Outliers

July 27, 2022

Shat Hosts,

It’s Ken L again and I’d like to talk about outliers.

There’s an aspect of outliers that wasn’t emphasized in the Deep Dive that I think brings some key context and actually helps make Caleb the important character the writers want us to think he is.

The term “Outlier” in this show is a specific term – we first heard about Outliers in Season 3. As you remember, they’re the people identified by Serac and Rehoboam that were incompatible with Rehoboam’s strategies for total peace in an optimal human society. Outliers were responsible for the divergence events that messed with that beautiful Rehoboam circle from Season 3. Rehobam identified these neurodivergent individuals as a threat to world peace.

So Serac and Incyte worked to eliminate Outliers’ influence on society – whether through straight up muder, putting them in human cold storage, having other Outliers hunt them via RICO, or simply pushing them to the fringes of society where they had limited power. Obviously this system failed – for one, William is a neurodivergent Outlier who was immensely powerful, and more importantly, Caleb is an Outlier who brought the whole system down last season.

What’s important to remember is that it is these same kinds of people who are now threatening Hale’s new world order. These same Outliers that were predicted by Rehoboam to make world peace impossible for humanity are now the only threat to Hale’s perfect host society. Indeed, despite being unable to foresee the world Hale created, Rehoboam’s base prediction about the impact of Outliers remains true – their very existence threatens peace. Outliers are now the only reason there is a Resistance and continued fighting against Hale. There’s something about Outliers’ neurodivergent minds that makes them resist conditioning, that makes them unsusceptible to compliance, going with the flow, and being controlled. They threatened Rehoboam’s strategies then, they resist the Tower now. So I somewhat disagree with Ash’s theory about diminishing returns – all human minds won’t eventually learn to resist the Tower, but Outlier minds will.

THIS is why Caleb is important and why Hale has a real motivation to make a fidelity-tested Caleb host. If she can perfectly replicate the mind of an Outlier – indeed, the Outlier that broke through Incyte’s conditioning, took down Rehoboam, and actively resisted the Tower’s control – then she can test that mind over and over and over again until she’s figured out how to subdue it. This justifies setting an elaborate trap for Caleb. This justifies 200 plus fidelity tests. It’s the only sustainable path to defeating the Outlier problem – better than Rehoboam’s methods or Hale’s game, which are just bandaids. So that’s Hale’s endgame – get a sample of a Outlier mind to perfect the Tower technology.

It’s also worth mentioning that William is also an Outlier. This leads to two key observations. First, it explains why so much time and resources are being expended to fidelity-test William in the Westworld Park over and over as we saw in the post-credits scene in the Season 2 Finale. Indeed, as far as we know, there is still no fidelity-tested Host William yet. The Doppelganger we’ve seen all season is a recreation from memory – like Bernard – but not a true fidelity-tested recreation of William’s mind. Like Caleb, a fidelity-tested William would help crack the Outlier issue. The second observation is that multiple Hosts – Hale and Host William at the least – have been exposed to William – an Outlier. Doesn’t this imply that both are risking exposure to the “virus”? I think we’re certainly seeing Host William crack. Could Hale be next?

Cheers,

Ken L

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