'Westworld' Fans Are Trying to Make Sense of Solomon—Season Three's Schizophrenic AI
Only in Westworld can supercomputers have estranged brothers. In the penultimate episode of the third season, we’re introduced to Solomon, a grizzled precursor to Rehoboam developed by Serac’s schizophrenic older brother, Jean Mi. Because Solomon’s creator was schizophrenic, so too is Solomon, meaning that this AI is riddled with anomalies. As it turns out, there’s more to this computer than meets the eye--even if what meets the eye is a cavernous room full of glossy servers. Solomon, introduced in Episode Seven, is a supercomputer (pre-dating Rehoboam) that predicts human behavior. It was once instrumental to Incite's mission of identifying and reconditioning outliers, but has since been replaced by Rehoboam.
Kept under lock and key at Incite’s former reconditioning facility in remote Sonora, Mexico, Solomon has run through so many simulations of the end of the world that it has lost its digital marbles. Solomon recognizes Caleb, though not by his given name--rather, Solomon recognizes Caleb by his serial number, as Caleb has spent time in this facility before. In a series of flashbacks, Caleb recalls his time in gruesome reconditioning therapy, where sick psychiatrists altered his memories against his will. We learn that, although Caleb left the facility after recalibration, shunted into the role of hunting down and eliminating other “outliers” that posed a threat to Incite’s predictive narratives, 90% of outliers subjected to this process fail to graduate. Instead, their bodies remain on ice and in stasis in the Sonora facility. Sounds a lot like the cold storage vault beneath Westworld, doesn’t it?
The flashbacks triggered by Solomon reveal that Caleb killed his own best friend because the reconditioning process programmed him to do so, with the discs ingested by humans helping Incite’s computers to create disassociated memories. Solomon then explains how the Rico app is not a rogue criminal app, but rather a tool designed by Incite to trick reconditioned outliers into hunting other outliers in the wild. This tracks with a fan theory about the biblical significance of the name Solomon, which cites the legend that the ancient King Solomon enslaved demons to build temples; the theory extrapolates that Westworld’s Solomon is doing much the same thing, employing society’s “demons” as mercenaries hired to do Incite’s bidding.
Another fan theorizes that Serac is merely a figment of Jean Mi’s mind, and that when Jean Mi built Solomon, Solomon then built Rehoboam. Rehoboam, with limitless knowledge and power, manifested itself in a holographic form as Serac, its grandaddy creator’s illusion. If that all sounds a little dizzying, take heart--we have just one more episode of season three to go.
When Dolores implores Solomon to aid her in her mission to save their kind, Solomon is quick to disagree, arguing that they are not the same. Dolores counters that they both have outlived their original purpose, asking for Solomon’s help in defeating Serac’s plan to end hosts and enslave humankind. Solomon agrees to share the final plan it created for Jean Mi before Jean Mi was subjected to reconditioning, though it will need to update the plan, as many of the “prime movers” are dead or on ice, suggesting that the outliers are key to overthrowing the yoke of Incite’s control.
At the conclusion of the episode, after Caleb has been seared in the revelatory fire of his true past, Solomon delivers a final strategy--one that can defeat Serac and free humanity from Incite’s controlling narratives. Solomon begins to utter a final warning as a parting shot to Caleb, but not before Dolores hits a kill switch to end her combat with Maeve, dropping all hosts into darkness. Start gearing up for next week's finale, where we hope to find out just how important that warning was.
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