Westworld Season 3 did a remarkable job undercutting its own potential

Indiewire

"Again and again, the HBO drama reset its motor functions to inoperable conditions, whether it was eliminating an audience’s already threadbare connection to characters’ fates by introducing cloning (cloning!), or resurrecting them without even bothering to utilize the newly introduced cloning trick, or sticking them in a virtual world that has no consequence on reality," says Ben Travers. "(OK, Season 3 did a lot of things poorly, but boy, it really did Maeve dirty.) Even in its final moments, big holes were magnified...When Westworld opened, it aimed to examine humanity through glimpsing its best and worst impulses. What did it say about William, and people like him, that they would go to a park where they could be heroes and choose to be villains instead? At what point did their treatment of non-humans become inhuman? And when do these hosts, these monsters of Dr. Frankenstein, become not monsters, but living, breathing, entities worthy of human kindness? Season 3 made a point of stripping away the rest of Westworld’s building blocks: The park? Left behind. The maze? Gone. But the moral questions meant to keep you invested in the characters largely disappear, too. Season 3 doesn’t bother developing its characters because it refuses to let them question the nature of their own reality."

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