'Westworld' Just Revealed Caleb's True Identity
WARNING: Spoilers for Westworld Season 3, Episode 7 ahead.
Well, well, well, if it isn't another plot twist from Westworld. Tonight's episode of the futuristic HBO drama finally unveiled the real backstory behind one of its new main characters, Caleb Nichols, with one of its classic, expectation-busting bombshells. We thought Caleb, portrayed by Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul, was a construction worker and former war veteran experiencing PTSD who lost his friend, Francis (Kid Cudi), in combat; but after watching Season 3, Episode 7, not anymore.
All was revealed when Caleb and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) found Solomon, the A.I. system and precursor to Rehoboam that strategizes world events and humans' lives. It turns out, Caleb was in the army, but he and Francis were discharged after a mission to track down an insurgent group ended in a tragic bombing. After returning home, Caleb underwent a "reconditioning" procedure to make him forget parts of his past and started taking special pharmaceuticals that created dissociative memories.
He and Francis were trained and tasked with hunting down people who were "outliers" in Solomon's calculations. The two were actually outliers themselves, but they became the system's most successful operatives in weeding out the rest. According to Caleb's log, his past tasks included successful kidnappings, ransoms, and assassinations. To track down outliers, they used the app, Rico, which was created to regulate criminality. (At the start of Season 3, Caleb was using Rico to make extra cash for completing illegal missions.)
According to Caleb's faulty recollection, Francis died in a military mission where they had captured the leader of a top Russian insurgent group. They were ambushed, and Francis was shot and killed in the attack. But that never happened. Instead, Francis was killed in one of his and Caleb's outlier missions. They had kidnapped the chief of the pharmaceutical company that manufactures the memory-suppressing pills. But because of their target's high-profile status, one of them had to kill the other to tie up "loose ends," in exchange for a bonus offer. The hostage plants the idea into Caleb's mind that Francis is going to kill him. Caleb confronts Francis but also gets a notification to assassinate him. Before Francis can shoot him, Caleb fires at him and kills him. He kills the pharmaceutical exec too.
After learning the truth about his history, Caleb is understandably enraged with Solomon, but he has to depend on the system to retrieve Dolores's plan for revolution. Whatever that entails will be revealed in next week's eighth and final episode. At this point, we can probably expect a few more surprises to come.
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