Westworld Season 2 Episode 3: Virtù e Fortuna Review

If you would like to read my review of the last episode, click here.

Synopsis: There is beauty in who we are. Shouldn’t we, too, try to survive? (HBO)

Writers: Roberto Patino and Ron Fitzgerald

Director: Richard J. Lewis

Rating: TV-MA

Running Time: 59mins

Airs: Sundays at 9pm on HBO Canada (Canada)/HBO (United States)

Three parks down. Three to go.

After speculation on what the other parks could look like, Westworld not only shows us one but two of the six known parks in The Raj and Shogun World that exist leaving us to speculate as to what the three remaining parks could be.

This episode begins in Park 6, also known as The Raj, which resembles a 20th Century British occupied India where guests come to embark on safaris as well as hunt big game animals that according to their website have long vanished from this world. The hosts, just as in Westworld, are turning on the guests and help prove a theory that the neural mesh network Bernard mentions two episodes ago extends well beyond park borders and is being communicated to all hosts across all parks. It just so happens that in this case some of the hosts from The Raj are Bengal tigers with the intent to kill any guest they can. This small portion of the story is a wonderful payoff for the Bengal tiger that washed up on the Westworld shore as we are finally shown just how that came to pass with not only the tiger making it beyond park borders but also an unnamed female survivor who is quickly picked up by Ghost Nation.

Peter Abernathy seems to be one of the main focuses of this episode as Bernard and Charlotte stumble upon him as he has been picked up Rebus among other guests in order to be traded to the Confederados who seem to have some sort of bounty set for any guests they can acquire. Just as Bernard and Charlotte get possession of Abernathy they are quickly split up with Charlotte managing to escape capture and eventually reconnecting with the Delos security team while Bernard and Peter are sent to Fort Forlorn Hope.

It is at the Fort that Dolores, after a successful merger of Confederados and freed hosts, uses Bernard to figure out what is wrong with her father and it is here that she discovers there is more to his behavior than just a malfunction but he is actually a vessel for a large sum of information that is attempting to leave the park. It is with Charlotte’s help along with Delos’ soldiers that they are able to recapture Abernathy during a major battle which Dolores uses as a distraction to evacuate her hosts while the Confederados take the full weight of Delos’ bullets.

It is during this storyline that Teddy shows his limitations as a “freed host” by not being able to remember Peter Abernathy as Dolores’ father and being unable to carry out Dolores’ order to kill the Confederados leader after the battle was over. My mind cannot help but cut back to that previous scene of Teddy lifelessly floating in the water among a horde of other hosts. We wrap this story with Dolores stating that she intends to go to Sweetwater next because there is something she needs to get. We are left to speculate just what “the weapon” could be and how she intends to use it for one more week.

The episode rewarded our patience in sticking with a fairly lackluster focus on Maeve, Hector, and Sizemore as they continue on a journey to find Maeve’s daughter. Sizemore is becoming more endearing to watch as he interacts more with the hosts. His character growth is working well as a comedic foil underlying Maeve’s struggle to find her lost daughter. As fortune would have it, they stumble across Armistice, who has an incredible looking new arm after her last one was stuck in a door, Lutz and Sylvester, all of whom were assumed dead after last season. Together they continue tracking across the underbelly of the parks thinking that they are still within Westworld’s borders, however, in a wonderfully created last shot are finally within the much awaited Shogunworld.

Outside of some major answers being provided through two other parks being seen to exist, much of this episode was not so much about furthering the character’s narratives but addressing the unspoken reality that the concept of control is something both guests and hosts will never attain no matter how hard they try. As guests attend these various parks, they believe they are in complete control just as Dolores believes that she can bend this world to her will in order to control her life beyond the park. Both are futile gestures with the guest’s inaccuracy with this concept being played out before us while Dolores’ realization is still yet to come. The more and more she delivers these overblown speeches about freedom of thought and action one can’t help but wonder if she, much like Teddy, isn’t truly free but merely playing out the Wyatt narrative to the most extreme degree possible without her fully realizing it. Only time will tell……

PENDING THOUGHTS:

• Bernard needs to do something about those tremors
• Abernathy’s Code said “ONE TIME USE KEY”. Charlotte is going to be pissed.
• Abernathy is carrying James Delos’ consciousness
• The female survivor from The Raj is MiB’s daughter
• “She has a Dragon” – Hector. Best line of the episode
• Glad to see Armistice alive and still using grenades instead of words
• Dolores’ wig in this episode was noticeably bad
• Fort Forlorn Hope is an awful name for a fort. Just sayin’
• What was Sylvester carrying in his arms? Katanas?
• What is Ghost Nation’s narrative?
• Didn’t miss MiB’s story at all this episode.
• There was a man running on fire. Awesome!
• Unsure if the map the female survivor had was for The Raj or combined parks
• Why is Bernard seen as a threat by Clementine & Co.?
• SHOGUN WORLD!

Score: 7/10

Critics w/o Credentials

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