Caleb (Aaron Paul) takes a strange trip in the latest episode of Westworld season 3, after Liam Dempsey (John Gallagher Jr.) doses him with a party drug called Genre. Using her newfound access to Incite, along with one of the other versions of herself, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) pulls a serious power move against Serac (Vincent Cassel) by infiltrating and leaking Rehoboam's data - and Caleb experiences it all through the filter of different movie genres.
When Giggles (Marshawn Lynch) is called in for backup along with Ash (Lena Waithe), he immediately recognizes what Caleb is going through and tells him that there will be five genres in total, warning that he should "watch out for that last act." So, exactly which genres does Caleb experience the world through the filter of, and what songs go with them?
The first genre is film noir, with Caleb seeing things in black and white as he, Dolores and Liam are pursued by Serac's employees. During the car chase he shifts genres to war, and Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" (the signature theme from Apocalypse Now) plays as Caleb fires on the pursuing vehicles using heavy-duty weaponry.
Eventually Caleb and Dolores stop to make a stand against the remaining vehicles and the genre shifts again, this time to romance, with the world acquiring a soft rosy glow, the swelling music of the main theme from the 1970 movie Love Story, and Dolores moving in slow motion as Caleb stares at her. When they enter the subway, joined by Giggles and Ash, Caleb shifts to what appears to be the crime genre, with Iggy Pop's swaggering tune "Nightclubbing" (most famously featured in Trainspotting) playing as the lights pulse.
The final genre shift comes after Dolores releases Rehoboam's profiles on every single person in the world to their owners, so that they can see exactly what the supercomputer knows about them and has projected and planned - including what their friends really think of them, whether or not they will be permitted to reproduce, and how their loved ones will die. As chaos breaks out all around, an arrangement of David Bowie's song "Space Oddity" by Westworld composer Ramin Djawadi begins. Caleb asks Giggles which genre he is experiencing now, and Giggles replies that he's experiencing reality.
Finally, the scene on the beach features the arrangement of "Dies Irae" that was used in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. At this point it doesn't appear that Caleb is actually experiencing the world through a horror genre filter, but the song definitely sets the mood for bloodshed - which soon arrives.
"Genre" moves the plot forward further than any other episode of Westworld season 3 so far, with Dolores using her systematic replacement of key humans to strike the first devastating blow against the world she plans to conquer. With everyone now thrown off their loops, things will quickly start to unravel unless Serac can find a way to get them in order again. We may be about to enter the disaster movie genre.