Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Genre’

“Which genre is this?”

“It’s reality, man.”

Let’s get that absolutely atrocious exchange out of the way now, because it was one of the few bum moments in this week’s episode, the best of the season so far. “Westworld” had spent much of the past few hours teasing out the idea that ordinary people are like hosts in their own world, tethered to a sophisticated algorithm that not only predicts their fate but also goes a long way toward engineering it. The reality, man, is the chaos that inevitably erupts after humans have been freed from their own loops and allowed to make real choices, rather than submit to a numbing illusion of having them.

The third season has been unfolding like a mirror version of the first, only now it’s the humans who are unknowingly locked into an automated and carefully managed routine. And much as with Dolores and other key hosts in the first season, change starts to happen the moment they achieve self-awareness. Companies like Incite have an interest in controlling the masses with the private information they’ve stolen from them, which is the natural endgame to what Delos intended with the Forge. The more a corporation could anticipate — and, better still, dictate — consumer behavior, the more it could manipulate mankind to serve whatever ambitions it might have.

There’s a lot of talk about how the system in 2020 serves the billionaire class; in the future, with men like Engerraund Serac pulling the strings, its serves the trillionaire class.

Yet the situation isn’t so cut and dried. It’s easy enough to decry a system in which people are at the mercy of a deathless algorithm. But this episode begins with a young Serac and his brother witnessing the leveling of Paris and everyone they knew and loved. “Humankind was hurtling toward extinction,” explains Serac, so whether God existed or not, He wasn’t doing enough to keep oblivion at bay. Another omniscient being would have to be created to replace God, and the Serac brothers make it their life’s work to get it done. Serac may be the villain of the season, corrupted by monstrous hubris, but his starting point was the basic survival of the species. That’s an idealistic goal if there ever was one.