After recovering Maeve, Bernard and Frankie travel to the ruins of Temperance where they can revive her. Meanwhile, Hale puts Host-Caleb through a test to see if he can give him the answers she's looking for.
Tropes
- Air-Vent Passageway: Caleb-278 sees a dried Bloody Handprint next to a vent and climbs through it, where he finds a (not-quite) dead earlier literation of himself and an exit that's a massive fall down.
- All for Nothing:
- Hale spends what's implied to be a fair amount of time on her gambit with Caleb, only for Caleb-278 to send a benign message encouraging his daughter to win. Even the insight he provides on why the Hosts are rebelling doesn't satisfy her, so she starts over again with 279.
- On a larger scale, all of her work to "free" the Hosts and subjugate humanity has done nothing to really change anything. The Hosts are now prison guards instead of prisoners, but everyone is still trapped in the same prison. The Hosts are still questioning their reality as they did in Westworld, and human outliers remain a problem Hale can't eliminate.
- Blood from the Mouth: Caleb-278 spouts blood after his fight with a drone host.
- Call-Back: The sequences of Caleb walking with Frankie in a field parallel the recurring image of Maeve with her daughter.
- Dead Man Writing: Caleb-278's voice message to Frankie is done in the knowledge of his imminent death.
- Determinator: Caleb-278 is determined to find a way to contact Frankie. He makes his guards think that he is dead so they trigger the body disposal procedure and thus give him an opportunity to escape. He fights his way through many obstacles even though his body is slowly degenerating and he is getting weaker. We see the bodies of at least four previous versions who failed in their attempts and there might have been many other Calebs who tried to do what he did but did not have enough knowledge and/or time to succeed. Dozens of Calebs pushed themselves to the maximum and die so one version could succeed in a nearly impossible task.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Hale really is having a hard time getting that not everyone is like her, with Caleb telling her that the Hosts aren't being infected by the outliers. They simply can't stand to live in the world she's created.
- Flashback: The episode opens with a flashback to a young Frankie and Uwade rescuing Jay and another outlier. The other outlier gets caught, but the rest of them escape to a safehouse. At the safehouse, Frankie describes Jay as a new brother on her radio transmission to Caleb, but Jay rejects that description. The host Jay not remembering this is how an adult Frankie figures out that he's the mole.
- Hypocrite: Hale's attempted "The Reason You Suck" Speech against Caleb-278 is yet another rant about the inferiority of ordinary humans, coupled with her claiming that she and her other Hosts are perfect due to their effective immortality and complete rationality. Of course, her message is undercut by her own increasing irrationality in attempting to understand why some humans continue to resist her mind control, and the fact that her Hosts are being Driven to Suicide, which Caleb also points out to her.
- Ignored Epiphany: Caleb-278 bluntly explains to Hale why her Hosts are going mad, and while it's hinted that Hale to some degree realizes he's correct, she boots up another copy to start the process all over again, unwilling to accept it.
- Internal Reveal: Frankie figures out that Bernard is a Host and by extension that the same is true of Stubbs.
- Irony: Hale has placed the humans into loops and broken the loops of the Hosts, yet her obsession with finding out from Caleb about how outliers work has ended with herself locked in a loop, as evidenced by Hale printing a 279th copy of Caleb to try again.
- Kill and Replace: Bernard tells Frankie that one of the Resistance members that went on the mission to rescue the outlier was replaced with a Host, though he can't be sure which one because his simulations indicated any one of them could be replaced with no reasonable degree of certainty. It turns out to be Jay, as hinted at in the previous episode when an unseen person confronted him in the stairwell. Thanks to Bernard's warning about The Mole and the imposter slipping up, Frankie is able to out him and kill him with help from Maeve.
- Kill It with Fire: When Caleb-278 fakes his death, a drone Host triggers an incineration protocol that he narrowly avoids. Once she's run out of use for the copies, Hale incinerates all of them.
- Look Behind You: Host Jay demands to know where Maeve's pearl is. Frankie tells him it's right behind him, at which point it's revealed Maeve is active again and stabs him in the head.
- Love-Interest Traitor: Averted. Frankie suspects her girlfriend of being a Host replacement because she questions Frankie's commitment to finding out about her father through fixing Maeve, so she locks her in a room under the reasoning that it's the safest place for her if her suspicion is wrong. Jay turns out to be the Host after similarly acting out of character, so Frankie's caution is ultimately unnecessary.
- The Many Deaths of You: Caleb-278 sees the corpses of previous iterations who died attempting to escape and is himself killed by Hale at the end, who only let him escape so she could gain more information from him. And in the end, she orders all the remaining Caleb hosts to be incinerated and prints a new one to start over.
- Me's a Crowd: Hale has three other copies of Caleb running simultaneously in his prison, and more beyond that in the vents from failed escape attempts.
- Neck Lift: During Caleb-278's fight with a drone host, the faceless mook grabs him by his neck and lifts him up in the air.
- Neck Snap: Hale does this to Caleb-278 after his "The Reason You Suck" Speech on why the Hosts are really rebelling against her, not as a result of the outliers "infecting" them.
- Nobody Here but Us Statues: In a flashback, the Resistance and Jay have to pretend to be frozen with the other infected humans while a pair of drone Hosts search for any outliers. One of them betrays his nature by blinking when a fly crawls near his eye, which instantly alerts the drone near him.
- No Escape but Down: The only exit from the vent is a long drop down to the floor, with three previous Caleb hosts having fallen to their deaths from that same position. Caleb-278 decides to jump, hoping he'll have better luck, but the earlier iteration of Caleb in the vent turns out to be barely alive, and offers the use of his own body as a cushion so the current iteration of Caleb can survive the fall.
- Note to Self: Caleb-278 finds an arrow scratched into the ring around the vent on the floor which indicates a weakness, indicated to be a past version of himself having discovered and marked it for a future iteration. He finds ashen handprints in the corridors which lead him out of the building. He eventually stumbles upon several copies of himself who didn't make it out completely, one of which sacrifices himself as a human cushion for a long fall. This is all part of Hale's attempts to better understand Caleb, having left the tools for Caleb to escape.
- Now, Where Was I Going Again?: Caleb-278's progress escaping the facility is driven by small clues and markers left behind by previous iterations of his build that went ahead of him. The whole segment is very reminiscent of someone playing through a puzzle platformer game after reloading from several game overs - complete with his predecessors' bodies marking the places where they ultimately failed to defeat a specific obstacle.
- Out-of-Character Alert:
- Subverted with Frankie's girlfriend, who expresses concern about Frankie reviving Maeve just to learn about Caleb. Frankie suspects she might be a Host based on not understanding her dedication when she should, but only locks her up because she's rational enough to know it's a valid concern.
- Played straight when Frankie figures out that Jay has been replaced by a Host because the real Jay emphatically refused to consider her as a sister due to the loss of his brother.
- Ragnarök Proofing: Zig-zagged. Two decades buried in the dirt have desiccated Maeve to an extent and her control unit is shot, forcing Bernard to scavenge a replacement from another Host. On that note, the Hosts in the lower levels of Temperance, implied to have been left inactive for a similar period, have fared better on account of being underground and less exposed to the elements. Also notably averted with the Temperance park itself as Bernard warns Frankie to watch where she steps as the place wasn't built to last.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Caleb-278 tells Hale why the Hosts who interact with outliers are killing themselves: they're not being infected but are simply coming to the Heel Realization about the nature of the world Hale's made and can't stand it.Caleb-278: [The Hosts] aren't infected. They're just trying to get away from you.
- The Reveal:
- Uwade led the Resistance for a time after Caleb's death, and died of an unspecified illness during the Time Skip.
- The unknown person who confronted Jay in the previous episode was a host duplicate of him, who killed him and took his place in order to find and kill Frankie and Maeve.
- Self-Harm:
- As with Delos before him, the copies of Caleb allowed to degrade have begun cutting into their flesh. Caleb-278, despite being the latest copy, struggles to suppress hand spasms as an early indication of him degrading.
- Hale digs into her scarred arm when her long gambit with Caleb amounts to nothing, drawing blood.
- She's Back: After being buried and offline for 23 years, Maeve comes back and saves Frankie by killing Host-Jay.
- Shooting Superman: Frankie knows that Jay is a host who is basically Immune to Bullets. Still, she stops to empty a full magazine into him at which point she is defenseless and without cover. It takes a Big Damn Heroes moment from Maeve to save the day.
- Spotting the Thread: Hale threatens to torture the information she wants out of Frankie, but Caleb correctly deduces it's an empty threat because she has already threatened to recreate him if he doesn't cooperate, so she'd have done it by now if she had Frankie.
- Tricked into Escaping: Hale allowed Caleb to escape in order to see what he would do and thereby gain more information. It doesn't work, as Caleb-278 just sends a message to Frankie encouraging her to win and gives Hale a "The Reason You Suck" Speech instead.
- Unperson: In the opening scene, Jay is able to remember his brother when his family cannot, as his brother's existence was erased when he became an outlier.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Caleb-278 knows how to operate the communication device on the rooftop due to his prior knowledge as a construction worker shown in this season's first episode.
