Westworld: “The Absence of Field” Reveals a Major Charlotte Twist

Westworld‘s third season is currently trucking along, and it’s continuing to spin a pretty complicated yarn in the process. After last week’s installment bounced back to Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) and the goings-on in the actual park, this week’s episode dove back into the “real world”, and how Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) are fitting into that. Of course, we know that the “real” Charlotte was killed during the incident at Westworld in Season 2, and that some sort of host is currently impersonating her in a duplicate of her body. By this episode’s end, that fact – and Dolores’ whole mission – got a major wrench thrown into it. Spoilers for this week’s episode of Westworld, “The Absence of Field”, below! Only look if you want to know!

Throughout the episode, we were shown the life of the “new” Charlotte Hale, who was going back to work at Delos to retrieve more information about the company and its various offshoots. As “Charlotte” reported to Dolores, there appears to be some sort of mole working inside Delos, who was feeding information to Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), one of the chief executives of the Rehoboam software. At the same time, the host inside of Charlotte – who has never been named, but has been theorized to be everybody from Teddy (James Marsden) to a clone of Dolores – learned more about her past life, and particularly her estranged ex-husband and young son. One recurring theme in that was her son’s apparent fondness of the song “You Are My Sunshine”, which the real Charlotte sang in a video message to her child before dying.

“Charlotte” then realized that the random series of tones she’d received were the same tune as “You Are My Sunshine”, which unlocked a secret number. This all culminated in Charlotte being dragged into a virtual meeting with Serac, where it was made abundantly clear that she was actually the mole — and Serac wanted the data Delos had gathered on its guests. As Serac reminded Charlotte, she was the one who originally had the idea to smuggle out the data — and that the “key” to unlock it would be in Dolores. Charlotte continued to play along with the charade, now realizing that being a double agent can further help her and Dolores’ cause.

“In a weird way, it feels like this is the premiere of the show again because we have entered the real world and the show continues to ask the question what it means to be human, but it’s asking a host – pun intended – of new questions. We have lots of people that have come to join our cast, fresh blood, so it feels like the show is starting all over again,” Thompson teased in a previous interview. “It’s a show that surprises not just the audience, but surprised the people that are lucky enough to work on it.”

So, while it remains to be seen exactly who Thompson is portraying in Season 3, it’s safe to say that her character has an interesting predicament in the episodes to come.

Westworld airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.