Oh Westworld, you’ve done it again. Season 3 Episode 4, titled “The Mother of Exiles,” packed a hefty dose of exposition and backstory into a single hour of storytelling and ended on a massive twist, as we finally learned who’s inside those host bodies that Dolores has created. Written by Jordan Goldberg and Lisa Joy and directed by Paul Cameron, who served as the HBO show’s cinematographer for the pilot and the Season 3 premiere (click here to read my spoiler-filled interview with Cameron about Episode 4), the episode took viewers on a rollicking roller coaster ride across multiple points of view, and finally brought William back into the fold. There’s a lot to unpack so forgive the long-windedness as I attempt to explain WTF just happened…

William

The episode opens not with Dolores or Bernard, but with William! And boy, our favorite Man in Black is not doing great. Last we saw Ed Harris’ character in the Season 2 finale, he had just shot and killed his daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) thinking she was a host, and afterwards had tracked Dolores down to The Forge. We watched him get in the elevator to go downstairs to The Forge (after he blew his fingers off with his gun, which was incapacitated by Dolores), but we never saw what happened in The Forge. The next we saw the real William, he was lying unconscious on the beach with the other survivors of the massacre and was being readied to take back home. But in that Season 2 finale post-credits scene, we saw William enter a dilapidated (far future?) version of The Forge and confront Emily, who sat him down in the very room they used to cage the host version of James Delos. When William asked what Emily was testing him for, she said, “fidelity,” leading us to believe at some point William is turned into a host.

And so here we are in Season 3, and William has seemingly gone mad in his own house, haunted by visions of his dead daughter, yelling to no one in particular that he knows what’s real and what’s not. There’s a great scene between William and Ghost Emily where she brings up the data Delos collected on William, asking “what if every choice you ever made wasn’t a choice at all? Just something written in your code?” This further drills down Westworld’s themes of determinism vs. free will for both humans and hosts. Either William had free will and chose to kill his daughter, or his path was predestined and he couldn’t do anything to stop that tragic outcome.

Indeed, Westworld has always been concerned with the idea of free will and breaking out of “loops,” but Season 3 is particularly focused on the loops that humans create for themselves—and ones created by outside forces, like the predictive algorithm A.I. Rehoboam. We saw it with Caleb in Episode 3, and now we’re watching William struggle greatly with everything that happened the last time he was in the park—which for us viewers constitutes the entire first two seasons of the show.

“Are you free and evil, or blamelessly and helplessly enslaved?” Ghost Emily asks William, before then positing that maybe William isn’t even William at all anymore. Maybe he’s been changed. Remember right after killing Emily when William was digging into his own arm to find out if he’s a host? Well, he’s at it again.

But then William’s hallucination/vision is interrupted by something very real—Charlotte (or the host version of Charlotte—we still don’t know who’s inside Tessa Thompson’s body) enters his house and interrupts his internal conflict, telling him it’s “time to come back to reality.” She explains that in less than 24 hours Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) will net a controlling interest in Delos, and she needs him. Charlotte explains that William sold some of Delos’ data (data relating to park guests, we think) to Serac 20 years ago, and now he’s coming back for the whole enchilada.

It’s during this scene that we also learn that William was the algorithmic proxy we saw in the boardroom in this season’s first episode. He delegated his voting responsibilities to a robot, because that’s apparently a thing you can do in the future.

And we also see Charlotte confront William about “the data from the project in Sector 16,” to which William replies no one knows about the project. One assumes they’re talking about the plan to bring James Delos back to life as a host—essentially making immortality achievable by copying one’s consciousness in code form, using data collected inside the park. We know with James Delos they never fully succeeded—the host version would break down after a few days—but the idea remains a sound one. And a valuable one. It’s what Serac is after, presumably after learning about it from the real Charlotte who was planning on selling the data for a pretty penny.

So William acquiesces to Charlotte’s request to get his shit together and help save Delos from this hostile takeover. He insists that once he gets back, they need to find the mole. But we, the audience, already know Charlotte is the mole. She tries to brush William off, noting that the data from Sector 16 was almost certainly destroyed in the massacre. He’s unconvinced.

As William is readying himself to step outside with Charlotte and head to the emergency Delos board meeting, he has another imaginary conversation with Emily. He’s decided that yes, he chose to kill Emily, and maybe now her haunting him is his penance, but no matter. He’s going to move on. Except…

Outside, Charlotte asks William if he thinks he convinced her. She knows he’s been talking to his dead daughter. William is incensed. Charlotte says she didn’t really need to spy on William, “because I know you. I know you better than anyone. I know you down to your bones.” She says it’s amusing that he thinks he chose to kill his own daughter, noting he doesn’t even have a choice in his own grief. William knows something’s up. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “Your oldest friend,” Charlotte/Dolores replies.

BOOM.

A big, classic Westworld twist. The host inside Charlotte is Dolores. There are two Doloreses. No wait, six Doloreses. Indeed, the episode then intercuts between Charlotte, Martin, and Musashi, revealing that the pearls inside these hosts are actually not different people from the park. They’re all Dolores. She made copies of herself. How? Why? To what end? That we don’t know just yet—and remember we saw her smuggle five pearls out of the park, and in this episode we only get three reveals, so that means two additional pearls remain. Whether those two are additional copies of Dolores or other hosts, time will tell. But for now, this is a whopper of a twist.

As it relates to Charlotte and William, The Man in Black explodes, yelling that she’s not real, “none of this is real.” This is all part of Charlotte/Dolores’ plan. She wasn’t taking him to Delos, she’s committing him to a mental health hospital. As a result, he’s being deemed incompetent and all of his voting shares will be transferred to the current Delos president—which is Charlotte. After he’s subdued, Charlotte whispers to William, “I promised I’d let you destroy yourself one day.” She pricks his neck with something, drawing blood, but we don’t know what for. Blood is a recurring plot point in this episode, as the show is really drilling down the notion that blood is used like a fingerprint ID of sorts in this future world. So what is Dolores planning? That we don’t find out just yet, but clearly this episode wants us to know A. Blood is important and B. Charlotte/Dolores now has some of William’s.

The last we see of William in this episode, he’s literally in a cage in a mental asylum. Out of the shadows emerges Dolores—the Dolores he met in the park all those years ago. Clad in her blue dress, Southern drawl in her voice, Dolores says, “I guess there is some justice after all,” adding that Emily’s final wish was that he spend the rest of his days rotting in an institution, prisoner of his own sins. “I guess you’ve reached the center of your maze, William.”

Is Dolores a hallucination? Is she literally inside William’s head? Is he a host? These are questions left unanswered, as we’re meant to question the nature of our reality as the scene plays. “Ask me the question William,” Dolores says. “The answer you so desperately want to know.” He replies, “Am I me?” Dolores answers, “Welcome to the end of the game.” Oh Westworld, you cruel mistress you.

Dolores

So that’s the end of the episode, but it’s far from the whole story because “The Mother of Exiles” has a ton of story to tell. The first we see of Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in this episode, the image is in widescreen aspect ratio, which is used when we’re inside a simulation. She’s inside a construct of Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) house, as we’re witnessing how Dolores set about re-building Bernard once she got to the mainland after the events of the Season 2 finale.

Back in real-time, Dolores and Caleb (Aaron Paul) are preparing to take down Liam Dempsey (John Gallager Jr.). Dolores already has part of the plan in motion, as the host who replaced Liam’s head of security Martin (Tommy Flanagan) gets Liam to give them authorization to use his bank account. Dolores and Caleb, under disguise, enter an extremely shady future bank where they all but drain Liam’s account. Caleb does so using fraudulent blood that identifies him as someone capable of accessing Liam’s account. Again, blood is important.

Then, Dolores and Caleb head to a super fancy party that Liam is attending, which turns out to be a high society prostitution masquerade ball, in which people look upon a slew of naked people and pay a small fortune to have sex with them. With the masks and the costumes and the objectification, this strongly mirrors the world inside Westworld—something that is not lost on Dolores.

Liam learns that his bank account is empty, at which point… Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) intercepts him! A twist, as Bernard and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth)—back on the mainland after a detour to Westworld—have nabbed Liam before Dolores has a chance. But no matter. A confrontation ensues in which Dolores and Stubbs have a nice round of fisticuffs (respectably, as both note it’s “nothing personal”) while Bernard runs off with Liam.

Outside, Bernard learns that Liam has not been turned into a host after all (“She’s keeping him in play,” Bernard says, noting that she must need him for something.). Martin dispatches with Liam’s bodyguards and tells Liam to run, with Caleb going after him. This leaves Martin and Bernard, which leads to the episode’s big reveal: Martin is Dolores, Dolores is Martin. As discussed in the “William” section of this recap, Dolores inserted copies of herself into these various host bodies, and the last we see of this Bernard confrontation, Martin has forced him to get into a car with him/her.

Maeve

After taking Episode 3 off, we finally pick back up with Maeve in Episode 4, and she’s still under Serac’s thumb. He brings her back online in an insanely fancy bar in Singapore, where an expository conversation ensues that at long last gives us some backstory on this season’s Big Bad. Serac reveals that he grew up in Paris, but a brief but striking flashback reveals a nuclear bomb was detonated inside the French city some decades ago in this future world, and it no longer exists. “Like you, I know what it is to see your world disappear in the blink of an eye,” Serac explains, as he attempts to further ingratiate himself with Maeve and convince her to kill Dolores for him.

Serac says he’s “waited many years” for Maeve, Dolores, “and the others” to arrive, seemingly hinting that his algorithmic invention predicted the very events that happened at Westworld years ago, and he’s just been biding his time. Serac says humanity’s biggest threat has always been itself, noting that he’s been trying to control that, “negotiate a way into the future.” In order to understand humanity, he created the most comprehensive picture of human behavior ever seen (Rehoboam), but he then discovered someone had put together a more complete portrait—“a map of the human mind.” This map was created in Westworld, and is the data from the secret project that Charlotte was talking about. And Serac believes it’s now stored securely inside Dolores’ head.

Serac explains that in return for helping him, he’ll give Maeve a future in the “valley beyond” world that houses her daughter, the key to which is housed inside Dolores’ head Serac claims. He notes that there’s no future in which humans and hosts can live harmoniously together, so this is the best possible scenario for Maeve.

He then takes Maeve to Bernard’s house, which he describes as “a divergence where the future I had so carefully planned ended.” The place where Dolores created all of her copy hosts. Rehoboam traced “the divergence” to this house three months prior, and ever since his algorithm has had trouble predicting a steady future. All because of Dolores.

Inside the house is the man who gave Dolores and her host buddies new identities, and we witness Serac torture and intimidate him for information by showing him what happens in the future if he doesn’t comply. So he does. Then Serac kills him. So yeah, while charming and maybe even a little convincing, this is a dangerous dude.

Maeve then takes to the streets of Singapore to track down Dolores, and we see that while she can’t exactly control humans around her like she could control hosts with her mind inside Westworld, she is able to futz with any and all pieces of technology in her proximity using only her mind. And in a future world run by tech, that’s mighty powerful.

She tussles with a pair of goons trying to track down “The Mortician,” showing she’s lost none of her badass touch. The Mortician explains that while she sold Dolores the blood of a human named Laura Espen (again, blood acts as an identity marker like a fingerprint ID in this future world), she didn’t sell any additional blood. Instead, Dolores asked for help “smuggling out bodies,” so The Mortician pointed her in the direction of the Yakuza, which has a scary new boss.

Indeed, after breaking into the Yakuza’s hideout and dispatching with the various henchmen in unique ways, Maeve discovers that the gang’s new boss is none other than the host Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada). A brief refresher: Musashi was the Hector character in the Shogun World park, but last we saw the character he had decided to stay in Shogun World while Maeve and her companions set out for the Valley Beyond.

It at first appears that Musashi is one of the hosts that Dolores decided to smuggle out of the park, as he says Maeve “left us to die,” roping himself in with Hector and Clementine and even Maeve’s daughter. But Maeve immediately knows this isn’t really Musashi. He didn’t believe that. He chose to say. No, this imposter is Dolores. “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” Musashi/Dolores explains.

When Maeve confronts Dolores on her apparent vanity, noting that Dolores said she would build a new world for the hosts but is seemingly readying it for only herself, Dolores retorts that “the thing we are going to do isn’t easy. There will be a place for the others in the world we’ll build. For your daughter.” So Dolores still intends to build a new world for the hosts—including the ones she sent to the Valley Beyond given that comment about Maeve’s daughter—but the actual building of that world she’s handling all by herself.

But Dolores/Musashi says she can’t risk letting Serac use Maeve for his own purposes, and a fight ensues. It appears that despite their combined strength, Dolores isn’t really interested in convincing Maeve to join her side of things. Dolores stabs Maeve and leaves her for dead, but she’s discovered by Serac and his goons and is revived.

Episode MVP: Ed Harris. It’s good to have William back, and man does Harris really go to some dark places in this episode. It’s easy to forget that our journey with this series essentially started with Dolores and William all those years ago, and seeing William outside the park in present day for the first time, Harris really does a great job of relaying the toll these past events have taken on his soul. Can he ever be redeemed? Is he a host? These are questions left unanswered, but it’s a testament to Harris’ performance that we are completely and utterly transfixed by what this dude is up to.

Final Thoughts

After a trio of episodes that felt more streamlined story-wise, “The Mother of Exiles” was admittedly chock-full of exposition and reveals. But despite not being able to just hone in on one or two characters, I think this episode succeeded in delivering on character, story and twist. And while I initially felt a little bummed out by the twist—I want there to be room for more characters from the past seasons instead of just Dolores clones everywhere—digging a bit deeper, it sounds like Dolores’ ultimate plan includes bringing everyone back.

And I felt the William stuff was handled really well. While you’re certainly supposed to want to know what in the world is really going on with that character, it’s a blast to watch Harris just really go there, and that final scene between William and Dolores brought me great joy. Neither character would be where they are today without the other, and I’m fascinated to see where this path leads. When this series does finally come to an end, it’s gonna come back around to William and Dolores isn’t it?