Be aware there arespoilersthrough Westworld Season 3, Episode 7.
There’s a lot to process in any given episode ofWestworld. A heady show with plenty to say about technology and society, the hit HBO sci-fi series also jams in new twists and character reveals with each new episode – especially in Season 3, an ambitious soft reboot that leaves the park (mostly) behind and heads out into the world of the future.
So, who’s human? Who’s a host? Who’s alive and dead? And who the heck are all these new characters? We’ve got you covered with a handy character guide to keep you up to speed on everything we know so far about all the key characters, where we last saw them, and if they could be coming back.
Check out theWestworldcharacter guide below and for more, check out Adam Chitwood’srecap of the last episode.
Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy
Human or Host?Host
Alive or Dead?Alive and thriving in a new body.
Evan Rachel Woodheads up the lead inWestworld’s massive ensemble as Dolores Abernathy, the oldest host in the park, created by Arnold Weber (who subsequently helped Dr. Robert Ford re-create him in the form of Bernard Lowe). Dolores solved the maze Arnold made her and reached consciousness, but when Robert refused to cancel the park opening, he programmed the personality “Wyatt” into her and Dolores slaughtered the hosts and killed Arnold in an attempt to prevent it.
Dolores was our first entry point into the perspective of the hosts, following her journey as she achieved consciousness in two-fold – in the past where she journeyed and fell in love with young William and in the present, where she confronts the Man in Black. After learning her full truth and killing Dr. Ford, Dolores and Wyatt’s personalities fused into a vengeful revolutionary for Season 2, which saw her leading a violent revolt against the park guests and Delos chairpeople on a mission to find freedom. At the end of the Season 2 finale, Dolores escaped out of the park in Charlotte Hale’s body with a bag of mystery pearls (essentially the brains of the hosts) and Season 3 sees her back in the “real world,” continuing her fight to free her kind.
What exactly does that mean? Nothing good for humanity. Dolores came back to the mainland with a vengeance, quickly dismantling Delos rival Incite from the inside and using humanity’s algorithmic overlord “Rehoboam” against them, revealing that every human’s path has been pre-determined, and in doing so, driving the world towards anarchic chaos.
Thandie Newton as Maeve Millay
Alive or Dead?You think she’s scared of death? She’s done it a million times, and she’s fucking great at it. (So yeah, alive.)
Thandie Newtonstars as the series’ resident scene-stealer Maeve Millay, a first-generation host who we first meet as the resident brothel manager in Westworld. Season 1 sees Maeve reach consciousness seemingly on her own, leading her to experiment with her own deaths and ultimately waking up inside the host processing facility, where she commands/earns the loyalty of two technicians, Lutz and Sylvester, who help her reprogram herself to untap her full abilities and make her immune to commands. She also learns that she was originally programmed to woman living in the country with her daughter, until the Man in Black slaughtered them both and triggered her first awakening. At the end of the season, she makes her first true decision, deciding to stay in the park to find her daughter rather than escaping as she was programmed to by Dr. Ford.
In Season 2, Maeve leads a counter mission to Dolores, teaming with Hector, Armistice, and head writer Lee Sizemore to find her daughter, and ultimately, to lead as man hosts as possible to The Valley Beyond, a virtual paradise that Ford snuck into the park programming. Maeve’s journey leads her through Shogunworld dead into conflict with both Dolores and Delos park security, who ultimately gunned her down at the end of the season as she held off hoards of violently reprogrammed hosts. Her sacrifice allowed her daughter, along with many other hosts, to escape into the Valley Beyond before the upload rift closed. However, Maeve is back in Season 3 and after a misadventure in a Warworld simulation, she’s got a new (if mush less superpowered) body and Serac put her on a warpath towards Dolores.
Ed Harris as William, aka The Man in Black
Human or Host?Who knows?
Alive or Dead?Couldn’t tell you!
Ed Harrishas absolutelylived it upin the role of The Man in Black, the mysterious but fitting moniker given to his character before the reveal that the big bad antagonist is none other than William (last name still unkown, leading some to believe there’s another reveal in store there.) The very same young man (played byJimmi Simpson) who ventured into Westworld for the first time with a white hat and a determination to treat hosts with kindness, who fell in love with Dolores and watched her fight for self-awareness, becomes the host-slaying big bad who offers a human antagonist amid the great societal ills and technological terrors that fuelWestworld’s narrative.
Naturally, the Man in Black was stoked as heck about the host rebellion because it made the game “real” and spent Season 2 on another misadventure with his buddy Lawrence that put him on a collision path with Dolores and his own worst nature once again. In the Riddle of the Sphynx, we learned how William worked with James Delos to create host clone copies of human consciousness, failing again and again, and ultimately leaving a Delos-bot to go mad for decades in their fidelity testing room. We also met his wife Juliet (Sela Ward), and learned that she killed herself after seeing evidence of who he really was in the park. William’s tragic arc bottomed out towards the end of Season 2, when he got caught too caught up in Dr. Ford’s mindgames and his quest to prove that no system could tell him and believed his daughter was a host. This being the Man in Black, he obviously killed her.
Dolores leaves the Man and Black to die at the end of Season 2, but the post-credits scene to the season finale presented one ofWestworld’s most baffling riddles yet. William takes an elevator down from the park into the inner-workings below and sees his daughter, who tells him this isn’t a simulation but what’s left of his world, before leading him to a very familiar room where she sits down and starts a baseline interview to verify…fidelity. What does it mean? When does it take place? Is it even real? TBD! What we do know is that in the current timeline, William wound up in a mental hospital thanks to some handy work by Haleores, where he was left strapped into an AR therapy session for way too long during the chaos Dolores and Caleb caused. After battling all the past versions of himself, William is back in action and rearin' to bring down all of A.I. kind, including his current traveling companions Bernard and Stubbs.
Aaron Paul as Caleb Nichols
Human or Host?Human
Alive or Dead?Alive
Aaron PauljoinsWestworldas a new co-star in Season 3, taking on the role of Caleb Nichols, an everyman stuck in his own sad little loop far removed from the walls of Westworld. A veteran who can’t find a place for himself in the world, Caleb works construction by day before clocking out to tend to his ailing mother and reluctantly chat about his trauma with a remote voice on the phone. That voice belongs to his deceased best friend Francis, who died during combat while they were at war, a trauma that weighs heavily on him. Caleb also works “the night shift,” aka doing petty crime for quick cash via an app, which leads him to Dolores, a whole world of trouble, and possibly the “something real” he’s been searching for.
It also leads him to some real ass-kicking truths about his past. Turns out Caleb isn’t just a veteran who can’t get a job, he was essentially designed to be that way by the all-knowing A.I. Rehoboam, including the pre-determined ending that he’ll take his own life. And that’s just the start. Caleb helps Dolores reveal Rehoboam’s grand design to the people, sparking chaos in the process, and she takes him to a facility where he discovers that he was an “Outlier”, aka a person who could not be controlled or predicted, and was first used by the system to eliminate other outliers before being reconditioned to forget his crimes. What’s worse, Francis didn’t die in the war. Caleb killed him. He was Caleb’s literal partner in crime until they learned the truth about what they were doing and Rehoboam made them both offers to assassinate each other. Francis was quicker to turn on his friend, but Caleb was quicker on the trigger. Learning the truth about his past ensured that Caleb would become the perfect weapon in Dolores' revolution – a human who wants to destroy his own kind – which is why she chose him in the first place.
Tessa Thompson as Charlotte Hale
Human or Host?HumanHost
Alive or Dead?Charlotte Hale is dead, long live the Hale-bot.
Tessa Thompsonstars as Charlotte Hale, the executive director of Delos. And as far as main characters Hale is still a bit of a mystery, mostly swaggering through a recurring role in Season 1, where she proved a temporary thorn in Dr. Ford’s side. Charlotte was in the park for the host massacre and while she survived the initial attack, teaming with Bernard briefly and later killing Elsie, Hale was ultimately killed by Dolores – but not before Dolores and Bernard made a Hale-bot host body, which Dolores used to upload her consciousness and escape out of the Park, taking a bag of mystery Pearls with her.
So where does that leave Hale for Season 3? Thompson returns in a starring role, but it’s a mystery who exactly she’s playing. At the end of Season 3, Dolores made herself a new body and puts one of the mystery pearls in the Hale-bot, which put Dolores and her mystery co-conspirator in a key power position at the company after the park massacre. Turns out that mystery conspirator was Dolores herself – the revolutionary A.I. put copies of herself in all the mystery pearls.
What we quickly learn, however, is that transplanting a host’s consciousness into another person’s body and life doesn’t mean they are the same “person” they were before. Haleores grows attached to Charlotte Hale’s family and begins to identify with the dead woman, but when she tries to make a grand escape with her husband and son, they’re executed in a car bombing. Which means we’ve got one extra pissed off and emotionally traumatized host on our hands.
Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe
Dead or Alive?Alive
Jeffrey Wrightstars as Bernard Lowe, the former head of programming at Westworld who became the series’ first big “secret host” reveal towards the end of the first season. When we meet Bernard, he is focussed on sussing out why the hosts are malfunctioning, haunted by dreams of his long lost son and romancing the park manager Theresa Cullen. Turns out his son’s death was his cornerstone memory, something he realizes when he discovers he’s a host, created by Ford in the image of his old partner Arnold (whose torment over the loss of his son led him to create the first host Dolores). Ford forces Arnold to kill Theresa, one of many times his creator used him for devious deeds and not the last.
Season 2 finds Bernard on a scrambled mission to solve some new blackouts and patches of missing time, which found him brain-scrambled laying on a beach at the start of the season. In a very confusing, time-slipping narrative, we learn that Bernard teamed up with Hale after the slaughter at the park, got split up, teamed up with Elsie, got hijacked by Ford’s ghost in the machine, and ultimately ended up helping Dolores create the Hale-bot. Ultimately that Bernard body was killed, but Dolores snuck his pearl off the island and rebuilt him a new body in the outside world, where’s he’s now public enemy #1, framed for the slaughter at Westworld. Since then, Bernard has teamed up with Stubbs and, surprisingly, the Man in Black to help stop Dolores.
Vincent Cassel as Engerraund Serac
Human or Host?Human (supposedly, I have doubts)
Vincent Cassellstars as Engerraund Serac, the primary antagonist in Season 3. A tremendously powerful figure in the world outside the park walls, Serac is the co-creator of Rehoboam, the A.I. that predicts/writes the future of the human race. Serac created the omnipotent machine with his brother after the pair escaped the mysterious destruction of Paris. Unfortunately, their system had no room for “outliers” – those who would subvert the grand design – and Serac’s brother was one of those outliers. In response, Serac created a program to reprogram the outliers. However, unlike Caleb, most of them aren’t able to be successfully reprogramed yet. We learn that Caleb’s “success” in the program is one out of nine. The other nine? Frozen in little coffin-like holders for the time being. That includes Serac’s brother andthatis the reason he needs Dolores and Delos, so that he can use their genetic information to fix and “save” his brother.
Serac is also responsible for bringing Maeve back to the mainland (though he took away some of the superior controls from her previous body), pitting the host up against Dolores. And despite Dolores' best efforts, Serac was able to accrue a majority stake at Delos, giving him the opportunity to destroy all the remaining hosts in the park, but not before bringing back some friends for Maeve.
Luke Hemsworth as Ashley Stubbs
Luke Hemsworthstars as Ashley Stubbs, the head of Westworld’s QA Security team. For most of the show, Stubbs has been depicted as a pretty straightforward guy doing his job, running tests on the hosts, checking perimeters and other security stuff – though he did disappear mid-way through Season 1 before turning up totes fine in Season 2. However, in the Season 2 finale, Stubbs heavily indicated he himself was a host, letting the Dolores/Hale-bot slip off the island with some sly dialogue about how the old man hired him to protect the park and all the hosts. And protect he shall. Ever since Bernard made his way back to the park for a quick data download, Stubbs has been tagging along and playing muscle.
Rodrigo Santoro as Hector Escaton
Alive or Dead?Dead, for real this time.
Rodrigo Santorostars as Hector Escaton, the resident park bandit and most wanted man in Westworld, Hector was created by Lee Sizemore as the rugged, heart-breaking nihilist anarchist who brought a dash of violence, romance and chaos to the narrative. Hector was seen briefly in the,ahem, services of Hale in Season 1 and Ford used him to spy on her. His regular loop saw the bandit robbing Maeve’s brothel for the safe and tearing up the town with his right-hand assassin Armistice, but after Maeve achieves consciousness and shows Hector the safe was empty all along, she convinces him to die with her and see the other side.
Hector suffered took heavy gunfire aiding Maeve’s escape in the finale, but he survived into Season 2 and once again fought by her side, joining her on the search for her daughter along with Lee. While Hector has accepted the “nature of his reality,” Lee reveals that he hasn’t fully achieved consciousness when he interrupts Hector mid-speech and finishes the script for him (also sacrificing his life so Hector and Maeve can escape in the process). However, Hector remains faithful to Maeve til the bitter end, and goes down with the rest of his gang, kicking up a row against a mob of infected hosts to protect those running to the Valley Beyond. That said, we do see Hector and his gang’s bodies on the beach at the end of the season, so it’s likely we haven’t seen the last of those particular hosts just yet. Maeve sees Hector in Warworld, but it’s not really him – that is, until she makes some demands of Serac and revives Hector’s consciousness… just in time for him to be killed for good when Haleores has his brain pearl destroyed into dust.
Simon Quarterman as Lee Sizemore
Alive or Dead?Dead
Simon Quartermanstars as Lee Sizemore, the head of Narrative and Design at the Delos parks, including Westworld and Shugunworld. A braggart and a bit of a blowhard, Lee regularly sparred with Ford in the first season over the storylines. He’s caught in the mesa during the host uprising and is almost killed by one of his most grotesque creations (a cannibal, no less) when he’s saved by Maeve and offers his help to find her daughter if she’ll protect him. Season 2 follows him on the journey with Maeve and Hector, which takes them through Shogun world – a particularly humbling moment when the hosts realize he recycled some of his narratives between the two worlds. Later, he reveals that Hector was inspired by the great love he lost, and picking up the words to a speech he wrote for the host, he sacrifices himself so that Maeve and Hector can escape. In Season 3, Maeve sees Lee again in a simulation, but he’s part of the programming, not the real Lee. However, when we see him again, the Simu-Lee is still aware he’s in a simulation so there are some interesting questions about A.I. within simulations that still need to be answered!
