Winners and Losers From Westworld's Season 2, Episode 3: 'Virtu e Fortuna'
By Henry McKenna
This recap of “Virtu e Fortuna” from season two, episode three of Westworld contains spoilers.
Shogun World (or Samurai World) would have to wait. Instead, at the start of “Virtu e Fortuna,” we found ourselves in Raj World, where the main draw was hunting. Consistent with the theme of Season 2, the hunters quickly became the hunted.
The third episode delivered the viewers a look at two new areas of the park. At first, Raj World seemed like a strange place for a vacation: why not just go to India? But of course, it’s probably not easy to murder animals in Westworld’s present day. And (sarcasm) what’s the fun of being in India if it’s not British-occupied? Yes, this park seems just as sick as the rest.
The resetting of rules appears to be park-wide. No human is safe. (Unless that human is shooting another human. Strangely, Grace’s test bullet didn’t kill her new lover, Nicholas, but the bullet from a host did). But while the hosts clearly have a thirst to kill, that thirst seems to be easily fixed. Bernard and Charlotte Hale needed minutes to make one host go from threatening rape to chasing a woman to offer her protection.
What has been done can be undone in some cases. What happens if Bernard tried to reprogram Dolores? Would she lose her elevated sense of self? And is she the only host who has truly gained consciousness? Have Teddy, Maeve and other hosts (samurai included) developed free thought?
Something to chew on as we get to the winners and losers.
Winners
Hale: Delos’ leader won the battle, and recovered Peter Abernathy. With Abernathy, you get the sense she has the park’s financial worth, which seems to be saved in the massive encrypted file stored in Abernathy’s memory. Plus, she’s alive — that’s not a bad outcome for any of the humans currently in the park.
Samurai: They have arrived. At the show’s conclusion, Maeve’s party found Shogun World.
Teddy: As a host who has seemingly died more than anyone else, he has begun to defend a few of his brethren from his trigger-happy girlfriend. Color me crazy, but it’s nice seeing someone whose first instinct isn’t to kill. He’s also showing insubordination and independent thought. It seems like independent thought comes hand in hand with the hosts growing a soul. Perhaps Teddy is on the way or already there. Teddy has always had a conscious, but is he conscious? The next question is whether his open subordination of Dolores will be a problem. After all, she gave him a direct order to kill the final leader of the desperados. Teddy did not follow the order. And now that leader is on the loose, potentially (and probably) looking to exact revenge.
Maeve: We may have left her face-to-face with a samurai at the start of the next episode, but she’s rolling with one of the nastiest crews in Westworld. She’s got one of the company’s top employees (Lee). A hostage is a nice insurance plan. She’s got muscle in Hector and Armistice. And she’s got two programmers. All the bases are covered.
PETA: If people could kill fake animals for sport, then maybe fewer people would kill real ones for sport. Westworld hunting is like the vegetarian replacement meat for hunting. That’s, of course, if PETA thinks of these in-park animals as fake.
Losers
Dolores: Dolores should know better than anyone that “these violent delights have violent ends.” If what goes around comes around, then Dolores might be in some trouble. Even she admitted that Teddy was all she had left, and he seems to be having second thoughts about spending the rest of his life in the Wyatt narrative. Her uprising hit new, gruesome heights when Delos’ soldiers attacked. She blew up her men and theirs, and abandoned the remaining living (?) hosts by locking them outside the fort to get lit up by machine guns. Then to be sure they were dead, Dolores’ black-bag-wearing foot soliders finished off the desperados with bayonets.
Peter Abernathy: Or should we call him King Lear? Abernathy is glitching between his personalities, and occasionally finds himself quoting Shakespeare, like he once did when he was Dolores’ father. Abernathy stumbled upon King Lear quotes during this episode. That doesn’t bode well for himself or Dolores. After Lear goes mad, his daughter Cordelia dies and Lear soon after. Harbingers aside, he is in a dire situation in the hands of Delos. One they upload the files off Abernathy, he’s probably worthless to them.
Bernard: Still leaking brain fluid. Still struggling with the existential crisis of being perceived as a human and a host. And to make things worse, a rugged-looking Clementine has taken him into custody.
Nicholas: We barely knew thee. The man we met in the opening scene in Raj World had a host-like life span in the show.
Viewers with weak stomachs: Maybe it was the man lit on fire. Maybe it was the heap of dead bodies at the gate or the fort (and the bayonets that followed). Maybe it was the samurai head. This episode felt especially gruesome.