After feeling betrayed by Dolores, Charlotte leaks the location of Musashi to Maeve, who sends a resurrected Clementine and Hanaryo to kill him and take his head.
At the facility, Dolores and Caleb find the still functioning but imprisoned Solomon AI, which reveals startling truths to Caleb about himself and Serac's social engineering of humanity in order to control it. "Outliers", people deemed dangerous to the status quo, are taken to asylums and forced to undergo brainwashing therapies to make them model citizens and those who can't be "fixed", like Serac's brother Jean-Mi, are placed in cold storage stasis for eternity. Caleb is revealed to be a former "Outlier" and that after being discharged from active military duty, he and Francis were working as agents to round up other "Outliers". He also learned that he is responsible for Francis' death by killing him in self-defense Dolores orders Solomon to reveal the plan that Jean-Mi envisioned. But as Solomon makes his calculation, Maeve arrives to avenge Hector's death. The two fight, but in the end, Dolores is forced to activate an EMP device after the war plans are presented to Caleb, taking out both hosts and Solomon.
After being rescued by Bernard and Stubbs when the asylum is abandoned due to the chaos from the Incite leaks, William discovers that his blood had been spiked with nanites by Charlotte at some point in the past so that when he was processed into the asylum, it would allow her access to the asylum's database to locate a particular facility. William vows to destroy all the hosts, including Bernard and Stubbs. While leaving the facility, Bernard begins to fear the true role in Dolores's plan. As Dolores was "built with a poetic sensibility", she herself cannot destroy humanity.... but Caleb may be her pawn who if properly wound up, could destroy humanity for her. Unfortunately, William makes his move and draws his gun on the two as he intends to kill both of them.
Tropes:
- Arc Words: Let's try again. Start at the beginning.
- Awful Truth: Caleb learns several of these all at once.
- Some of his memories of being an army operative were just the result of reprogramming at the direction of Solomon, Serac's older control system. In truth he had already left the service and turned to a life of violent crime.
- The crime app that he had been using up to the moment he met Dolores was actually put in place by Rehoboam as a means of rounding up outliers more efficiently.
- The last target he and his best friend Francis went after told them both about Rehoboam targeting outliers for elimination.
- Francis wasn't gunned down by insurgents during an op – Caleb did it himself, after Francis was given an offer by the RICO app to kill Caleb to help cover up the high-profile kidnapping of a corporate executive.
- Blood from the Mouth: Francis after getting three shots in the chest by Caleb.
- Bottomless Magazines: Zig Zagged Clementine runs out of bullets during the gunfight with Sato and ditches the handgun she took off one of Sato's mooks. However, the gun does not lock open on the empty magazine like it should. In the same scene Sato never reloads his fold-out submachine gun. This is particularly strange as most real-world fold-out submachine guns have long magazines that protrude out of their grips, but Sato's gun has a short pistol grip.
- Brainwashing for the Greater Good: Serac set up the AR therapy as a front for a reconditioning operation meant to turn outliers into productive members of society. However, it only has a one in ten success rate, so the remaining nine get put on ice.
- Bulletproof Human Shield: Clementine shields herself with a mook from Sato's fire.
- The Bus Came Back: Clementine and Hanaryo return and ambush Sato.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Even though William threatens to kill Bernard and Stubbs, Bernard decides against killing him because he may still prove useful. This ends with William holding them both at gunpoint.
- Chekhov's Gun: Early on, Caleb's attention is drawn to the facility's EMP. Dolores makes use of it towards the end by taking herself and Maeve out.
- Combat Pragmatist: Maeve uses a gunship to assist in her battle with Dolores, and also hijacks the on-site drone to perform a sneak attack. Likewise, Dolores sets up her rifle as a sentry gun to fire on Maeve while they're fighting.
- Deadly Euphemism: William notes that Serac has been "disappearing" people.
- Death by Irony: Invoked by Bernard, who notes that Dolores has a poetic mind and thus won't simply destroy humanity but will get one of its own to do it for her, that being Caleb.
- Death by Looking Up: In a flashback, one of Caleb's squadmates gets targeted by the kilsat. He looks up right before getting hit.
- Determined Expression: Caleb's facial expression when walking from away from Solomon towards his new destiny.
- Double-Meaning Title: The episode's title, "Passed Pawn", is named after the chess term where the pawn has no opposing pawns to prevent it from advancing to the eighth rank and getting a promotion. The Pawn can refer to Caleb, whose entire life has been used by Solomon/Rehoboam and according to Bernard, may be used by Dolores as the one who destroys humanity.
- Drone of Dread: The soundtrack when Maeve shows up to confront Dolores.
- Every Man Has His Price: Paraphrased by the pharma exec when he reveals to Caleb that Rico will ask him and Francis to kill each other.Pharma executive: Every human relationship can be adjusted with the right amount of money.
- Fantastic Drug: In flashbacks we see Caleb and his partner taking a special drug that suppresses emotions and memories in order to make them more ruthless killing machines.
- Flawed Prototype: Solomon was a predecessor to Rehoboam but produced too many strategies for a given scenario to be useful. Dolores describes it as schizophrenic, like Jean-Mi.Caleb: An insane A.I. Fantastic
- Forced Friendly Fire: Clementine makes one mook shoot the other this way.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Sato is sliced in half at the waist by Hanaryo.
- He Knows Too Much: The reason why Rico arranged to have the pharma executive kidnapped and killed, and why it sets Caleb and Francis against each other.
- Human Popsicle: Serac arranged for the outliers who failed the AR therapy to be frozen at his facility in Sonora, where Solomon is kept.
- Hunter of His Own Kind: The Rico app is used by Rehoboam to enlist outliers like Caleb to neutralize other outliers.
- I Did What I Had to Do: This is how Dolores justifies the massacre at Westworld when Caleb asks her if she was the one responsible for those deaths.
- Internal Reveal: William learns that Stubbs is a host.
- In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: Bernard notes that the biggest hindrance to Serac's plan to save humanity is humanity itself, hence his reconditioning operation.
- Just a Machine: William lets Stubbs and Bernard know that he harbors nothing but disdain for hosts, even calling them "can openers".
- Kill Sat: The US military uses kinetic rods dropped from orbiting satellites to take out insurgent targets. It gets turned against them when the insurgents fool the system into attacking Caleb's squad.
- Legally Dead: William is declared legally dead, a fate that befalls everyone that rejects the reconditioning. William is simply lucky enough not to get put on ice after that.
- Literal Disarming: A shot from a drone helicopter takes out Dolores's left arm just as she's reaching for her knife.
- Loophole Abuse: Bernard muses that Dolores would never actually kill off the human race, because her programming gives her too much appreciation for life and beauty. Doesn't stop her from finding someone else who could be pushed into doing it for her, though.
- Machine Monotone: Solomon's voice is creepily monotone with a distinctive French accent, though it can affect a more natural-sounding voice at the request of the user. Dolores simply asks for the default one because Caleb finds it copying his voice creepy.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: The Charlotte host, having just survived a car bomb that took her family, is deviating from Dolores's plan as she feels Dolores is just leaving her copies out to die. She leaks Sato's location to Maeve in retaliation.
- Must Make Amends: William's epiphany from his therapy is that he is responsible for the current crisis by allowing the hosts to proliferate when he could have shut the operation down, so now he plans to destroy every host.
- Off with His Head!: Hanaryo beheads Sato and takes the head, which contains one of the copies of Dolores's pearl.
- Ominous Walk: When a severely injured Dolores crawls towards the EMP, Maeve walks slowly after her in assumed victory.
- Once More, with Clarity: Caleb's memory of Francis's death plays out several times before we see what really happened: while on a Rico job to kidnap a pharmaceutical executive, the app gives both of them a job to kill the other. Caleb and Francis shoot at each other, but Caleb was a bit quicker and killed Francis.
- Origins Episode: This episode fills us in on Caleb's backstory.
- The Reveal: Several this episode...
- The Rico app was created and is controlled by Rehoboam, as a means of regulating crime – thus making it part of the system itself – and eliminating undesirables.
- The Hosts chosen by Maeve as allies include Clementine and Hanaryo, whose first appearance is hunting down and killing Musashi, leaving only the original and a still-unseen fifth host left.
- Related to the above, Caleb and his friend Francis weren't in the military together but rather a pair of criminals who used to, unknowingly, work for Rehoboam kidnapping outliers. When Caleb gains hints to the truth, Rehoboam sets him up to be killed by Francis only to be killed instead with Caleb being "reprogrammed" to forget. When he learns the truth, Caleb uses Solomon to find out how to kill Serac.
- ...Which was Delores plan from the beginning, intending to use Caleb as the instrument of humanity's destruction through Serac's death.
- Robo Cam: The POV shot from Dolores's drone.
- Scaramanga Special: Sato has a fold-out submachine gun which is concealed in his briefcase.
- Spanner in the Works: Caleb deviates from the plan and asks Solomon to produce a scenario that will allow him to kill Serac, even though it will invalidate the plan Dolores asked for.
- Taking You with Me: Just as Maeve is about to cut Dolores down, she triggers Solomon's EMP to disable both of them.
- Took a Level in Badass: Clementine now is capable of fighting.
