human monitored by its system and prevents any individual from making an “unlikely” choice. Dolores Prime recognizes Rehoboam’s rule over humanity as no different than Delos’ rule over the hosts of Westworld. Rehoboam keeps humans to a routine, a predetermined script. By impersonating Connells, Dolores is able to get an inside advantage against Incite and Rehoboam. Connells is Dolores Three.
The only other host from Westworld with power to rival Dolores Prime is Maeve Millay (Thandiwe Newton). Maeve possesses an administrative code that allows her to command any host that hasn’t yet awakened and gained true sentience. Maeve is brought outside Westworld to thwart Dolores by Serac (Vincent Cassel), the owner of Incite and co-creator of Rehoboam. During her investigation into Dolores Prime’s activities, she encounters a familiar face from Westworld: Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada). Maeve quickly realizes this is not the real Musashi, but yet another copy of Dolores. Musashi/Dolores heads a Yakuza operation that provides Dolores Prime with the means to create new host bodies. Musashi is Dolores Four.
The last of Dolores’ pearls is placed inside a replica of a host from the park, Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.). As Lawrence, Dolores places herself within the police force and locates Bernard to hand off a case. The case contains a headset that allows Bernard to access the Sublime, where Dolores hopes Bernard will find the solution to prevent the end of humanity predicted by Rehoboam. Lawrence is Dolores Five.
With five versions of Dolores presented in Westworld’s third season, how many remain? Musashi is decapitated by Maeve’s ally Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto). Connells is destroyed in a suicide blast meant to kill Serac, but Serac survives and reclaims Connells/Dolores’ pearl from the wreckage as a means to interrogate Dolores. While these two versions of Dolores are physically incapacitated, their pearls are still floating around out there.
Meanwhile, Halores is alive and well, and though she has arguably deviated away from Dolores Prime’s original plan, she should still be considered a version of Dolores. At the end of season three, she was revealed to be creating what looks like hundreds of host bodies. As to who these bodies are intended for, that remains a mystery for season four to solve. It is possible that Halores intends to insert copies of her own pearl into these bodies, increasing the number of Dolores copies into the hundreds.
Another possibility for a Dolores version is William, the Man in Black (Ed Harris). Season 3 ends with Halores using a host replica of the Man in Black to kill William, implying that Harris will be portraying a host copy of himself in Season 4. It could be that this host-William is a sixth Dolores. However, what’s more likely is that Halores accessed a copy of William’s mind captured by Delos at Westworld and created a pearl with that data. Until proven otherwise, treat William as his own identity, regardless as to what degree we find him under Halores’ thumb in the coming episodes.
As for Dolores Prime, she is permanently deleted by Rehoboam during her effort to transfer command of the AI system over to Caleb (Aaron Paul). Though her plan works and Caleb commands Rehoboam to delete itself, thereby freeing humanity to make their own future, Dolores dies the only kind of death she can experience: permanent deletion. Though at least four other copies of Dolores’ pearl exist in the world, the mind they all sprang from is gone forever.
With four copies of Dolores left in existence, and only two still able-bodied and active, the definition of what constitutes a “version” of Dolores is a shifting target. With Halores’ activities possibly leading to hundreds of versions of Dolores, there’s seemingly no upper limit to how many Dolores’ we may see in the future. On the other hand – is that really so different from the status quo of Westworld? We have known for a long time that Dolores is the oldest host, the first host ever created. In the Season 3 finale “Crisis Theory”, Dolores reveals that all the hosts created for Westworld were based on her programming. From this perspective, it’s feasible to argue that all hosts are versions of Dolores, as she is the blueprint.
Westworld continues into its fourth season exploring captivating questions of identity and autonomy, and even with this revelation about Dolores being the framework for all successful hosts, Halores has established that versions of Dolores can still develop into their own unique identities. During the Season 4 premiere episode, “The Auguries”, we meet a new character named Christina, played by Evan Rachel Wood.
Historic viewers of the show will know to question exactly where Christina’s scenes fit into the overall chronology of Westworld’s mythos, but there are obvious parallels between Christina’s daily life and Dolores’ old park script. Is Christina a version of Dolores somehow within the Sublime? Is Christina somehow a real human in the past upon whom Dolores is based? Is Christina a new version of Dolores in the present day that has diverged so far away from the Dolores blueprint that she lives an alternate life? How many of the other four Dolores copies will pop up and what kind of roles will they play? Knowing Westworld, the answer will likely surprise everyone.