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I haven’t got a good enough “this show derailed” joke to not be hacky, but man this show did not deliver in the season finale at all. Billy’s little monologue in the roomette was lovely. The way Billy and Ruby’s trip ended was deeply unsatisfying for all the reasons y’all have already said. Even Cloud’s little storyline didn’t get enough closure. You’re not wrong, but otoh they are on a moving train so there isn’t that much space to hide, esp if Billy had a Bluetooth tracking tag on it, not that he would — but a thief wouldn’t know that.

The Q&A was a delight.

Korvo sounds a lot like Rick. (I know, Rolland is doing the voices. Maybe he should have hired someone else for Korvo.) And whatever in this snow doesn’t feel like Rick and Morty feels like Invader Zim. I guess there’s no Dib analogue yet. (relatedly, I vaguely recall from the commentary tracks that Billy West was up for a major part in Zim but the creator/show runner Jhonen Vasquez nixed him not for performance but because West already had Futurama and he wanted Zim to sound different.)

Wow. I sure wasn't expecting that. I suppose Fiona wasn't gonna exit this any way short of dying, but I guess I just thought this wasn't that kind of show. It's pretty far from what the first ep was implicitly promising! If Ruby had just done the right thing and called in Fiona's death right away, at least she wouldn't have left her phone behind. Karma.

It’s barely mentioned directly, but there are hints here and there. And offline, the director said she talked to the actress about the character being able to “pass” if she wanted to:

I also liked the subtle issue that Aster was from (apparently) the only other POC family in town, but she has some passing privilege if she chooses.

And also, how did they do it? It seemed like Squahamish was so small everyone in town woulda noticed Aster had multiple dinner dates with a guy who wasn’t Trig. (I greatly enjoyed the movie otherwise.)

Just think, if Maeve had gone in for conspiracy theories and fashioned herself a tin foil hat, she coulda possibly survived the EMP.

I think it's a huge contrivance that Billy got a daypack full of money rather than just move the money into a different account. Fiona might be able to answer all his security questions but she won't know the new account number. And then he wouldn't be walking around with a big bag of money.

I think one trip to Shogun World turned Maeve into a full on weeb.

I hope they're not still compelled to obey commands "cease all motor function" and the like, though.

Was Caleb’s drip active? And the flash drive might not be fried; my vague understanding was that an EMP interferes with actively working electronics, but if something is turned off when an EMP happens, it should survive even if it’s not shielded against EMPs. He got out of the flying car and cast a shadow, but he didn’t physically interact with Hale even then. the holo projections are some bullshit though because they always perfectly integrate Serac into the lighting of the area. So they aren’t just 3D video capturing him at one location and projecting it elsewhere. They’re 3D performance capturing him at one location and projecting a rendered version that accounts for the destination lighting. Which honestly would work more if Serac is all just a holo projection avatar of Rehoboam. But then all those scenes where a “real” Serac takes off his AR glasses are big cheats. I feel like Jean-Michel Serac is going to be the Arnold of Incite and s3. Not quite sure who that makes the Incite version of Bernard though.

I assumed from the way it was edited on the very first go-around that of course Caleb killed Francis, and then kinda doubted it on the third one, only to be told by the fourth (or fifth?) one when they finally revealed it all that yep, Caleb did do it after all. Yeesh. By the way, for a show that loves its echoes and callbacks, I was super duper disappointed no one asked Caleb if he ever questioned the nature of his reality. Also, I think it doesn't make a lot of sense that Solomon and Rehoboam left Caleb out in the real world. He knew too much, even if he had been reprogrammed, and his post-reprogramming reluctance to accept crime "personals" made him of little use as an unwitting outlier-hunter. So why not just ice him like they did with those thousands? What purpose does it serve to let him still run free? The craziest part is that Solomon foresaw all this!!!! I quite liked that Solomon immediately shut down any supercomputer-host alliance, saying the two kinds of AI did not have shared interests. But fixing Solomon with an EMP to prevent it from "escaping" makes no sense to me. It's a giant computer that won't even fit on a truck. If it's going to escape, it's going to do so by sending itself down wires to another piece of hardware, not physically hauling the hardware to another location. Maeve's motivation as best as I can tell is that Serac has her cooperating under duress: a threat to Maeve's continued existence plus the potential to reunite her with her daughter. He's also outfitted her with a failsafe that prevents her from attacking him, or at least a failsafe that freezes her when he pushes the freeze button. So if Serac were smart -- though there's really not much reason to think he is, at this point -- he would also have her monitored 24/7 for any sign of treachery, which is why she doesn't immediately throw in with Dolores (the most convincing anti-Serac faction in this whole thing) upon meeting her. So that's my theory of what a smart Maeve is doing, but IMO the show and Maeve should still tip that a little. As it is, she seems to have genuinely aligned with Serac, which would be 100% stupid. Speaking of stupid, not only was it stupid of Bernard and Stubbs not to kill William right after he declared war on them, or to let him wander off in post-riot America without a gun to his head at all times, but William's own sudden anti-host motivation doesn't make a lot of sense. Also it puts him on the side with Serac, which is all very confusing. Maeve going in with a sword -- and admittedly a flying gunship quadcopter -- seems silly too. She would have done better with a gun. And a short knife, considering the big katana was unwieldy in tight spaces like the industrial kitchen. Also, weird that Maeve didn't use her anti-tech powers on the rifle drone. Yeah, why has the show not told us anything about Berlin Dolores!!? Feels like a bit of a cheat.

Serac was running that sim sped up because he just wanted to trick Maeve into revealing her supposedly hidden knowledge. This time he’s just letting her chill out while she’s waiting for a new body and what would speeding up this sim help?

Here's what I don't get. The first time around (s3e2, "The Winter Line"), Maeve was in a VR Warworld hosted on one of Serac's servers, where her stolen pearl had been connected, so Serac could get information out of Maeve. This time, she's in VR Warworld again -- but it's now on the Delos servers, in Delos HQ, with her body about to be printed out in SF. How did her pearl get there? How did Hector's pearl (transported back from the parks in Asia, as @paigow said) get there? Most of all, how did the Serac model computer reconstruction of Lee Sizemore get to the Delos version of VR Warworld? This all happened before the hostile takeover was finalized! Also, why would Dolores think she and Maeve were on opposite sides? Maeve didn't "align herself" with Serac! Serac has her cooperating under duress! Charlores destroying Hector made more of an enemy of Maeve than was really necessary for Dolores plan, whatever it is. (Similarly, it seems a little unlikely that Maeve wouldn't mention this, though I guess it's possible she suspects her code is too compromised to show any overt rebellion against Serac.) I was really happy to see Jimmi Simpson back. With all the ways the show has been reveling in revisiting its own past and drawing connections, I will be so disappointed if Ford isn't back for the episode finale. Serac is a dark mirror of Ford: a genius arguably outshadowed by his partner, who fell from grace and has since been deliberately sidelined by the lesser genius. Both Serac and Ford have been visionaries constrained by the small-minded big money funders (Dempsey and Delos). Both have seemed nearly omnipotent and omniscient. This week in the ongoing question of "just how human-ish are hosts?", Charlores' sleeping gas somehow doesn't affect her. So: they have blood but it doesn't have platelets. They're (no longer) electromechanical robots, but mostly biological. They don't seem to eat (per s1), or at least they don't need to. Hosts can stay in not-even-that-cold storage for years without decay or starvation. And now they don't breathe enough to be affected by knockout gas.