Lara Milbratz

The title refers to the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City.

Actor Evan Rachel Wood and creator Lisa Joy have both said that Dolores evokes Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Maybe it’s the 1) tied back blonde hair, or 2) the powder blue high-waisted dress or 3) the fact that she’s a blank slate who stumbles into a wacky fantasy world full of anthropomorphic creatures, much like the iconic character.

One minute Dolores is painting horses in the blissful area of the park, and another minute, she’s galloping home to a traumatic experience. “I’m in a dream,” she obediently tells her technicians during these trying times. The Lewis Carroll story and subsequent Disney adaptations also explain away that freakshow of a tea party by concluding it was all a dream, so this comparison seems about right.

Philosophers have long been concerned about how we can know that our world isn’t just a very believable simulation of a real one. But concern about that has become ever more active in recent years, as computers and artificial intelligence have advanced.

That has led some tech billionaires to speculate that the chances we are not living in such a simulation is “billions to one”.

“Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer,” writes The New Yorker’s Tad Friend. “Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

A number of prominent tech billionaires have discussed the idea of the simulation – including Elon Musk, who has used his fortune to fund potentially odd efforts in the past.

Mr Musk spoke earlier this year about the fact that he believes that the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation is “one in billions”. He said that he had come to that conclusion after a chat in a hot tub, where it was pointed out that computing technology has advanced so quickly that at some point in the future it will become indistinguishable from real life – and, if it does, there’s no reason to think that it hasn’t done already and that that’s what we are currently living through.