Westworld Season 2 Episode 3 recap: Dolores tries to star a revolution

Westworld continues its gripping third season with the new episode The Absence of Field on Sunday night.

Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) returns alongside new character Caleb Nichols, who she first met at the end of the Season 3 premiere.

In the preview for The Absence of Field, Dolores teased to Caleb that she was going to start a revolution, by destroying the world her human counterparts inhabit.

The episode begins with a naked Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) recording a message, before it cuts out and we see a new body being printed.

Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) then tells Charlotte to ‘bring herself back online,’ but Charlotte doesn’t remember anything.

Dolores tells her she is a creature of beauty and power, before asking her to focus, asking her to, ‘remember who you are.’

Charlotte says she remembers who she is, as Dolores says she will show her who she has to pretend to be, while handing her a small mirror.

‘Charlotte Hale? But she tried to kill all of us,’ she says, as Dolores says they’re outnumbered in their fight against Delos.

She shows Charlotte the other cores that she brought with her, revealing that one of them is Bernard (Jeffrey Wright).

Dolores tells her that the way they built this world, it won’t be too hard to destroy it, and when Charlotte asks where she’s going, Dolores says, ‘Home’ as the title sequences begins. 

While it isn’t immediately clear what robot’s core was put into Charlotte, it might be Maeve (Thandie Newton). 

Another mysterious graphic surfaces revealing there is ‘elevated scrutiny’ in San Francisco, as Charlotte gets back to work at Delos, seeing a large robot being put together. 

Charlotte leaves after the presentation, calling someone, saying that person needs to call her right away.

We then flashback to the end of the first episode, where Caleb (Aaron Paul) staying with Dolores as paramedics come to take her away.

The paramedics say she shouldn’t be alive, as Caleb springs into action, putting an oxygen mask over her when the police override the ambulance.

Caleb says they don’t ‘have time for this,’ as Caleb checks the Rico app and sees there is a high value target in the area.

Caleb tells Dolores that if she goes with the cops she will die and she asks him to help her.

When the cops arrive, Caleb questions if they are actually cops, and they seem not to be legit as a firefight ensues and Dolores stabs one of them in the neck and kills the other with a machine gun.

Caleb says he needs to get her to a hospital as she walks off and carries a body into the truck to verify the identity.

She asks him his name, and he tells her his name is Caleb Nichols, but she says, ‘not anymore,’ because he’ll need a new identity.

He asks what her name is, and she doesn’t tell him, saying the less he knows about her the better before driving off.

Charlotte is seen outside at night, as she’s told that Serac is behind the hostile takeover of Delos.

The woman says Serac is a ‘black hole’ and there is no presence of him online, but she says he initiated a data transfer with them two decades ago and now he’s trying to steal their company.

Charlotte keeps listening to a mysterious audio transmission on her phone, before entering her apartment, cautiously.

She finds a man naked Jake (Michael Ealy), who says he used to live there for eight years. 

Before he can say anymore, she kisses him passionately before they break it off when she says he wasn’t invited.

He says he’s there because she forgot to pick up their son again, Nathan, as she tries to comfort him, saying her meeting ran late.  

She asks him to go to sleep for mommy, but he insists she’s not his mommy (which is technically right) and he doesn’t love her, and she says of course she does, and asks if he said that because mommy and daddy don’t live together anymore, as he nods. 

Back at Delos, Charlotte is told they have a ‘leak,’ as she’s told they are missing host control units, one of whom being Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton).

The men she’s with think this was an ‘inside job from the top of the food chain,’ as Charlotte agrees there is a ‘mole inside Delos.’ 

After her meeting, she gets in a car and tells someone on the phone that she can’t wait and she’s coming to you, possibly referring to Dolores.

Charlotte is seen having a drink at a hotel lobby with a pin in her hand and listening to that recording, when Dolores arrives.

Dolores says she can’t always be there to hold her hand, and Charlotte wants to know who she really is, pulling up her coat showing a bloody gouge.

Charlotte asks ‘what the f**k is happening to me’ and Dolores tells her to turn off her emotional functions as she gets a room in the hotel with her digital assistant.

Dolores gets Charlotte into the room and sees she’s been cutting herself, and when asked why, she says she can’t stop.

Dolores says, ‘they don’t have impulse control, we do,’ as Dolores starts healing her wounds as Dolores says ‘no one knows me like you.’

‘If I ever lost you, I don’t know what I’d do,’ Charlotte says,’ as Dolores says she’d survive because they have to, ‘our kind depends on it.’

Charlotte tells Dolores that someone is trying to take over Delos and he has a mole inside the company, with Dolores saying she will find the mole and kill him and also make a counter offer to stop Serac’s offer.

Dolores says she has to visit an old friend, with Charlotte asking if it will always be like this and if they’ll ever get to be themselves, and Dolores says they will.

Dolores tells Charlotte to rest and she’ll have more clothes sent up, but when Charlotte asks her to stay, Dolores sits on the bed and says, ‘You belong to me, you know that?’

Charlotte says yes, and Dolores says, ‘Don’t hurt yourself ever again,’ as Dolores snuggles up to Charlotte in bed. 

Caleb sees on the Rico app that he has become a high-value target himself, as he tells his mother that he’s going away for awhile, but she doesn’t remember him.

We saw in the premiere that she has been having memory issues and doesn’t always remember him.

As he leaves the hospital, he’s stopped by two guys, who ask where the ‘girl in the ambulance’ is, saying she’s worth a lot of money and he’ll cut him in.

Caleb says there’s no girl, and they take him away, with one saying remember they gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Back in the hotel, Dolores gets dressed again as Charlotte sleeps, as she contacts Martin (Tommy Flanagan) who tells her about Serac.

She then asks for information about Caleb Nichols, as he’s taken and tortured by those two men, but while that’s happening, the robot he worked with activates itself.

They keep asking him where the girl is as they push the robot onto the ground below, shattering, as he has flashbacks from his military service.

When they say they’re only going to ask him one more time where she is, Dolores herself comes and saves him, killing the two men.

She asks, ‘Who the hell are you?’ She responds, ‘I’m Dolores,’ as Caleb tells her, ‘Well Dolores, thanks for finding me.’ 

Caleb says they were willing to kill him to get to her, and she says he must be hungry and offers to buy him breakfast.

Charlotte wakes up alone in the hotel and goes to work, where one of her execs says they didn’t find the mole, but they found something in the initial logs – her message from earlier, a message to Nathan Hale, her son.

She says she’s going to sing a song to him now, but during the video, someone else comes in and says the school calls and she’s running late.

She arrives at the school, listening to the mysterious audio again, when she finds Nathan sitting on a bench with a man, petting his dog.

She starts choking the man on the bench, telling him that most people don’t want to see the predator inside.

She said seeing him with Nathan reminded her for something, she remembers what it’s like to be me, telling him he’s not the only predator here, as he lays dead on the bench while she brings the dog for her son Nathan.

Dolores brings Caleb into a diner, telling him, ‘this is your spot,’ as he wonders how she knew that.

She knows he comes here once a year and she gives him a tablet, showing a transcript of a call, as he flashes back to a time when he was a boy, as his mother walks away.

A traumatized Caleb keeps reading the transcript, on the verge of tears, as he asks if it’s a joke, and Dolores says he stayed in that spot for six hours and she never returned.

She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized, telling Dolores that he threw up all over himself, saying that he’s, ‘enraged’ as Dolores knows the feelilng.

‘This isn’t surveillance or social media. How do you know every detail of my worst memory?”

She tells him about the machine Incite has built, with every aspect of their lives recorded and logged, to make a composite of everyone.

‘It’s not about who you are, Caleb. It’s’ about who they’ll let you become,’ she adds.

They go onto a long pier, with Caleb saying he had his first beer on this pier, which Dolores says, ‘This is where you kill yourself.’

She adds that it’s most likely he will take his own life right there within 10 to 12 years, and she knows because it’s part of a predictive algorithm.

She says he’ll never be more than a construction worker because that’s all that they’ll let him be. 

Caleb asks why she’s telling him all this, and Dolores says because they are a lot alike, they did the same thing to her.

She asks why he didn’t tell those men about her, adding he surprised her. She says he can give her money and he can run.

She says she’s going to start a revolution, and she wants to, ‘show this world for what it really is.’

He says he didn’t tell them about her because she is, ‘the first real thing that has happened to me in a long time.’

She says the man who built the system – Serac – won’t go down without a fight, and Caleb says he’s a dead man either way, but this way, he gets to decide who he wants to be.

Back at Delos, Charlotte plays back the message she recorded for Nathan in her office.

Charlotte is in her car when she finally cracks the code to the mysterious audio recordings, calling someone who picks up, but doesn’t say anything.

She says, ‘I want to meet,’ and the mystery caller hangs up and re-routes the car to a heavily-guarded palace… Serac’s  palace.

She walks through the abode, when she’s met by Martel (Pom Klementieff), and then Serac, who wonders if she’s forgotten her role.

Charlotte says things have been challenging, with Serac saying he wants all of Delos’ dirty secrets, and she says a lot was lost.

Serac says it was all her idea but Charlotte says their assets are out there with the encryption key, as Serac says the key is within Dolores.

Charlotte says she needs more time, but Serac says time is a luxury, of which she doesn’t have much of, as Serac disappears and the episode comes to an end.

In a preview for next week’s episode, we see The Man In Black (Ed Harris), who is in not so good of shape.

The fourth episode of Westworld Season 3, The Mother of Exiles, debuts Sunday, April 5 at 9 PM ET on HBO.