Hale orders the Man in Black to hunt down the outliers after she believes that they "infected" the hosts in questioning the nature of their own reality. Meanwhile, Christina begins to learn the truth about herself and the world she lives in.
Tropes:
- Ambiguously Gay: Christina sends Emmett home to "his partner". While the word technically applies to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples, it's more often used by the former.
- And You Thought It Was a Game: Christina discovers to her horror that the "NPCs" she's been writing for are actually humans. The "game" is the world itself and nearly all of humanity its characters, entertainment for Hale's new generation of Hosts; who can do as they please with no repercussions.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The homeless man, who has been rambling about the tower since the first episode, is an outlier. He causes Hope, one of the hosts sent to kill him, to go into a breakdown by asking her if the flower he's holding is real.
- Compelling Voice: Aside from just thinking of new stories, Christina is able to narrate a new story for her boss on the fly when he gets too pushy.
- Control Freak: Hale starts to become more controlling and impatient when she learns that the outliers cause many of her hosts to break down into an existential crisis after one of the hosts kills herself. She demands the Man in Black to continue the job to hunt down outliers. Unfortunately for her, even the Man in Black is questioning his own identity.
- Did You Just Have Sex?: Christina's flatmate notices her good mood the day after her date with Teddy and assumes this trope.
- Dominance Through Furniture: Hale forces three people to group together as a makeshift chair while she's talking to William.
- Double-Meaning Title: "Zhuangzi" is the name for a 3rd Century B.C. Chinese text with various themes: one of them is that humans can achieve happiness through spontaneity and rejecting imposed order. What makes an outlier an outlier is realizing that their lives are being controlled and rejecting it. Another theme is achieving enlightenment by shedding the human world just as Hale is attempting through offering Hosts the Brain Uploading process called Transcendence.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: When Hale talks about the Olympian gods, she posits that their interactions with humanity was simply out of boredom while humans thought it made them special. The answer is neither: the Olympians are the most infamous case of Jerkass Gods in mythology who did things because they were gods and thought that gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted while being petty and prone to Disproportionate or Misplaced Retribution.
- Fingore: The street piano player's hands are raw and bleeding from Hale ordering him to play for so long.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: Any of Hale's Hosts who interacts with a human outlier, discover something about themselves that causes them go into an existential crisis and mental breakdown. So far, 38 Hosts have suffered the experience and Host!William is next.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Whenever a human becomes an outlier, Hale starts a game wherein hosts race to see who can eliminate the outlier first. Unfortunately for Hale, this has also resulted in her hosts malfunctioning from coming into contact with the outliers.
- Just in Time: The leader of the resistance group shoots the Man in Black just as the latter is about the kill an outlier woman on the top of a building.
- Meaningful Name: Olympiad Entertainment is named for Mount Olympus, the home of the gods in Classical Mythology. Both Charlotte and Christina work out of Olympiad's building, and both have been compared to gods during the episode and wield god-like powers over the world.
- Merciful Minion: Subverted with Hope who is sent after the homeless man. While it seems she is having a change of heart when finding him, she shoots him nonetheless.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In-Universe. As Christina becomes more aware of the truth, her accent becomes more like that of Dolores.
- Perception Filter:
- The tower is invisible to infected humans, who are conditioned to see nothing but empty ocean in its place. Outliers that have broken their programming can see the tower and understand instinctively what it's been doing to them. When Christina starts to realize the truth of her world, she also becomes aware of it.
- More broadly speaking, humans have been conditioned to obey Hosts without question and recognize them as friendly even if they've never met. William introduces himself to a couple who treat him like an old friend, and even when he directly questions their reality, they can't bring themselves to resist the compulsion. They're left sitting in the restaurant for hours making forced small talk because he orders them to stay and they have to obey.
- The Reveal:
- Christina's storyline:
- Christina is indeed writing narratives of the mind-controlled humans, which Teddy describes as having a power of a god. She can also issue commands to other people, such as her boss. And as she learns more of the truth, she begins to see the tower.
- The name of James Marsden's character in this season is confirmed to be Teddy. Whether he is the actual Teddy (who is last seen in the Sublime after Dolores put him there in the Season 2 finale) or someone else is unclear. There's also his knowledge about Christina and her situation which makes his identity ambiguous.
- Hale's world:
- Hale has built and seeded Hosts across human society who are free to do as they please, much like how the Guests treated them in the Delos parks. Hale, however, has grown bored with ruling humanity and believes that their physical forms are limiting and has begun a project called Transcendence which appears to be some form of Brain Uploading. Part of the problem with this is that many of the Hosts aren't interested according to the Host William.
- All of the new Hosts, including the William Host, were created based on Host Hale's code (and by extension that of Dolores).
- Like with Serac, Hale's system isn't 100% perfect, with "outliers" being humans who aren't affected by the signal that she uses to control humanity. She created a "game" where the Hosts hunt them down but this itself has caused issues: several of the Hosts, 38 to be exact, have interacted with the outliers despite the rules against it. They afterwards suffered some form of existential crisis and took their own lives.
- The William Host himself appears to be suffering from this "infection" and a talk with the original, who's still alive, seems to hint that he and the others have Grown Beyond Their Programming. While it's not stated, it's implied that part of that evolution is having a Heel Realization over enslaving humanity and crossing the Despair Event Horizon as a result.
- Christina's storyline:
- Rewriting Reality: Christina learns she has the ability to affect the narratives of other humans simply by willing it, in effect rewriting their stories.
- Victory Is Boring: While she got what she wanted, Hale feels bored and unsatisfied, treating her human subjects like toys.
- Wham Line: In the ending, Christina asks Teddy who built this world, and Teddy answers, "You did".
