Three months after the Westworld park massacre, Dolores has framed Bernard for the massacre forcing him into hiding as she begins her scheme for bringing forth chaos upon humanity. Having assumed a new identity, Dolores has seduced her way into high society as the girlfriend of Liam Dempsey Jr., the owner of Incite; a company that gathers personal data which can be used to guide its clients for a better future. However, her ruse is uncovered and Dolores is set to be killed. However, she kills her assailants and Liam's right-hand man, Martin Cornells, and replaces him with his host copy.
Caleb is a former soldier turned construction worker and petty criminal, who suffers from PTSD from the death of his best friend during combat and his inability to gain employment outside construction and petty crime. While trying to cope with the failure of not getting a new job, he unsubscribes his virtual therapist. Then, he stumbles upon meeting Dolores, who is injured during her fight against Cornells' men.
Meanwhile, Bernard is working at a meat processing plant and obsessively scanning his memory out of fear that Dolores may have seriously tampered with his mind when she restored him to a new body at the end of season two. Eventually, after being forced to kill two coworkers who discover his identity, Bernard heads back to Westworld to find Maeve.
In the post-credit zinger, Maeve awakes in a room with a man bound and gagged and looks outside, to find herself in Nazi-Occupied France in a World War 2 park.
Tropes:
- Backstab Backfire: Dolores lets Gerald kill himself by running through a VR projection of her and into the pool. She even warned him that he will only die if he tries to hurt her.
- Batman Gambit: Dolores knows exactly how Gerald and Martin will act, thanks to the "books" on them stored at the Forge, and sets up traps for them.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Though not formally revealed in this episode, we see the efforts of Rehoboam, an AI that pretty much dictates human life by assigning a role to everyone, stiffling their attempts to improve themselves or their lot in life, while channeling "outliers" (people who are threats to society) into crime via a crime app called "RICO".
- The Bluebeard: Gerald, the Incite businessman who had once visited Westworld to experience rape and feminicide to "get it out of his system" and later, went on to beat his first wife and murder her when she tried to leave him.
- Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In a sense. Dolores is noted to have taken her fake identity from a dead teenager in Kyiv and evidently drained her blood to pass DNA checks.
- Bottomless Magazines: Played straight for a while. Though she does eventually run out, Dolores fires scores of bullets from her pistol.
- Brutal Honesty: Dolores tells Jerry that she won't hurt him if he doesn't try to hurt her... but that he will try to hurt her. She leaves the threat unspecified.
- Call-Back:
- Dolores tells Jerry that she "read his book," implying that she still has access to the data from "The Passenger".
- After getting injured during the shootout, Dolores meets Caleb and collapses into his arms. This is exactly how she and William first meet in "The Stray".
- The scene when Caleb wakes up is very similar to the scene of Dolores waking up in "The Original" which shows that the humans are no different than the hosts when it comes to being on a loop.
- Car Fu: Dolores runs over one of Martin's mooks after stealing one of their cars, and later directs her self-driving bike to run down another mook trying to shoot her.
- Companion Cube: Caleb's friend Francis turns out to be an AI therapist he subscribes to, and he unsubscribes at the end because he isn't real.
- Conspicuous Consumption: One of Liam's yuppie friends mentions that the liquor in his glass costs three times what his father made in a year.
- Cool Bike: Dolores steals a self-driving motorcycle to pursue Liam. The self-driving feature comes in handy later.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Jerry, who covered up murdering his first wife by having it ruled she slipped and hit her head because she got too drunk.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Two guys try to take Bernard in for the bounty on his head. He flips his remote and mops the floor with them.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Dolores steals the identity and biometrics of a dead Ukrainian girl for her alias.
- Double Tap: Dolores takes no chances and double-taps any mook she guns down.
- Dragon-in-Chief: Martin, Incite's head of security, with Liam pretty much a figurehead.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: The first scene at London has Big Ben in the background.
- Exact Words: Dolores calls for her Cool Bike to come to her location and "intercept." It proceeds to do exactly that with one of the bad guys.
- Fall Guy: Delos covered up what really happened in Westworld by blaming it all on Bernard. He is made to look like a rogue employee who sabotaged the system and got many people killed as a result. There is a huge reward out for his capture.
- Feel No Pain: Dolores is shot and barely pays it any mind, only collapsing when her blood loss exceeds her body's ability to compensate.
- Forced Friendly Fire: Dolores makes one mook shoot himself in the head with his own weapon.
- Forced to Watch: Dolores ensures that Jerry will see the visions she has prepared for him by zip-tying his glasses to his head.
- For Inconvenience, Press "1": When Caleb is rejected by the company he applied to, he asks the person who called him if there's anything he could do to make himself more employable. After a long pause, he asks if he's talking to a human and the operator replies with a canned response to make it clear he isn't.
- Funny Background Event: The mook being taken out by the self-driving motorcycle is framed as one of these.
- Honey Trap: Dolores seduced Liam Dempsey to get close to Rehoboam.
- Ironic Echo: Martin's doppelganger delivers a Pre-Mortem One-Liner ("I can't imagine anyone's gonna miss you.") to Martin which echoes what the latter said to Dolores earlier.
- Irony: Caleb discontinues his therapy on the grounds of needing someone "real." The next person he meets is Dolores.
- Justified Criminal: Caleb engages in freelance crime to make ends meet and pay for his mother's treatment. He refuses "personals" (kidnapping, murder, etc.) and sticks to petty crime like robbing ATMs.
- Karmic Death: Jerry killed his first wife by pushing her into the pool and cracking her skull. When Jerry tries to attack Dolores, he is fooled by a VR projection and falls into the pool, cracking his skull.
- Kill and Replace: Dolores kills Martin, Liam's head of security, to replace him with a host duplicate.
- Meaningful Name: Rehoboam was the king of Judah who started a civil war against the newly-formed kingdom of Israel which lasted 17 years.
- No-Sell: Martin tries to give Dolores a lethal overdose, but it has no effect on her because she's a host.
- Obligatory Earpiece Touch: Dolores has to touch her earpiece to engage the intercom which helps the audience to know when she is talking to her A.I.
- Pet the Dog: Despite her hatred towards humans, Dolores spares Jerry's second wife and tells her that she gave her freedom after Jerry kills himself trying to kill her.
- Playing Possum: Dolores fakes being disabled by Martin, allowing him to take her somewhere remote so she can kill his goons then Kill and Replace him.
- Puppet King: Liam Dempsey is just a figurehead to Incite and has no actual access to Rehoboam.
- Right Behind Me: One of the board members of Delos complains about Charlotte being made interim CEO, exclaiming "who died and put her in charge?" just as her host duplicate appears behind him.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Caleb is haunted by the death of his comrade Francis in some conflict.
- Shout-Out: When Jerry wakes up bound with music blaring throughout his house, he tells his home automation system to silence the music, but it responds, "I'm sorry, I can't do that."
- Slaughterhouse Fight: Bernard fights two baddies in the slaughterhouse where he works.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The upbeat "Common People" by Pulp plays over the scene where Dolores takes out a bunch of mooks.
- Split Personality: Whatever is going on with Bernard, this is how it comes across. He has a remote control that allows him to switch his violence off and on, and when it's off, he refers to Bernard as a different person, despite still speaking as him.
- Unflinching Walk: Dolores is just too badass to look back when her motorcycle takes out the mook behind her.
- Wham Shot: Maeve being revealed to be now in Warworld, a previously unseen Delos park recreating World War II.
- Would Hit a Girl: Jerry, who raped Dolores while in Westworld and later beat and murdered his first wife. Also Martin, who proceeds to try to murder Dolores when he finds out her identity is fake (it's implied that he also once raped Dolores on a vacation to Westworld).
- Wrong Assumption: Martin figures out that Dolores is a fraud, but just thinks that she's a spy or something similar. Too late does he learn who she really is.
- You Wake Up in a Room: Maeve wakes up in Warworld sitting in a chair with a guy in the next room that she was evidently beating up.
