Summary: Caleb restores Dolores to a new body. Caleb takes the drive and goes to Incite to destroy Rehoboam. Dolores is separated from him by Charlotte and Maeve and she is defeated and taken back to Serac. Caleb gets to Rehoboam but Maeve stops him from inserting the drive. Maeve discovers that Serac is only a puppet and is operating purely under Rehoboam's control. Serac destroys the drive and deletes Dolores' memories, but this causes Maeve to enter a world with just her and Dolores and they finally come to terms with each other. It's revealed that Dolores' memories being injected into Rehoboam gave Caleb control over it. Caleb orders it to delete itself and Serac is horrified. Meanwhile, Bernard and Stubbs escape from William. Stubbs is injured so Bernard tries to help him. He discovers that the key to the host's world is in his head. Bernard enters the world to learn how to save humanity. Meanwhile William tries to hunt down the hosts and finds Charlotte in a facility. Charlotte reveals a host version of William who then kills the real William.
The Good: My praise remains the same as it has been all season. The show is pretty. It's well acted. On paper, there are some good scenes and some fun action sequences. I did enjoy the scenes with Dolores and Maeve speaking about their views and finally understanding each other, as well as Serac panicking once he realizes that he lost. The Bad: But what has this show become? This once fascinating show is now just your everyday dumb sci fi drama with mindless action, boring characters, a lack of any clear storytelling and a plot that is so needlessly convoluted that I can't even say that I ever fully understood what was going on, and I certainly did not care enough to try to figure it out. This season was executed horrifically bad, and now that I know what the overall story arc was, it's completely clear to me how badly this show dropped the ball on what should have been a pretty easy story to convey. Instead, everything was made needlessly complex and confusing. The exposition in this show is terrible. None of these plots are ever convincingly explained, and so I'm always left confused as to what a lot of the characters are doing and what the point is. Looking back on the season, I now realize that so many plot threads were completely meaningless and unnecessary. I can't tell you how many unnecessary subplots there were of characters trying to find some meaningless and uninteresting piece of information from a powerful company. It's impossible for the viewers to care about any of these plots, and it's made even worse by the fact that we don't even know why the characters should care about these pieces of information either. This leads me to my next point. The character motivations were horrendous in this episode. I was never entirely sure what any character wanted or what they were doing to further their own interests. The show had 7 whole episodes to make me understand these characters, and instead all of that time was wasted on dumb action, and I was left completely disconnected from everyone. This episode was the big climax where (almost) every character arc came together for one big confrontation. But it all meant nothing because I knew so little about all of these characters. No moments had any actual meaning. The show is also having something of an identity crisis and it's impossible to take it seriously anymore. This episode tried so hard to be profound with its themes and characters and it fell flat on its face. I can't care about the themes because the characters are so badly written. Furthermore, none of the themes of free will or technology were even explained in any meaningful way. In the end, this season offers such a black-and-white perspective on its themes and nothing is explored well at all. An additional problem is that I can't even take the show seriously when it's trying to do this. One second we get these attempted emotional scenes, and I'm left feeling confused because these emotional scenes are packed between countless sequences of dumb, poorly choreographed action that contains no tension. It feels like two completely different shows, and none of them are executed well. Now that I've expressed in general terms what I hated about this episode, and this season by extension, it's time for me to start getting into the details. However, I don't think I will go very in depth here. I'm sure there are other people out there that are more willing to pick apart the inconsistencies in the writing than I am. Besides, I'm nowhere near invested enough to pay complete attention to every little detail in this show and criticize it. It has been this same way throughout the season, and by this point I just don't want to waste any more of my time on this show. So many moments in this episode fell completely flat because they were either awkward or gave me absolutely no reason to care about what was happening. These moments include William choosing to save the world, Bernard meeting with Arnold's widow (why, I have no idea), Caleb and Maeve joining forces after succeeding, and Ash and Giggles returning to help Caleb get to Incite. None of these moments got any sort of emotional reaction from me. I was just sitting there bored. This episode made the massive action sequence from the last episode completely meaningless. The fight between Dolroes and Maeve had zero consequences. Both of them are fine, and I'm not even sure how they were able to come back so easily. Dolores was given a strange body that contradicts everything we knew about hosts beforehand while Maeve just regenerated offscreen apparently. Furthermore, Caleb's characetr journey in the last episode was made completely pointless. I thought it was leading to him taking independence and becoming the central focus of this finale. Instead, he never gets his chance to shine and never makes any meaningful decision at all. The focus is still squarely on Dolores and Maeve and Caleb feels like a spectator to everything, the same way he has been in every episode before this. At least before I thought he was being built up for something. But now it's painfully clear that the writers had no plans for him. He's not important at all and I feel like the time spent with him was a complete waste since there was no pay off in the end. Charlotte's story didn't deliver either. She is so difficult to care about because she is just another Dolores. I know I can't expect any good character development for her because of that (Dolores and Maeve have become so, so bland) and so I'm not at all invested in her getting revenge for her family. Moreso, we aren't even given any compelling reasons for Charlotte to want to go after Dolores so definitively. After all, didn't Serac kill her family anyways? We aren't given any insight into her motivation and her decision-making. She just makes a choice offscreen and we're forced to go along with it. Very poor writing. Then there are Bernard and Stubbs who were completely useless the whole season. In the end they did nothing. Literally. I can't name one single scene where they were important in the season. Both characters are 2-dimensional and boring and they ended up aimlessly wandering around the entire season which doesn't make for good television at all. The reveal that Bernard had the key all along is meaningless and it does nothing to interest me. The post-credits scene is also pretty dull and it didn't get me excited for season 4 at all. Serac's character was completely decimated this episode. I've tried to ignore it but this show seems to really love to paint male characters as weak, pathetic and corrupt, only ever giving "positive" qualities to the females. Serac was the one exception to this trend and because of that, he seemed like an interesting villain. All of that was thrown away these past few episodes with some horrendous writing. Serac became more and more incompetent as the season went on and he fell for every single generic villain cliché you can think of. It was so disappointing to see. And what's the big pay-off for him? It turns out that he was weak, pathetic and corrupt as well, just a puppet for Rehoboam. And just like that, a compelling villain was completely destroyed and lost all credibility. Now he's just another weak and pathetic male character to get put in his place by the strong women of the show. It's a worrying trend and one that is so frustrating to watch because the writers seem to care much more about having strong women put weak men in their place than telling an actual story. I'm extremely disappointed that Serac's credibility as a character was sacrificed for this stupid reveal. He was the one thing that I was still invested in, and it led to absolutely no pay off whatsoever. Lastly, we get to William who ended up being completely pointless this season. His character arc? Meaningless. It all went nowhere. I thought we were going to sit through a redemption arc of sorts that led to William returning to the evil, villainous man that we saw back in season 1. I was expecting the big pay off to come in this season finale. Instead William just dies and is replaced by a host. What? That's such a poor pay off for the character work we sat through in this season, and it makes every scene spent with the character feel like a total waste of time. What's worse is that this all happens in a post-credits scene! Was William really not worth giving an actual storyline to this season? This character was once one of the show's best, and now he has been delegated to being a waste of time that has no impact on the story at all. The handling of this character was awful and it's exemplary of how poor everything has been handled this season. The Unknown: I have a few questions, but I really don't care to learn any of these answers. Is Dolores actually dead? How about Rehoboam? What's next for Maeve, Caleb and Serac? What has Bernard learned from his time with the hosts? Will he actually do something next season? What is Charlotte's plan? What will she do with William? Best Moment: Probably Serac begging for Rehoboam to respond after Caleb deleted it. It's the only moment in the whole episode that stood out to me. Character of the Episode: Dolores. Conclusion: This was a bad finale to a bad season. Usually by the end of the season, the story becomes stronger because then everything comes together and we can realize what all the storylines had been building towards. This finale did the opposite. It made me realize just how horrible and wasteful the earlier episodes of this season were. This episode didn't give me anything worthwhile and it makes me feel like I wasted my time watching this season. It should go without saying that I hated this season. Looking back on the previous episodes, I honestly believe that my scores are too inflated now that I know that there was no pay off down the line. The season was a mess and it failed miserably at establishing any kind of character arcs or exploring any meaningful themes. Add on a needlessly convoluted plot and countless dumb action scenes and it's the recipe for a horrible season of television. This show doesn't even feel like itself anymore. It's just a pale imitation of every dumb sci fi TV show out there. To think, that this show used to be about robots in a western-styled theme park. What happened to this TV show that showed such promise back in 2016? In conclusion, this season was bad and I'm unhappy that I had to sit through it. I am 100% done with this show now, and I will not be watching or reviewing season 4. Score: 40
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
March 2024
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