IN REVIEW: WESTWORLD (S3-EP4) – The Mother of Exiles

Synopsis: The truth doesn’t always set you free.

The Story

This week we get to see how William/The Man in Blacks storyline is progressing and it’s not good due in part to the fact that he is being haunted by his daughter who he mistaken for a host in the last series. Things pick up however when Charlotte Hale comes calling to pull him together so he can help her save Delos from being taken over by Engerraund Serac. Little does William know that she is the mole that has secretly been working for Serac or is she?

Meanwhile, Serac has gotten control of Maeve and has laid everything out for her in terms of what has been happening and what his role is in proceedings. In short, Serac thinks of himself as uniquely placed to save humanity from itself, but is likely just as deluded with delusions of granger than most the players in this game are. Serac tasks Maeve with finding Deloras and tells her that Deloras is the key to her being able to reunite with her daughter. This information is enough to motivate Maeve into tracking the other hosts.

Elsewhere, Deloras and Caleb execute the next stage of her plans, which involves a little bit of identity theft and a fair bit of roleplay to enable them to steal an absolute fortune from Liam Dempsey, but Bernard is not too far behind them.

The Acting

Ed Harris absolutely rocks it as The Man in Black who also happens to be William who owns the majority shares in Delos. The scenes at the start of the episode where he is having an absolute psychological meltdown were amazingly acted. It was also quite cool how a visit from Charlotte Hale snapped him out of it. Or at the very least seemed too.

Also putting in a solid performance was Thandie Newton and Vincent Cassel as Maeve and Sarec respectively. I loved the scenes where Sarec was laying everything out for Maeve and kind of preparing her for her mission. The interactions between the two characters were like a game of psychological chess as Maeve seemed to have to work a little to figure Sarec out.

Overall

A really strong episode with a few twists and a really big reveal as to the identity or the identities of the hosts contained within the pearls that Deloras has been planting into duplicates of people.

My one big concern now is that quite a few reveals have been made and we are only 4 episodes into an 8 episode season. Narratively speaking this season seems to be moving at a much more rapid pace than the previous two series. Which has me wondering where things are likely to go. That said. I also cannot wait to find out.