Freeze all motor functions! Westworld fans react to Dolores’ shocking secret

Well, that just happened. After speculating our way through the first three episodes of Westworld this season wondering just what Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) had up her sleeve, a huge piece of the puzzle (or several teensy tiny little pieces, to be precise) has finally rolled right into place. 

The end of “The Mother of Exiles,” Sunday’s fourth Season 3 episode, brought an answer to one of the biggest questions fans have had since Season 2: just whose synth identities did Dolores smuggle out of Westworld? For three weeks now, fans have concocted one plausible theory after another — and with Westworld, almost any theory feels plausible. 

Now that we have the answer, it may take social media a moment or two to bring itself back online from all the fan fallout. Reactions to tonight’s big reveal range all the way from “told you so!” to “no they didn’t!” — so of course the only thing to do is take a sampling before next week’s episode piles on even more surprises.

**Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for Westworld Season 3 Episode 4, "The Mother of Exiles," below.**

Lo and behold, it turns out there’s only one Westworld host whose identity is pearl-worthy — and it's the one at the top of the food chain. Sunday’s episode revealed that there’s more than one Dolores walking around in the real world, and that she didn’t just upload her identity-defining data to Charlotte Hale’s body alone. Nope, Dolores diabolically cloned herself into the other black pearls that left Westworld with her at the end of last season, and on Sunday the others revealed themselves in the bodies of Musashi and Connells (along with Charlotte and the "real" Dolores herself, of course).

Multiple Doloreses, hiding out in stolen identities, walking free in multiple places at once…whoah. If you're Dolores, though, it makes sense — or, as Musashi/Dolores puts it, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." In the immediate aftermath, fans were predictably beside themselves:

With all those Doloreses running around incognito, and not even power-grabbing human megalomaniac Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) fully in on just what’s at stake, things are about to get even more interesting...and certainly no less dystopian. Maeve (Thandie Newton) may look down for the count following her mind-warping standoff with Mishashi/Dolores, but we've seen the Season 3 trailers...and we know there's a showdown on the horizon. Catch what happens next when episode 5 of Westworld comes back online on April 12.