WW – Westworld S3 E2 The Winter Line

Jason and Cristina break down the Westworld Season 3 Episode 2 The Winter Line! Warworld, Corrupted Code, Serac.

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Podcast Notes –

“People put up a lot of walls.  Bring a sledgehammer to your life.” 

OVERALL THOUGHTS:  

CRITICS:  In “The Winter Line”, Westworld‘s muddled timelines start to surface, but by continuing to put character development center stage the episode avoids confusion and takes Maeve and Bernard on an exciting new journey.  

TITLE:The Winter Line was a series of German & Italian military fortifications in Italy, constructed during World War II. The series of 3 lines (Gustav Line (main), Bernhardt Line, Hitler Line) were designed to defend a western section of Italy & ran uninterrupted to Rome. 

FUN FACTS:  

• The aspect ratio changes from when Maeve realizes she is inside of a simulation. This is kept up throughout the episode. 

• There are two complex square roots of root of -1 –  i and –i.  The square root of a any real number cannot be negative (nothing multiplied by itself gives you any negative number) – so you have to use a different unit, I = Imaginary Unit.  Although there is no real number with this property, I can be used to extend the real numbers to what are called complex numbers.  There are two complex square roots of every real number other than zero (which has one double square root). 
  

NEW FACES & PLACES & IDEAS 

FACES: 

• Engarraund Serac: played by Vincent Cassel.  
• Hector:name in Warworld is Ettore – Italian version of Hector.  
• Dave & Dan:technicians
  

“We’re friends with both Dan and David, who are lovely human beings. They have been incredibly supportive and friendly with us and George R.R. Martin as well. George has frequently pitched a crossover episode. When the time came for Stubbs and Bernard to be wandering around the Mesa, we could not resist”. Nolan also said this cameo was an homage to David and Dan’s huge contribution to television with Game of Thrones : “It reinvented television in terms of its ambition, its production values, the sweep of the stories they were telling”.   

IDEAS: 

• LIFI:A mobile wireless technology that uses light rather than audio frequencies to transmit data – supporting by companies driving the adoption for the next generation of wireless that is ready for seamless integration into 5G.  
• Park 4:Medieval World?  
  

PLOT 

Divergence: South China Sea 
6.06 Arc Seconds 
Focal Point: 9 degrees 55N, 115 degrees 32E 

BERNARD – FINDING STUBBS 

On the way to Westworld, the Man with the boat says he remembers these waters when they were red with blood.  He drops Bernard off at the beach, who then walks through the graveyard in ruins, to Sector 17 and Ford’s secret cottage house.  In the backroom, he locates the other Bernard bodies and among them, sees a badly injured Stubbs, realizing – he’s a host.   Stubbs says that the last job his boss gave him was to cover Bernard’s tracks and give him a chance to escape.  After that was done, with no further purpose, Stubbs shot himself, aiming for the charge in his neck, but missed.  Bernard fixes him up the best he can and tells him he came back here because he needs to stop Dolores – she brought him back for some reason; maybe she thought she would go too far and needed a check.  But he can’t do it alone; he needs someone stronger than himself – he came for Maeve.  Stubbs agrees to try help him try to find her.   

They go to the Mesa and down to Cold Storage.  Since they don’t have the money for QA, drone hosts are sparsely patrolling.  In storage, Bernard finds Maeve’s body but the pearl is missing – someone took her.  He needs to find a computer in the mainframe to find Maeve.   

So they make their way up to the Maintenance floor of Park 4 – where parks are shut down but the techs are still working. In one room, techs “Dave & Dan” are building an AI dragon for a startup in Costa Rica (will have to ship it in pieces).  Bernard gets to a tablet and looks up Maeve but it says she’s gone.  He thinks there might be a corruption inside his code (due to the way Dolores rebuilt him) – he’s been running diagnostics with his own equipment but that would be flawed, so he wants to check it.  He starts running a full system scan – ‘search for any corruption in last 100 days’.  During this, guards find them and Stubbs fights them off but he pulls Bernard out of the scan and says they need to go.  

Bernard remembers that in the Library, Dolores focused on a select groups of profiles.  She seemed specifically interested in one man; they’ll start by finding him (Liam).  When Stubbs is ready to leave, saying he’s fulfilled his mission, Bernard changes his core directive – protect Bernard at all costs – and takes him with him.  

MAEVE – WARWORLD 

In Warworld, Maeve watches from her window as soldiers round people up in the streets.  Hector enters the room and she is happy to see that he’s alive and seemingly awake.  He tells her he’s been searching for a way out and thinks he’s found one.  He gives her two pills and says they work fast.  Also, the Allies will be slaughtered unless they can get them the plans he’s stolen.  They make their way to a bridge where a soldier stops them, but Maeve shoves a pill in his eye and they get away.  Hector takes her to a car he’s hidden, saying they’re leaving this world, he drives to an airfield but finds the pilots in the plane have been shot.  He then says, “we must go Isabella” (indicating he isn’t awake and doesn’t know who she is).  Maeve surrenders them to the soldiers outside.  They shoot Hector and as he lays dying, she says –  

 “Don’t you see, we were never escaping to begin with.  None of it matters because none of it is real.”  Maeve then picks up the gun and shoots herself.   

Waking again in Maintenance, Maeve is relieved to see it’s Felix fixing her.  But he doesn’t seem to recognize her.  Feeling helpless, when she is approached by security, she picks up a drill and threatens to end it all.  But she is stopped by a man ordering the others to leave her, this is all part of her new narrative – it’s Lee.   He says he couldn’t leave her in danger and kept putting her in Warworld because it’s near the Forge – he thought she could get to her daughter. They ride to the Forge and Lee brings her downstairs, saying she should just open the system like she did last time.  When Maeve says it wasn’t her, he wonders who operated the LIFI cannons to open the encrypted world?   Maeve realizes it was Dolores.  Lee questions her on whether she ever gave Maeve the coordinates and tells her that she made him a better man.  She realizes this isn’t real and Lee never did make it out. “You didn’t help me because you wanted something in return, you did it simply because it was the right thing to do.  Lee Sizemore died a good man.”   

As Maeve comes to this understanding, the world around her starts to malfunction.  It’s not just Lee, no one is real.  The illusion extends to everything; it’s all a construct. Whoever is doing this is going through a lot of trouble to find out what she knows.  Maeve tries to convince Lee it’s an illusion and they need to find out what the rules are.  She thinks humans are lazy and whoever built this applied the same code inside the simulation as they used to build the simulation itself.  This game is a replica of the world but it is has limited processing powers.  If you ask the hosts to do more than what they’re built to do, you overtax the system.  So what if you add more complexity?   

As Maeve reawakes in Warworld, Lee watches all the hosts in the Command Center argue with each other.  Maeve goes outside and turns Hector in to the Officers, then telling them all to check their pockets.  When they each pull out a copy of the Allies plans, they begin fighting and shooting each other.  Finally, everything freezes – she successfully crippled the simulation.   (*why doesn’t Lee freeze here?) 

Maeve then pulls up cameras from the location they’re actually in the real world.  She finds the right simulation and programs a Maintenance Drone to steal her pearl and escape.   Taking control of the Drone, she runs outside but is quickly found and shot down.     

This time, Maeve wakes in a house she doesn’t recognize, with a painting on the wall (looks like Rehoboam anomaly screen), in a white dress.  Engerraund Serac welcomes her to the real world.  He says they are in the middle of a war and he needs her help to win it.  No one knows that it’s happening yet, or that it’s already been lost.  His business is the future and their work is to create it.  For the first time, history has an author and he helped build a system that was creating a better world.  But then it stopped and if things continue this way, there’s no future for his kind.  He thought he had discovered the reason – the emergence of someone dangerous that the system couldn’t predict.  He thought the threat was Maeve but he was wrong – there’s someone they hadn’t accounted for – Dolores – she escaped one world to wage war on another.  Serac wants Maeve to track Dolores down and kill her.  Maeve replies no one tells her what to do and picks up a knife to stab him.  But before she can, he presses a button that freezes her – he had to take every precaution after all.  Maybe next time they talk, he can persuade her they’re on the same side.   

In this trailer we get a few clues. We see various events happen on the circle—a second Russian civil war, for instance. Then “system initiated” in 2039. Over all of this is the voice of Serac, who calls humanity a “little band of thugs, stumbling from one catastrophe to the next” until now.  

“Our history is like the ravings of a lunatic—chaos,” he says. “But we’ve changed that. For the first time history has an author, a system.” This is when we see “system initiated” and the words “Solomon Build.” 

QUESTIONS 

• Will we get to see Park 4 – Medieval World?  

• Is there a corruption inside Bernard’s code?  If so, what did Dolores do?  
• Was Serac behind having Maeve’s pearl stolen and brought to the system?  How was he able to print her body – how did he know what she looked like?  Is he working with someone from Delos?   
• Will Maeve go after Dolores?