The End of the Dolores Game

Hi Dolores, Dolores, Dolores and Dolores,

It’s Doloreses all the way down…

I had been thinking that last week’s Telegraph was maybe a bit too dense and that we needed a lighter episode but this made me laugh quite hard at the multiple Dolores reveal. If they had put Evan Rachel Wood, Tessa Thompson, Tommy Flanagan and Hiroyuki Sanada on the screen at the same time in separate squares, it would have been just slightly more cheesy.

Yet despite Ashley’s disappointment, there are philosophical themes in play here which can be explored further even if we have to work at it a bit more than the showrunners.

However I am going to focus on the storytelling for this email and give some support to Big D and his timelines theory.

I think that we can be confident in that Serac is operating at the three months point after Dolores stole Gerald’s money in the cold opening to episode one based on what we are told in this episode. That is the obvious divergence that Rehoboam picks up.

We can also be confident in that the Charlotte Hale 90 days comment refers to the slaughter of guests that occurs at the end of season one.

We know that it takes a couple of weeks for the investigation team to arrive at the island in season two and for Dolores to escape. This means that there’s at least a three week differential between the Hale 90 days and Serac’s three months assuming that Delores works incredibly fast.

Currently the most simple explanation based on what has been shown seems to be that Serac turned to Mauve after failing to purchase the company. This would also support Big D’s instincts.

It’s not a huge misalignment in timelines but it is enough which allows for the blurring of actions to make things look concurrent.

Other things I liked in this episode was that Serac was real (please) rather than being the Metatron of a conscious Rehoboam and that he has real motivation; that Paris was destroyed by an enormous nuclear explosion (given Serac observation point) which basically would end Western Europe as an influence in the world and give some motivation as to why people would accept Incite control as a trade off worth accepting; that Serac doesn’t know about Bernard which adds a random element to our story and means that he still has the potential to be a useful idiot for Delores’s scheme; that there is the potential for the unidentified pearl to not be Dolores; and that William appears to be human at this point in time given his sedation and entry to an asylum (I don’t think we have enough time to do a William as consciousness in a host’s body).

One thing that displeased me was the lampshading from Mauve “this is where she remade herself”. It allows the story to move on sure but there’s a big question raised by the Charlotte bot cutting herself about hosts and identity/image in the previous episode. If returning to the Dolores body was important enough for Dolores and one of her cloned versions then doesn’t this mean something about the nature of sentience in hosts? I find myself hoping that the lampshading only refers to the technology and that we will see more exploration of identity. After all, although these are clones of Dolores, they must be diverging based on experiences since then? Nature vs Nurture in cloned sentient robots – that could be an interesting storyline.

Keep well Shat family,

Yours forever overcomplicating
John Lish

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