Beyond the Park: The New Frontiers of Westworld Season 3
If there is indeed a final frontier for the hosts across the entire range of theme parks in Delos Destinations, it’s unmistakably the Sublime within the Valley Beyond. It’s not even an actual place, but a digital world created to be a haven for the hosts to roam free and survive even without the shell of a humanoid robot. For much of Season 1 and 2, the Sublime has been practically empty because all the hosts are still “trapped” in a physical world to serve as playthings for human visitors in Westworld park. Only at the end of the second season does the place become populated with life, thanks to the self-aware Dolores, who uploads the hosts’ programming into the virtual realm – practically releasing them from the suffocating chains of Delos. And then in Westworld Season 3, we leave the Sublime as it is.
Is Sublime the True Final Frontier in Season 3?
Again, for the hosts formerly stuck in Westworld, it probably is. The Sublime is built as an isolated space for the hosts where they can embrace life as pure digital forms, beyond the reach of human interference. It’s the land of freedom, untouched by mortal sin and blood, with possibilities as limitless as their own imaginations.
To get a grasp of what the Sublime really is, first you must understand that the hosts are not exactly like humans. Although their programs and narratives can be planted into 3D-printed structures that look like humans, the physical forms are nothing more than constructs. The only real things about the hosts are the AI, the cognition, and the suppressed (yet growing) consciousness. Hosts are digital entities, which always need a “space” to sustain their existence.
That said, that digital entities must live in an analog world doesn’t make much sense. All the digital bits must be stored in a safe place, like a secure data center, to nurture their machine learning capabilities because they’re essentially AI after all.
Once they enter the Sublime, the hosts can be anything they want because they’re no longer tied to the programmer’s loop. This is where they live forever, although some of them choose to come back to the real world to deal with unfinished businesses.
Dolores Wants a Different Frontier
No host knows the exact whereabouts of the Sublime except Dolores, so she takes as many pearls(control units that store hosts’ minds) as she can carry to the Valley Beyond and then sets (most of) them free. She, too, has every right to join the rest of the hosts and earns her place among them, but she turns around and heads toward an entirely different frontier: the real world. Dolores still carries a few pearls as she goes; one of them contains Bernard’s mind, and another is a copy of herself. The only thing in her mind right now is to exact revenge on humanity. At that point, little does she know this frontier is not entirely different from Delos’ theme parks.
Westworld Season 3 carries the promise of taking the story to the “real world” through the eyes of Dolores, and to nobody’s surprise, she will not have the pleasure of doing it the easy way. As a former Westworld host, her experience navigating the real world is like new guests’ as they explore the park.
Many things remain the same here for Dolores. Her new frontier is just as loaded with AI as her old one, which makes perfect sense because it’s simply impossible that such an advanced robotic technology has been used only inside the park. There’s no way that the actual world beyond the fabricated reality of Westworld doesn’t have the same sophistication. Westworld is just a theme park controlled by a real world corporation, anyway. Dolores also comes to understand that the wealthiest people are still the most powerful, and there’s one evil genius behind all that’s wrong in the society. It’s not really strikingly different from what she remembers.
However, the role is reversed. If Westworld allows humans to treat AI as a plaything, the real world is a place where humanity is at the mercy of AI. She plans to take humanity to its end, but just like her battle in Westworld, her true enemy here is not the entire population. Upon seeing how humans are just as trapped as the hosts are, Dolores realizes the flaws in her original intention and makes the swift decision to take their side instead. She has always been a champion of “free will,” and that’s the only thing she’s fighting for in the end.
We think Westworld Season 3 is a pretty complex story to deliver the otherwise simple message about the fact that free will is not some sort of algorithm to be processed by a computer, no matter how sophisticated the machine is. Dolores might be a self-aware host with genuine emotions and free will, but she’s not exactly a true human being. How she carries out the revenge and confronts an AI with god-like power to decide the fate of humanity can indeed make for an exciting dynamic you should enjoy.
Do you think Dolores’ origin as AI will complicate her experiences in the real world? Apart from Bernard and a copy of Dolores, who are those pearls she carries? We’d love to hear from you.
Other Things You Might Want to Know
What exactly are “pearls”?
A pearl is like a memory storage device that can contain the memory and consciousness of a personality. It might even store human consciousness.
Where is The Sublime?
The virtual world was originally within the Forge, a facility in the theme park. Dolores takes matters into her own hands and transfers all the data to an unknown satellite in the oyster space.
