This week’s Westworld was, um, a lot. We not only got to find out what Dolores’ plan is, we got to see her enact it. And we got an ambitious visual treat. And we got an origin story for Serac and Rehoboam. By the end of the episode the lines are drawn in the sand: Team Human and Team Host. We know what each side wants, if not necessarily how they plan on getting it. There’s a lot to dig into with “Genre,” which was written by Karrie Crouse and Jonathan Nolan and directed by Anna Foerster, so let’s get into it.

Dolores and Caleb

After grabbing Dempsey (John Gallagher Jr.) at the party in last week’s episode, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) explains she needs him for “access” to the deeper layers of Rehoboam. He pushes back, but Dolores quickly (and easily) intimidates him into being rightfully afraid of what she’ll do if he doesn’t acquiesce. She also explains that Serac (Vincent Cassel) knows Dempsey is trying to outbid him in picking up controlling interest in Delos, and she can help. “Either we find a way to defeat him together, or we all die,” says Dolores.

Dempsey tries to turning Caleb (Aaron Paul) over to his side, but it’s not going to work. Caleb blames Dempsey and Incite for sending him and his friends off to war, for predicting such a poor outcome for his life that he’s labeled expendable. A scuffle ensues, and Dempsey injects Caleb with the drug “genre” that he picked up at the party. And here is where things get interesting from a visual standpoint. The drug allows the user to experience life in different movie genres, like a movie marathon in five acts, so the episode then morphs into a stylish black-and-white film noir, complete with a terrific noir twist on the Westworld score.

Dolores, Caleb, and Dempsey get into a vehicle but are being followed by Serac’s men, and thus a full-on action movie car chase ensues. But the style changes—it begins as film noir, and then Caleb’s drug switches to a war movie genre as “Ride of the Valkyries” plays and the car chase gets some inspiration from Apocalypse Now. And finally, when the chase comes to an end, Caleb switches to the romance genre and looks longingly at Dolores as super soft filters wash over the frame. Jonathan Nolan’s got jokes, y’all!

In the midst of the chaos, Dempsey finally hands over his biometric key, which gives Dolores full access to Rehoboam. They also get some backup in the form of Ash (Lena Waithe) and Giggles (Marshawn Lynch), who Dolores hired on the Rico app. Dolores explains that they have to keep moving, or else Serac can track their location. So they head to the subway and get on a train, but the other half of Dolores’ plan is revealed…

We see that Dolores’ Martin Conells (Tommy Flanagan) host body is escorting Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) through Incite’s headquarters, to Rehoboam itself. We learned last week that the pearl inside Conells is a copy of Dolores, so Dolores is literally two places at once, which is the only way she can access and change anything inside Rehoboam. Conells/Dolores tries to explain to Bernard the purpose of their plan, how every human in the world is on his or her own predestined loop thanks to Rehoboam.

Back in the subway, Caleb switches genres to a musical? I think? Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” plays as the lights in the subway station flicker to the beat of the music. Fun!

On the train, Liam gets into a fight with the others over the ethics of Rehoboam’s algorithm. “There are some things people shouldn’t know about themselves,” he argues, and explains that the world would be chaos if not for this well-oiled algorithm. After some protesting, he relents and shows Ash and Giggles their predicted outcomes. Giggles “will be lucky if he ends up dead in a ditch,” and for Ash, he says the “golden boy brother” of theirs ends up in a bad, bad place. The two are visibly upset by these revelations; predicted outcomes that Rehoboam all but ensures come true.

Then Caleb tells a story about a rat trap they used to make overseas. A bucket filled with water. When filled with very little water, the rats would die quickly. But when filled with enough water to give them hope, they would swim around for hours thinking they could actually get out of the bucket. The metaphor is clear—the world created by Rehoboam gives everyone the false hope of upward mobility, of having a better life than the one they currently lead. But the algorithm also knows full well which individuals will succeed and which will fail. It needs the “failures” to experience false hope in order to continue striving, pushing, and working, despite the fact that their social status will never change. Capitalism!

And thus Dolores’ plan comes into full view. She instructs Conells to send everyone in the world their Rehoboam profiles. Their predicted outcomes, their age and manner of death. As phones begin lighting up all over the subway, tears flow and fights are fought. Things are even worse out on the street. Pure and utter chaos, as everyone has been told the exact rail their life is on. The promotion they’ll never get. The relationship that won’t last. The false hope is removed. The truth laid bare. A somber cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” plays.

In the midst of the chaos, however, Serac’s men have tracked Dolores and her team down. She’s shot multiple times right in front of Caleb but doesn’t even flinch. The nature of her reality now in danger of being revealed, as Caleb is puzzled.

Bernard now sees in full view what Dolores is doing. She’s sending humans all over the world off of their loops, just as she did with the hosts in the park. “The right information at the right time is deadlier than any weapon,” Conells/Dolores explains. But as Conells/Dolores is leading Bernard to “something he should see,” Bernard’s old buddy old pal Stubbs shows up to save the day. Conells/Dolores implores them to leave, to save their own lives as Serac’s people close in. “My role’s finished,” Conells/Dolores says. “You’re the only one we can’t replace.” So Bernard, it seems, still has a major role to play in Dolores’ plan. We just don’t know exactly how he fits in—only that he’s special and can’t be copied, like Dolores. He and Stubbs exit the building.

Conells/Dolores then confronts a hologram of Serac and Martel (Pom Klementieff) in real life, admitting he’s the one who broke into Rehoboam before blowing up the entire floor—and himself and Martel with it. That’s one Dolores copy down.

We shift back over to Dolores, Caleb, Dempsey, Ash, and Giggles, and Caleb has hit the final “genre” it appears: horror. The score for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining plays as the five of them walk along a beach. Dolores says they don’t need Dempsey anymore, and asks what they should do with him. Dempsey begs to be let go, noting that he has nothing left—they took all his money. But in the process he can’t help but continue being a complete and utter dickhead, his “nice guy” persona falling away. He tells Ash they’ll continue to be the petty criminals that they are. “Now you’re going to see that the system isn’t the prison. You are. To all of us. We can’t fix you, and we can’t get rid of you.” It appears that Serac’s genocidal tendencies have trickled down a bit.

Dempsey says Caleb is “the worst of them,” and Caleb starts remembering more of his past—but not the full thing. We get glimpses of a kidnapping of sorts. A black site. Was he a hitman? Special ops? We don’t find out just yet, as his flashback is interrupted by a gunshot. Ash shoots Dempsey at point blank range. “I guess I do have a choice,” Ash says as they walk away.

Caleb tries to save Dempsey while continuing to see flashes of his past, and in Dempsey’s dying worlds he says, “You did it.” He dies before we discover what he meant, or why those words resonated with Caleb. But Dolores seems to have some idea…

Dolores and Caleb reach the airfield she was heading towards, where Serac confronts her via hologram. He says this is his system. That he has full control. To which Dolores replies, “The people who made me, they always thought they had control. They’re all dead now.” She explains that she doesn’t need to fully know Serac, she just needs to know how to beat him. And what really rattles Serac is when she invokes his brother. He insists he’ll do anything to ensure the future of humankind. But Dolores will do the same for her kind, and for the betterment of breaking humans out of their loops.

Caleb tells Dolores that maybe people shouldn’t know their own fate. She says he wanted to know, why shouldn’t they? “Maybe I’m not like other people,” Caleb says. To which Dolores replies, “Neither am I.” They board a plane to parts unknown.

Serac

Serac gets an origin story in this week’s episode, which is showcased as Dolores is accessing Rehoboam and finding out what it knows about its co-creator. Indeed, the episode begins with voiceover of Serac saying, “I suppose I should start by telling you about myself,” acknowledging that everyone who knew anything about him was killed in the nuclear bomb detonation in Paris. The episode opens with that striking flashback from last week’s episode, and Serac explains that he and his brother were playing on the outskirts of Paris during the attack; losing everyone they knew and loved in an instant.

From the onset, Serac describes his brother as unique, crediting him for keeping the two of them alive at such a young age. As footage of chaotic events throughout the globe plays, Serac says humankind was hurtling towards extinction, and they wanted to save the world from itself. “To create order out of chaos.” So they came to the New World “to build a god.” Enter: Rehoboam. It’s at this point that Serac not only reveals why they built Rehoboam in the first place, but reveals that Rehoboam is who he’s talking to, setting the stage for the flashbacks to come as Dolores digs deep inside this A.I. to learn about her enemy.

But Serac says when they initially build Rehoboam, there were problems. Things Rehoboam couldn’t predict. They needed more data, so they teamed up with Liam Dempsey Sr., whose company Incite had the entire world’s data at its disposal. Problems persisted, however, and after creating the “Solomon” version of Rehoboam (symbolism!), 18 months after their partnership was born, Dempsey confronted the brothers and expressed his intention to pull out, despite promising progress. Indeed, the machine had been accurately predicting the past when given the necessary data, so in theory it should work to predict the future. No matter, Dempsey was frustrated, but Serac’s brother had a unique solution. He said they should kill Dempsey. Serac says his brother was uniquely brilliant, “but also uniquely troubled.”

Serac and his brother set about proving to Dempsey that their invention worked, so they showed him the stock market hours into the future. They showed that they can not only predict the outcomes, but push the stock market in either direction by buying or selling vast shares of something. They can quite literally print money, and they do—they show Dempsey that they stole $5 million from corporate accounts and turned it into $100 million in a week.

Dempsey “only saw the money he could make,” but Serac says he and his brother saw the true power of Rehoboam, that it could change the world. They began charting a course for the entire human race. “Humanity’s story had been improvised. Now it was planned years in advance.” Serac explains that for a time, everything was aligned. Their plan was going as expected. Until, well, it “began to fall apart.”

Dempsey became greedy, driving outcomes to increase his wealth, so they locked him out of the system. But the bigger problem, Serac explains, is that in every model there were people whose behavior couldn’t be predicted or controlled. And his brother was one of them. “He didn’t fit the world anymore, and the world didn’t fit him. And it drove him mad.”

Serac is convinced that one day, Rehoboam will all come crashing down if he doesn’t act against these outliers. 10 years after their arrangement was first made, Dempsey discovers a secret facility of Serac’s. It’s a mental institution of sorts, where he’s keeping these “outlier” people and attempting genetic editing experiments to “cure” them—including his brother. So yes, Serac is basically a Nazi. He’s “cleansing” the world of the mentally ill, the “unstable,” the unique so that his predictive algorithm won’t be in danger of falling apart.

He explains that Rehoboam sends these “outliers” to high-risk sectors like war, “a wood-chipper to eat them up and spit them out.” Like Caleb. He defends his position by saying that helping them is better than killing them off, and notes that his brother was using Rehoboam for his own good—as a way of planning to murder Dempsey.

The next scene after this confrontation finds Dempsey riding in a car with Serac, telling him he “can’t geld humankind,” to which Serac replies, “Somewhere in this group is an agitator who will destroy the world.” He intends to break society’s own loop of repeating history by removing these outliers altogether, and letting Rehoboam run the entire world smoothly. This is a bridge too far for Dempsey, who wants out. He says he’ll tell everyone about Serac’s plan.

But Serac says he looked into every scenario in which Dempsey informs the public about Serac’s trials, and in each one it led to human extinction. This, he says, is why his brother wanted to kill Dempsey. But Dempsey is undeterred, noting that he looked into the future as well and knows that Serac won’t stop him.

Oh but there’s a twist. Serac explains that “there are little white spaces” in Rehoboam’s algorithm. “Rare moments when randomness interacts with your life to create a truly free space. Where you can make a choice. A bubble of agency.” It’s now that we see Serac has taken Dempsey to a plane crash—Dempsey’s plane. Serac then murders Dempsey by bashing his head on the wreckage, dragging him into the fire to let him burn. Rehoboam didn’t predict this outcome, but Serac made it so.

In the present day, Serac is on a plane when he learns that Dolores was looking for his files inside Rehoboam. He knows she knows the full truth about him. He gets frustrated watching Dolores enact her plan, and after a final confrontation where the two enemies dig their heels in on Team Humans and Team Hosts, Serac’s watch that keeps an eye on how closely Rehoboam is predicting outcomes is going haywire. It’s shifting entirely out of whack. The loops are broken. The world is chaos. For once, he now seems unhinged.

Episode MVP: Composer Ramin Djawadi has previously had an opportunity to play around with the music of Westworld when delving into the Shogun World and The Raj parks, but in “Genre” he has to tackle five different feature film genres in the span of a single episode—and he knocks it out of the park. That film noir twist on the score is A++.

Final Thoughts

This episode feels like two episodes’ worth of story stuffed into one, and I’m not quite sure it all gels. There’s a lot going on, not just from a narrative standpoint but also from a thematic one. And the added “genre” twist, while funny, feels like another detour taking away from more interesting character stuff. Westworld is usually at its best when it can focus on one or two characters at a time, but in trying to tackle Dolores’ plan and Serac’s origin story and Caleb’s past all at once, “Genre” isn’t all that fulfilling on a base character level. There are definitely good ideas in here, but I think the show might have benefitted from devoting an entire episode to Serac and his backstory, rather than trying to have it work in tandem with Dolores’ present day plans.

But “Genre” also poses some genuinely fascinating questions as it relates to Rehoboam. Serac is convinced that if he doesn’t fix these “outliers,” humanity is doomed. But he’s also alluded previously to the fact that he’s been waiting for Dolores and her kind to break out of Westworld, insinuating that Rehoboam must have predicted this particular development. Remember, Charlotte Hale is the one who pitched Serac on stealing data from the park. How does The Rise of the Hosts factor into his overall plan? Are they outliers similar to the ones he’s trying to “edit” out of humanity, or are they an entirely different kind of stitch in Rehoboam’s side? What does Serac want with the Delos data from their secret project? Questions that will likely be answered in the coming weeks, but again this episode had so much ground to cover it felt conspicuous to leave them out.