That simplicity of the ultimate idea behind the show gives the creators freedom to actually have a little fun with the format. One of the coolest things about this episode is courtesy of the drug injected into Caleb (Aaron Paul). Called “genre,” throughout the episode, every bit of Caleb’s POV is accompanied by something out of a different type of movie. These range from the early film noir elements when he’s skulking through a city trying to evade detection with Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), “Ride of the Valkyries” during a chase scene, and most amusingly, the strains of Henry Mancini’s famous “Theme From Love Story” during, of all things, a shootout while standing next to a lovingly-shot Dolores in profile.
It’s a fun bit of playing with the look of the show, from fading into black-and-white during the film noir fantasy to the drum machine throb of Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” during the public transportation escape when Dolores downloads everyone’s file from Rehoboam to their personal device with a phone call to Connells (Tommy Flanagan). Dolores is literally tearing the fabric of the world around him to shreds, and to Caleb, it’s merely an emotionally-arresting drama where he reveals a tragic story to serve as a metaphor for the situation Dolores has placed the world into.
Aaron Paul, who has excelled at both comedy and drama, deserves a lot of credit for his ability to meld both skills here. When he’s staggering around under the influence of genre, suspiciously eying strangers, it’s very funny. The Love Story moment where he watches, rapt, as Dolores machine guns down some of Serac’s guards is brilliantly funny, if only for his sheer goggle-eyed fawning. However, when his genre shifts from to action, and again from action to gritty drama, he’s brilliantly able to shift gears to match the material that exists only in his head. He also does a wonderful job of maintaining whatever genre Caleb is in no matter what might be happening around him, with Evan Rachel Wood, Lena Waithe, and, surprisingly, Marshawn Lynch as great straight acts to surround him, carrying the weight of responding to his brilliantly bleary-eyed performance. Even without the change in musical cue, or the drop of the beat, you can tell genres are shifting on Caleb simply by the way Paul’s face changes, and that’s a skillful feat from the actor.
Director Anna Foerster, too, deserves credit for the balancing act. Caleb is very much in a one-man movie, and the little touches Foerster gives to the genres as they shift—particularly the slightly blurry soft focus on Dolores as Caleb gazes on her lovingly and the well-done drone strike bomb on the pursuit SUV during the “Valkyries” chase—elevate the shift into something a little more than a gimmick. Westworld was very much a western in the first season, then very much a samurai movie, and now it’s something that blurs the lines between those genres as needed, hence genre the drug. It’s an action/mystery/sci-fi thriller with elements of horror, romance, and comedy.
Foerster also makes good use of b-roll to flesh out Serac’s back story, not neglecting that particular tale, which functions as both interlude, back story, and framing device for the episode. In many ways, aside from Caleb’s hallucinations, Serac’s tale provides the most interesting visuals of the episode, with people trapped in cages, recalling William’s efforts to recreate his father in law James Delos in Host form and William’s own imprisonment. There would always be some people who didn’t fit into Rehoboam’s efforts to guide humanity, and Serac has made a concerted effort to isolate, imprison, and otherwise remove these people from the human tapestry, even at the cost of his business partner Liam Dempsey Sr. (Jefferson Mays) or his brother.
