Wait, What Happened to Dolores in the 'Westworld' Season 3 Finale?

From Harper's BAZAAR

WARNING: Spoilers for Westworld Season 3 ahead.

Westworld's third season came to a close tonight with a major cliffhanger surrounding our host in charge, Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood). The wholesome country girl-turned-militant revolutionary nearly fulfilled her strategy for world domination, but Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), the head of the A.I. and data company Incite, got in the way.

Serac had been after Dolores since the start of the season because he believed that she had an integral key of Delos data—regarding "the Sublime"—locked away in her mind. (Turns out, the key is actually in Bernard Lowe's mind, which we don't find out until the end of the episode.) Maeve (Thandie Newton), hired by Serac, brings Dolores to him so he can finally access the highly-guarded info. He hooks her up to Rehoboam, the massive computer system he helped create that calculates people's futures, and starts erasing Dolores's memories one by one to find the key.

During her last few moments of consciousness, she has a telepathic moment with Maeve, to whom she reveals her real plan: She isn't trying to dominate the world out of revenge for what humans did to her and her fellow hosts; she wants to free humans from their calculated lives and give them the choice to make something beautiful of the world. She also hacks Rehoboam's controls, giving her human ally Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul) authority over the system instead of Serac. He commands Rehoboam to delete itself, thus freeing humankind from its predetermined paths, even if that means tragedies and chaos lie ahead. When he and Maeve exit the Incite headquarters, they leave Dolores's body behind.

It appears that sequence marks the end of Dolores, but considering host "deaths" hardly last on Westworld, we wouldn't be surprised if she came back in Season 4. (Can't she be duplicated again or revived?)

There's also another version of Dolores occupying a clone of Charlotte Hale (AKA "Charlores"), who has a moment in a post-credit sequence: The Man in Black finds her in a research lab of Delos's Dubai headquarters. Before he can kill her, a clone of the Man in Black, clad in his classic Westworld hat and costume, emerges and kills him. The final shot shows a room full of machines making new hosts, which suggests Charlores has her own plan of conquest up her synthetic sleeve.

In the meantime, though, Dolores fans are in mourning.

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