There's something pathetic about seeing a villain brought low, not by the good guys, but by their own paranoia and hubris. Good beating bad? Hooray, kudos all around. Bad guy reduced to a shell of a man, ranting and raving at the ghosts in his head in a Grey Gardens mansion? Not quite as satisfying, especially when that villain is The Man In Black, AKA William (Ed Harris), president of Delos and terror of Westworld and all its hosts. An entire season of William luxuriating in chaos and violence in an attempt to get to the heart of the maze, only to be trapped in a maze of hallucinations and grief, tormented by Grace (Katja Herbers) and constant reminders of his own failures as a husband, father, and friend. His wife is gone, dead by misadventure or suicide. Grace is gone, gunned down by her father in a paranoid fit in Westworld. Logan and James Delos are both gone, to drugs and to the failure of William to reconstruct his father-in-law's mind inside a Host body. William has one thing left to him that matters, and it's not Delos, it's the data constructed by William and Hale (Tessa Thompson) in Sector 16. When an appeal to save his company from Serac (Vincent Cassell) doesn't work, an appeal to keep Sector 16 safe does, and however briefly, we see William as he truly is. It's a neat trick Westworld pulled, completely inverting the hero and the villain of the first season by the third. It's no longer Dolores cowering while William runs roughshod over the world. Dolores is a multi-billionaire who easily blends into the halls of power while the man in charge of a billion-dollar company on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence is reduced to a tired-looking old man talking to no one in a paper jumpsuit. The big bad is now the most pitiable figure on the show, and the helpless farmer's daughter mostly fit to be menaced in a barn is now the most dangerous being on the planet, with resources to match her grand schemes.
Review of The Mother of Exiles
