The showdown between Dolores and Maeve is bound to come to a violent head, but for now, Westworld is centered on expanding their ideological divide. The first look at next week’s episode brings Dolores back home to confront her foil, as Jonathan Nolan explains this week’s epic car chase and the “genre” drug that brought Aaron Paul’s Caleb to a whole new level.
The teaser for episode six (just three more to go this season) of Westworld looks to be bringing Dolores and Caleb to the parks that started it all (though it could very well be another location that simply looks like the parks—after all, this is Westworld we’re talking about). Following their successful dismantling of humanity’s status quo, they’re moving onto the next phase of her big plan. Whatever that may be.
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As Thandie Newton’s Maeve once again finds herself in Warworld—either in the physical or virtual space, again it’s hard to tell with this show—she and Dolores cross paths behind the scenes. Dolores may be nude with Maeve towering over her, but it’s clear that Dolores has the power. At least, she thinks she has the power. Based on the rest of the teaser, things may be happening that not even she can control.
HBO also shared a behind the scenes look at episode five, “Genre,” which saw Dolores carrying out her grand plan of exposing Rehoboam’s real-world loops to the humans. Much of the episode was seen through the eyes of Caleb, who’d been dosed with a drug called Genre that made everything feel like he was living in a movie. In an interview with Insider, showrunner Jonathan Nolan explained how the sequences were inspired by film noir, Apocalypse Now, The Shining, and other films. Caleb journeys through about 50 years of cinematic history in what Nolan described as an alternate (and cheaper) version of Westworld itself.
“The show is playing very explicitly with the idea is that, over the course of the next 50 years as we explore various different levels of reality—one of which is filmmaking itself—people would try to turn their memories of great Westerns of years past into a theme park that they could live in,” he said.
Westworld continues with episode six on Monday.