Westworld Season 3 Recap: Who's Alive, Who's Dead, Who's a Robot and What Happened?

It’s the year 2022. You’ve just watched the trailer western world Season 4, which premieres this Sunday on HBO Max. You feel a strange mix of emotions: anticipation, curiosity, but also frustration. You search your mind, retracing your thoughts in search of the answer to one question: “Wait, what the hell happened to me western world Season 3?”

There are many twists and turns in the third season of western worldso many in fact it makes the easy task of remembering What happened and if an arduous task happened, not to mention the question of what Yes, really happened versus what didn’t happen. To clear up this confusion, we’ve combed through our memory banks and put together a clear and concise explanation of western world Season 3 as humanly possible. Let’s start broad and dig into the details, shall we?

What the heck happened in Westworld Season 3?

Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy in Westworld Season 3.

western world Season 3 takes place in the year 2053, approximately three months after the events of Season 2. Bernard, Dolores, and a copy of Dolores being kept in an artificial host containing the now-deceased Delos executive Charlotte Hale (more on her later) embodies are the only hosts who managed to escape from Westworld to the real world.

Bernard is in hiding after being framed for the Westworld massacre at the end of season one and on a mission to find Dolores and thwart her apparent plan to eradicate humanity. He goes back to Westworld (which just so happens to be on an island in the South China Sea) in search of allies to help him in his fight against Dolores, particularly Maeve Millay, the former brothel keeper who uses a form of “synthetic” in season 2 Telepathy” which allowed her to command and control other hosts in her vicinity. While searching for Maeve, Bernard finds Ashley Stubbs, Westworld’s former head of security, who turns out to be the host herself. The two find Maeve’s old host body, but find that the pearl of her control unit (see: artificial mind) has been ripped out.

Thandiwe Newton as Maeve Millay with a katana in the Westworld season

Following the events of season two, Maeve’s body was discovered by the henchmen of Engerra and Serac, a reclusive and powerful engineering genius. Thinking she was too dangerous, Serac had her pearl ripped from her artificial body and placed in an artificial simulation within a simulation designed to resemble a Delos theme park designed to resemble WWII Italy. Upon learning this and subsequently exhausting the simulation’s processing power to free herself, Maeve loaded her control unit bead into a robotic body and attempted to escape from Serac’s compound – only to be gunned down by security guards. Maeve is then reanimated in a copy of her original host body, giving Serac a choice: help him track down and stop Delores, or have a kill switch implanted in her body permanently shut her down.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Dolores (and Charlotte-Dolores) wage an asymmetric proxy war against Serac and his greatest creation: Rehoboam, an artificial intelligence secretly ruling the world. Along the way, Dolores meets and recruits Caleb, a disaffected war veteran and fixer, to fight at her side. Caleb and Dolores uncover the truth behind Rehoboam’s manipulation of the human race, leading to mass hysteria and open revolt across the world. Dolores is captured by Serac, who combs through and erases her memories in search of a “key” that would allow him to achieve his ultimate goal of creating a “perfect” world. Dolores is erased in the process, but her sacrifice inspires Maeve to betray Serac and hand over full control of Rehoboam to Caleb, who subsequently orders the AI to self-erase.

What happened to all the other hosts? (e.g. Teddy, Clementine, Akecheta, etc.)

Westworld season 2 forges the valley beyond

Those who haven’t died by the end of Season 2 are all in The Valley Beyond, aka “The Sublime,” the virtual reality created by Westworld creator Robert Ford to give the hosts a choice to let them create their own paradise free from human interference. At the end of Season 3, it is revealed that Dolores placed the “key” to The Sublime in Bernard’s mind when they escaped Westworld to prevent it from falling into Serac’s hands.

what about dr Robert Ford happened?

Ah, he is dead– dead now. Like real this time – the digitized copy of Ford’s consciousness housed in the forge in Westworld was destroyed along with the forge itself at the end of season two. Bernard erased all traces of the code that Ford had left in his mind before he left Westworld.

However, that doesn’t mean he can’t appear in another of those flashbacks the show loves so much. Or who knows, maybe Anthony Hopkins will return as the host, hosting a replicated version of Robert Ford’s mind – it’s really anyone’s guess!

What happened to William, aka The Man in Black?

Ed Harris as William (the Man in Black) in Westworld Season 3.

As Season 3 begins, William, the so-called “Man in Black,” is still alive, but the guilt of accidentally killing his daughter in Season 2 has severely impacted his sanity. Secluded alone in his grand mansion, William demonstrates his inability to separate reality from fiction. Charlotte-Dolores arrives to visit William at his mansion and attempts to get him to return to Delos, using his majority vote to resist a hostile takeover by Engerra and Serac. Realizing that Charlotte-Dolores is actually a copy of Dolores and that the “real” Charlotte Hale is actually dead, William is arrested and placed in a mental institution. After undergoing intense psychological counseling via a virtual reality simulation, Bernard and Stubbs rescue William from the chaos caused by Dolores and Caleb leaking all the predictive models Rehoboam has made of every human on the planet let.

After leaving the institution, encouraged by a new personal mission to destroy all hosts, William wounds Stubbs and escapes Bernard. Some unspecified time later, William storms the Delos branch in Dubai to stop Hosts manufacturing, only to be surprised by Charlotte-Dolores and seemingly killed by a Host version of himself.

Wait, so who or what exactly is Charlotte-Dolores?

Evan Rachel Wood and Tessa Thompson as Delores Abernathy and Charlotte Hale (Charlotte-Delores) in Westworld Season 3.

Charlotte-Dolores (or “Halores”) is a copy that Dolores made of herself at the end of Season 2 in order to successfully smuggle Bernard and herself out of Westworld. After fleeing Westworld, Dolores made several more copies of herself, which proceeded to kill and take on the identities of people who would later become instrumental in her plot to destroy Rehoboam. It is believed that most of these Dolores copies were killed when Serac exacted revenge on her for exposing the truth about Rehoboam’s manipulation of humanity. At the end of Season 3, Charlotte-Dolores is the only remaining copy of Dolores known to have survived.

Charlotte-Dolores fears that she was abandoned by her creator to die, and since her personality and motivation have already diverged dramatically from those of the original Dolores, Charlotte-Dolores unsuccessfully attempts to kill Dolores just before she and Caleb get up are on the way to destroy Rehoboam. After Charlotte-Dolores fails, she takes on a new goal opposite to that of her creator: to destroy all of humanity and allow the hosts to become the dominant species on the planet.

So Engerraund Serac is the villain, right? What exactly did he want?

Vincent Cassel as Engerra and Serac as Westworld Season 3.

Yes, he was the main antagonist of season three. He created Solomon, an artificial intelligence capable of predicting the future, in 2039 and later created his successor, Rehoboam, along with his brother Jean Mi. Serac’s goal in Season 3 was simple: he wanted to save humanity, but believed that humanity too flawed in trusting her to make decisions for herself. With Rehoboam, Serac amassed tremendous wealth and power, making himself the richest person on the planet before wiping his existence from the internet. Approximately 20 years before the events of western world Season 1 sold William Serac valuable human behavior data collected as part of Delos’ immortality project in Westworld, data that Serac would use to refine his process of “reconditioning” humans whose deviant behavior was considered a threat to the ” “Perfect” world as Rehoboam envisioned. But he couldn’t perfect the process until he had the rest of the data – stored in the Forge in Westworld.

That’s what Serac really wanted all season: not only to stop Dolores’ plan to destroy Rehoboam, but also to get the rest of the data that was copied to The Sublime after the destruction of the Forge at the end of Season 2. Serac suspected that Dolores had the key to The Sublime, but she didn’t – Bernard unknowingly had the key all season.

what does it all mean actually mean? What is the state of the world at the end of Westworld Season 3?

Jeffrey Wright as Bernard in Westworld Season 3.

That’s a great question – we don’t know yet! The post-credits scene at the end of Season 3 shows Bernard waking up in the same motel he was last seen trying to mentally re-enter The Sublime. It’s covered in dust and the room is in disarray, suggesting that several months or even years have passed since the events of Season 3 Approved the western world Season 4 takes place seven years after the events of Season 3.

This is what it looks like when you exit the trailer western world Season 4 will take place in and around a futuristic post-Rehoboam New York City, albeit towered over by a strange, ominous skyscraper seemingly held together by a white web-like web and buzzed by invasive robotic bees. Charlotte-Dolores is in full control of Delos making new hosts. Stubbs, Maeve and Caleb are all still alive, as is a mysterious new copy of Dolores in a replica of her original body. The fates of William and Engerra and Serac are still unknown.