SPOILER ALERT: I obviously don’t know how the season will end, but I am writing this knowing (or, more exactly, “knowing”) what happened in the first seven episodes. So there are spoilers below.

I have never ever even been close to predicting a season finale correctly. But does that stop me? Nah. Someday the script writers will learn to pay attention to how I say show will end the day before it ends and will use that to re-shoot the entire thing because they recognize the superiority of my sense of narrative, theme, and character. For example, did they listen to me when I said the only satisfying way to wrap up Leave it to Beaver would be for June to hire Eddie Haskel to take a hatchet to her husband Ward. Eddie was clearly a sociopath with father issues, and, come on, the family name was “Cleaver.” Talk about your heavy-handed foreshadowing! But would the writers listen? They never do.

Anyway, here’s definitely how Season 3 wraps up tomorrow night. I am certain that I’m getting this one right. 100%. Here goes:

We’ve been watching two simulations, one by Rehoboam the other by Solomon. Rehoboam’s is schizophrenic, because Serac is actually the crazy one, not his brother.

Rehoboam is based around the idea that with enough data, you can predict everything humans will do. Solomon was built on Serac’s brother’s belief that humans ultimately are more unpredictable than that. That’s why you need to gather as many of the “outliers” as you can and use them as a living AI farm. Each of the outliers entombed in the building with Solomon is processing a different world simulation, based not just on the data that Delos has provided from WestWorld but also on the outlier’s own character, personal experience, models, etc. Unless you do this, you end up with a simulation (Rehoboam’s) that is too regular and orderly.

Part of the Big Reveal: Caleb finds his own body in one of the pods in Solomon’s warehouse. His simulation (i.e., the simulation his body is having in conjunction with Solomon) is the most successful one.

Ok, that’s as far as I’ve gotten, except that I find myself hoping that Dolores wins, much as I love Thandie Newton. I’m not at all sure I’m supposed to be that sympathetic to Dolores given that she’s a manipulative, cold-blooded mass murderer. I may be influenced by how fantastically Rachel Evan Wood acts an amazingly complex and difficult role.

The one thing I’m certain of throughout all of this is, that Monday morning I’m going to be reading a bunch of recaps to find out what actually happened.

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Newton showed that the tides are produced by the gravitational pull of the moon and the Sun. But, as a 1914 article in Scientific American pointed out, if you want any degree of accuracy, you have to deal with the fact that “the earth is not a perfect sphere, it isn’t covered with water to a uniform­ form depth, it has many continents and islands and sea passages of peculiar shapes and depths, the earth does not travel about the sun in a circular path, and earth, sun and moon are not always in line. The result is that two tides are rarely the same for the same place twice running, and that tides dif­fer from each other enormously in both times and in amplitude.”

So, we instead built a machine of brass, steel and mahogany. And instead of trying to understand each of the variables, Lord Kelvin postulated “a very respectable number” of fictitious suns and moons in various positions over the earth, moving in unrealistically perfect circular orbits, to account for the known risings and fallings of the tide, averaging readings to remove unpredictable variations caused by weather and “freshets.” Knowing the outcomes, he would nudge a sun or moon’s position, or add a new sun or moon, in order to get the results to conform to what we know to be the actual tidal measurements. If adding sea serpents would have helped, presumably Lord Kelvin would have included them as well.

The first mechanical tide-predicting machines using these heuristics were made in England. In 1881, one was created in the United States that was used by the Coast and Geodetic Survey for twenty-seven years.

Then, in 1914, it was replaced by a 15,000-piece machine that took “account of thirty-seven factors or components of a tide” (I wish I knew what that means) and predicted the tide at any hour. It also printed out the information rather than requiring a human to transcribe it from dials. “Unlike the human brain, this one cannot make a mistake.”

This new model was more accurate, with greater temporal resolution. But it got that way by giving up on predicting the actual tide, which might vary because of the weather. We simply accept the unpredictability of what we shall for the moment call “reality.” That’s how we manage in a world governed by uniform laws operating on unpredictably complex systems.

It is also a model that uses the known major causes of average tides — the gravitational effects of the sun and moon — but that feels fine about fictionalizing the model until it provides realistic results. This makes the model incapable of being interrogated about the actual causes of the tide, although we can tinker with it to correct inaccuracies. In this there is a very rough analogy — and some disanalogies — with some instances of machine learning.

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There’s absolutely no reason to read this. If you’re reading it before the last episode of Breaking Bad airs tonight, it contains rank speculation and yet another bad guess. If you’re reading it afterwards, it’s just plain wrong. So, go away. I’ll let you know if it turns out there was any reason to continue reading.

The title of tonight’s final Breaking Bad episode is “Felina,” which, as others have pointed out, is an anagram of “finale.”

Eric Brown reports on a few Internet theories about what the title means. Pretty interesting, especially the Marty Robbins one. But I kind of like the possible reference to Schrodinger’s cat, especially since Heisenberg is all about uncertainty.

So, here’s a prediction. The cage that Jesse is in is a Schrodinger box. Walt comes upon Jesse in it unable to tell if Jesse is alive or dead. Maybe Todd has a gun on him, telling him he can talk away and leave Jesse to die. Walt opens the box. ( The probability wave settles: Jesse lives, and Walt dies.

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