The Hosts Go to War in This Week’s Episode of ‘Westworld’
Stories collide and characters clash, as hosts and guests alike all converge on an unlikely prize on this week’s episode of Westworld, “Virtù e Fortuna”. Warning, there are spoilers for the episode in this recap!
The concepts of virtù and fortuna originate from Niccolò Machiavelli and his writings in The Prince. Basically, they represent the two factors that a ruler faces when governing his country- virtù being the steps and precautions that a leader can take to ensure that the state is maintained effectively, while fortuna represents the more unpredictable challenges that a nation might face. As I understand it, you could think of fortuna like a car accident, while virtù is the insurance plan that the driver hopefully had.
Typically, if we were going to associate Machiavelli with a show on HBO, the obvious candidate would be Game of Thrones. But this time, the second season of Westworld’s third episode takes on that mantle, both in title and in story, as its characters begin vying for power and preparing for the coming conflict.
“Virtù e Fortuna” opens up with a much anticipated surprise for fans- an explicit look into another Delos park. Instead of the teased Shogun world, though, we instead are taken to a Raj themed park, teased on the Westworld alternate reality game already.
In Raj World, a guest named Grace hooks up with what appears to be another guest. Before she gets intimate with him, though, the two first discuss how they couldn’t be entirely sure the other isn’t a host. Along with last week’s Delos showcase in the city where it was unclear which beings were hosts and which were actual human beings, I think that this ambiguity of humanity is definitely going to be a running theme in the season.
Later, Grace and her man friend head out into the jungle when they experience what I like to think of as Delos’s Order 66- Ford’s changing of the code that prevented hosts from harming guests. Grace’s arm candy is taken out by a host, but Grace herself manages to escape the Raj park and is chased by a tiger to the sea that had apparently been built by Ford.
It was interesting to see where the tiger seen earlier this season had come from, but I thought the CGI was really rough. I tend to be a little more forgiving on CGI for stuff that doesn’t exist in the real world- dragons, X-Wings, gauntlet-wielding Mad Titans… but I know what a tiger looks like. I’ve seen one in real life. And I get that it’s definitely a challenge to convincingly make a being like a tiger with CGI, but it’s not even my only visual complaint with this episode- later, during a battle scene, there’s a really terrible smoke effect.
Smoke!
Westworld is an incredible feat of a show, and I know it’s still in its early seasons, but it can be disheartening to see weak effects like that- particularly when I honestly don’t usually have much of a critical eye for that sort of thing anyway.
Anyway, unlike the first two episodes of this season, there seem to be fewer instances of jumping around to different timelines this time. Aside from a brief moment where we flash forward to see Bernard at the Mesa command center to see that Delos is still searching for Peter Abernathy, the rest of the episode tends to be focused on the earlier timeline, with Charlotte and Bernard still on the hunt for Peter, Maeve and her posse out to find her daughter, and Dolores still acting as the scourge of host-kind against Delos and the scattered guests still in the park.
Maeve’s story sees her, Hector, and the obnoxious Sizemore finally back out in the wilderness. We again are reminded that Maeve has use for Sizemore, given that in a run in with some Ghost Nation hosts, Maeve refuses to give the writer up. Perhaps this brief thread was necessary in that it let the show remind the audience again exactly why Maeve hadn’t just killed Sizemore already, but I did find it kind of strange that Maeve didn’t try to exercise more control over the Ghost Nation warriors- we’ve seen her have essentially omnipotent powers over other hosts before, so I’m not really sure why she couldn’t have just used those same techniques against the hosts pursuing them.
Once safe in the network of underground tunnels below the park, Maeve and Hector’s PDA seems to finally irritate Sizemore, who claims that the two shouldn’t be in love given that Hector has a love written as Isabella, and it becomes clear that Sizemore is likely sensitive to the issue because he had written Hector and Isabella as ideal versions of himself and a lost love. Hector responds that now that he is aware of his own consciousness, he realized that his love for Isabella was just code, while his love for Maeve was something real. Yet, even as he professes his feelings for Maeve, the hosts’ writer simultaneously quotes Hector word for word, showing that even though the hosts have deviated from their original plots, they haven’t entirely gone off script.
After regrouping with the tattooed Armistice and traitors to humanity Felix and Sylverter, Maeve’s party heads to the snowy north end of the park (seriously, how big is Westworld?). There, in the forest, Maeve and her crew is attacked by the long-anticipated Shogun World hosts.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the park, Bernard and Charlotte continue to track Peter when they discover him captured by some ne’er-do-wells, with the impressively mutton-chopped Rebus among them. Honestly, when I saw him on screen, I said out loud “Ugh, that guy?”
Which is actually kind of amusing, because Bernard and Charlotte manage to lure Rebus away from the camp and reprogram him, upping his combat skills and compassion and making him “the most virtuous and quickest gun in the west.” Seeing Rebus go from village degenerate to badass boy scout was hilarious and satisfying, and he was nearly able to stop the incoming Confederados from taking Peter and the other prisoners, but the rogue Confederates prove too strong and manage to not only capture Peter but Bernard as well, while Charlotte escapes. The prisoners are taken to the grimly named Confederado stronghold of Fort Forlorn Hope.
Stories finally start to converge when Dolores and Teddy also end up at Forlorn Hope, with warnings of an incoming threat. Dolores, going by the name “Wyatt” manages to impress Confederate Major Craddock by offering a Delos automatic weapon with the promise that she’d let them keep any other weapons they found- all on the condition that Craddock allow his men to help Dolores survive the coming attack.
Dolores recognizes both Peter and Bernard when they arrive as prisoners, and asks to speak privately with Abernathy. During their brief discussion, Dolores realizes that Peter is malfunctioning, and is consistently babbling about needing to “get to the train”- which, in this viewer’s personal opinion, may be foreshadowing a possible code that will lead to the hosts eventually leaving the park itself, given how the train seems to be the entrance and exit to Westworld.
Recognizing Bernard’s skill at maintaining hosts, Dolores asks him to help stabilize her father. Bernard digs around in Peter’s programming and discovers a large, mysterious encrypted file. He recognizes this as likely being what Charlotte was after, and warns Dolores that she’ll be relentlessly pursued by Delos as long as they hold this file.
Bernard’s warning rings true when the Delos attack force arrives at the fort the next day. As Bernard works on decrypting whatever is in Peter’s head, Dolores and the Confederados try to hold off the Delos guards, despite being at a horrible technological disadvantage. Bernard finally discovers something important™ but we don’t get to see what it is before a secret Delos strike team infiltrates the fort and takes Peter.
By the way, I really love what they did with Angela Sarafyan’s Clementine character this year. In season one she was a pretty but vulnerable host, sort of a protégée to Maeve. This time, she’s like some horrifying banshee, and it’s really a terrifying sight to behold.
Anyway, Dolores’ request that Craddock “promise her his men” ends up being fulfilled in a dark way as she and her masked army lock the Confederados outside of their own fort, and in an act of ruthless virtù she detonates some placed nitroglycerin barrels, blowing up both the Confederado hosts as well as the Delos attack force. The resulting explosion, by the way, is where that woeful CGI smoke effect comes from.
The battle won, Dolores tests Teddy’s loyalty by ordering him to execute Craddock. Teddy fails, and lets Craddock and the surviving Confederados run away, no doubt adding fuel to the fire between them that is sure to be “Teddybowl 2018” later this season.
Overall, I thought this was a really solid episode. Plot threads are already starting to come together, which is nice since I found the weird timeline threads of the first episode to seemingly be ambiguous for ambiguity’s sake rather than really contribute much to the story. The season so far has definitely been good in its own way (particularly with the completely outside-the-b̶o̶x̶ park story in last week’s episode), but I personally feel like this is finally the Season 2 of Westworld that fans have been expecting. I definitely can’t wait to see what happens next week!
