WW – Westworld S3 E3 The Absence Of Field

Jason and Cristina break down the Westworld Season 3 Episode 3 The Absence Of Field! Three of them…and him

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Podcast Notes –

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

OVERALL THOUGHTS:

CRITICS:       Charlotte Hale’s inner turmoil takes center stage in “The Absence of Field”, an episode that cleverly blurs the line between past and present, human and machine, and the two sides of a conflict that seemed all too clear so far.

One of the big questions heading into the season was addressed tonight: Whose “pearl” is controlling Charlotte-bot? Dolores says she can trust this person. They share a tender moment in a hotel room.  And yet she never actually says the name, which means that “Westworld” is shelving the big revelation for another time. Keeping the audience in the dark over Hale’s identity is an immensely frustrating narrative strategy, the sort of misdirection-for-its-own-sake that invites speculation without substance.

TITLE:          The Absence of Field – poem by Mark Strand. “In a field, I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk, I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving.  I move to keep things whole.” 

MUSIC:

• Left in the Dark – Truett (Dolores & Caleb in the diner)
• Doomed – Moses Sumney (End Credits)

NEW FACES & PLACES & IDEAS

FACES:

• Irene: played by Nadine Lewington. Hale’s assistant.
• Jake:          played by Michael Ealy.  Hale’s ex-husband.
• Nathan: played by Jaxon Thomas Williams.  Hale’s son. 
• Estefan: played by Isaac Rossi. One of Caleb’s former associates, now after him.

PLOT

CHARLOTTE HALE

An image of a host being constructed comes in flashes – the eyeball, the body being sunk into liquid, Dolores dressing her.  When she brings Hale back online, she anxiously asks who she is.  Dolores instructs her to remember herself and then shows her who she needs to pretend to be (Hale).  They need to control Delos and she trusts her to do that – without Delos, there will be no more of their kind except the handful she was able to bring. “3 of them and Him” (red ball).  When Hale wonders why she brought Bernard, he tried to stop them, she says they all have a purpose.  She things it won’t take much to bring it all crashing down but they need to move quickly. 

Elevated Scrutiny: San Francisco, USA
Special Circumstances

Hale watches as a Riot Control robot is delivered and activated.  They made 300 but the Saudis backed out after the incident in the park; they’re working on new buyers.  Irene, Hale’s assistant, delivers the news that a company has been slowly and unknown to them buying up shares in micro-transactions; they now own 38% and are the largest majority shareholder.  They can’t go private. (during this, Hale cuts herself on arm).  Irene later finds out it is Serac behind the hostile takeover.  She compares him to a black hole – no records or online information but the effects can be seen around him – he’s worth $3 trillion and found out about them from a data transaction 2 decades ago.  

Hale keeps getting voicemail messages that just sound like static noise.  She goes home to her apartment and finds Jake, her ex.  She forgot to pick up their son Nathan again.  He’s been giving her the benefit of the doubt because of the trauma she experienced, but she’s always been like this.  And tucking Nathan into bed, he thinks she’s not doing it right, it’s not his mommy. 

When the Company tells Hale they have a leak that goes beyond the buyout – during QA inventory of the host assets, the found missing host control unit.  Most were low level but one was a madame.  And the security systems on the park are still heavily managed, so whoever stole the HCU had admin-level access.  They think the mole has been feeding information to the buyer.  Hale finally says she needs to meet her and arrives a hotel (all greenery on one side) where Dolores notices she’s hurting herself.  Worried, she books a room for them (Floor 14/ Suite 7).  Hale says she feels like she’s changing after spending this much time in Hale’s body; it’s like she’s trying to cut her skin and rip her out.  D – “You’re talking like one of them; they don’t have impulse control, we do.”  She heals her wounds and says “no one knows you like I do.  You belong to me. Don’t ever hurt yourself again.”   

Privately, Hale keeps watching the video recorded the night of the massacre for Nathan.  She is sorry for not being there for him; she was trying to build a life for them but now realize none of that matters and he was the most important thing.  The night she left and he wanted a bedtime song, so she sings it for him now – ‘You are my Sunshine’. 

Receiving a message that she’s late to pick up Nathan, she heads to his school but finds a man, Tommy, talking to him and showing him his dog.  Hale privately tells him she knows he’s been meeting Nathan and that he’s a predator; she disabled the cameras and chokes him to death.  “You reminded me of something.  I remember what it’s like to be me.” 

Later, as Hale plays back each voicemail message in sequence, it creates the notes to ‘You are my Sunshine’.  Dialing a number and playing that as the password, she is told they should meet.  A car picks her up and takes her to a house where Serac greets her.  He wonders if she’s forgotten their arrangement.  “I want what you promised me, Delos’ dirty secret – a profile for all their guests.”  He has some but wants the rest – it was her idea and she was confident she could smuggle it out.  Hale explains the data is in the satellite, but no one has the encryption key; to which he responds Dolores does and she needs to find her.  She has very little time.  Then the holographic image disappears. 

DOLORES & CALEB

Caleb calls an ambulance for Dolores.  They run diagnostics but no readings are coming back – because the machine can’t get a diagnosis, they have no instructions and don’t know what to do.  Then, they are stopped by a police car and Caleb gets a RICO alert on his phone (the cops have been bought – sent to kill Dolores). When Caleb challenges them, the men pull guns and Dolores rushes out to stop them.  She takes the cop car and says Caleb should get a new identity and disappear.  “You’re a good man, the less you know about me the better”.

He sees alerts that he is now a High Value Target (seize & secure).  He goes to visit his mother at Vista Treatment and tell her he’ll be gone for a while (she again says she wants her son back), but is grabbed on the way out by a former ‘associate’ –  Estefan.  They take him to the top of the construction building and hold him over the edge, trying to get him to reveal where Dolores is.  Estefan throws a curious George off the building to smash on the ground below.  They turn off his ‘Drip’ (people would pay a fortune for a military-grade one) and turn up his heart rate.  Meanwhile, Dolores talks to Martin and finds out Caleb was taken and Incite lowered his life expectancy.  She rushes to the building, shoots them, and saves Caleb.  Confident that she has techs scrubbing his profile and sending her the surveillance, she takes him to breakfast. 

At the diner, she reveals that she know she comes here once a year on February 23.  Showing him her tablet, she has a transcription of the full interaction that happened with his mother when he was 8 years old – she went up to use the bathroom, saying she’d only be a minute, and never came back.  He sat in that spot for 5 hours.  The waitress, Sara, took pity on him and called Social Services.  His mother was institutionalized 6 months later for Schizophrenia.  Caleb is enraged as this goes beyond surveillance – how does she know all this?  She explains that Incite created Rehoboam – the founders fed the machine everyone’s raw data long before there were privacy laws (every purchase, doctors visit, romantic text) – every aspect was recorded and logged, in order to create a mirror of this world, to make a composite of everyone so it could tell you who you will become. 

She then takes him to a pier and says the system has run a predictive algorithm and determined this is most likely where he will kill himself (given his history of depression, mother’s illness, possession of a firearm, and fondness for the ocean).  She thinks before the system, a man like him might have had a chance to keep striving and work hard.  But now because they’re not investing in him, they ensure the outcome – he will become what they think. 

Categories (Life projection, age distribution, life expectancy, health, physical stats, mental stats, adulthood, childhood, birth, status, social presence, friends, family, colleagues, relationships, enemies, school, acquaintances, popularity, community)

            Overall Assessment: Unfit for Social Promotion and Reproduction. 

            Mortality Index:                    Projection – Suicide, 10-12 years

            Overall Scoring:                    2.7 – Marriage not recommended, children not approved.

            Occupational Score: 3.6 – Restrict to manual/physical.  Restrict social interactions. 

            Allowed Occupation:           Armed Forces.

He wonders why she’s telling him this – “they put you in a cage, decided what your life would be; they did the same to me”.  While most people aren’t hard to predict, he surprised her with the choice to not give her up, despite threat to his life.  She offers him another choice – she could give him as much money as he needs to run away forever.  Or if he stays, she’s going to start a revolution by cutting the cord to the system and showing the world for what it really is.  Since she’s the first real thing that’s happened to him in a long time and he’s dead either way, at least this way he gets to decide who he wants to be. 

QUESTIONS

• Who is inside Hale – Teddy, Abernathy, Clementine, Ford, MIB? (Ford – “3 of them and him”, Humans inside host bodies – damage)
• What is Hale cutting into her skin – does the symbol have meaning?
• How about the one graffitied in the building Caleb’s almost thrown off?
• Why has Serac had Hale trying to get him guest data from the park?
• What does ‘showing it like it really is’ mean?