It bears reiterating. Evan Rachel Wood in S2E9 "Vanishing Point" is some of the best acting I've ever seen.
Because philosophically, what's happening is that Dolores's soul mate just dumped her in an extremely dramatic fashion and she's in shock.
But what's literally happening is that a supercomputer that planned for every contingency just got blindsided by the one person she thought she knew like the back of her hand doing something she didn't account for. And now her entire plan - the end goal she was working towards and was so certain about - has been thrown off and it actually takes a second for her cognition to recalibrate and react.
And Evan just nails both sides of this character; both human and machine. Look at the way she tenses up, the way her eyes snap to the middle distance. The way she takes a few robotic steps forward because she doesn't know what to do and falls to her knees, furrows her brow like she almost doesn't know what she's looking at for a second. Dolores is so good at pretending to be human, but when she is at her most emotional, that's actually when the façade starts to break down and she reverts to something a little less elegant. The tears come, but first her entire mind goes blue-screen for a moment, and you can see it on her face. Not just shocked, malfunctioning. Not just devastated, perplexed. 🏆

















