Westworld: 4x08 Que Será, Será.
It is time for one last game. A dangerous game with the highest of stakes. Survival or extinction.
A few episodes ago, Bernard delivered an at the time undecipherable message about the future. He said that whatever he and Maeve were doing couldn’t save the world, that they would die in any scenario he had seen and the world would die with them. But he also said that there was the fraction of a chance for one last attempt, but it lay in someone else’s hands. In Que Será, Será, Charlotte Hale is now the recipient of that same message – sent to him from a Bernard just before his last hurrah, letting her know that she has created a world that is not sustainable, that will fail, and that she now has a choice about whether to let someone else have that last try. Charlotte has, somehow, survived William’s attempt to kill her – it looked like a head shot to her pearl, but she is repaired, given a body that is stronger but still looks like her, because she wants William to know who killed him once she comes for him. She has to admit defeat because whatever it is she created now lies in shambles, humans and hosts killing each other, following the siren sound that William programmed the tower to emit. Will she be stubborn and insist that this is it, or will she admit that there was always a different way to do this?
Meanwhile, Christina reckons with the realisation that she is not real. As the world around her lies in chaos, she ponders what it means that she is a machine without a body, a programme running this entire reality but not existing in it. We get an explanation for how others could interact with her – they weren’t sent by Charlotte, but created by Christina so she could have conversations with herself that brought her closer to the truth. She was seeking answers, and the only way to get them was by interacting and communicating, even if it was just with herself. As Charlotte destroys the simulation and retrieves Christina’s pearl, which lies beneath it, she finds herself once again in the walled garden with her former roommate, talking about what options remain in a world that always seemed destined to fail, and she remembers Dolores’ way of seeing the world all the way back in Westworld, her quiet fascination with the beauty and connectedness of nature. Teddy told her that her appearance was never what made her real, that it is her thoughts and the effects she has on the world that make her.
For the entirety of this final fight between Charlotte and William, it remains unclear what decision she has made about Bernard’s message. She knows that William wants a tabula rasa, which means destroying the sublime along with this world, which is already done for. He thinks that hosts are destined for failure, fruit from a rotten tree, impossible to save, and he wants to eradicate everything – it’s a conclusion only a man like William could come to, aware of his own shortcomings only insofar as he assumes everyone else shares them. The small scenes between Frankie and Caleb in the episode – a father desperate to save his daughter after spending so long looking for her, feeling himself fail – serve to prove William wrong in a way, show a side of humanity that he has never stopped to consider.
William is about to destroy the sublime when Charlotte finds him, and there is one final fight – William versus the now stronger Charlotte, in a body that appears to be human but has been made stronger – and Charlotte prevails in the end because Bernard left her a gift, another small piece of the puzzle of what he saw as the endgame. This time, Charlotte does double tap – she removes William’s pearl, killing the Man in Black once and for all. No more grandstanding, no more egotistical musings about the world. Then she does what Bernard asked her to do, gives Christina a shot at starting anew. She puts her pearl into the system, allowing her control over the sublime, so that she can run one final game to check if humans and hosts are truly unchangeable. Charlotte’s attempts at edification and transformation have failed miserably, but maybe Dolores – the woman who painted pictures and believed in love – can create a world that makes positive change possible, rather than more slaughter.
Random notes:
I only noticed in this episode that the streetlamps in the city are shaped like the tower – either Charlotte is a class A troll or Christina was building in little signs to help herself awake to her reality.
I truly hope that we’ll see Maeve again. Nobody seemed to be retrieving her body from the pool, but Charlotte’s very unlikely survival gives me some hope. This does seem to be the last we’ll see of Charlotte though – after completing her mission, she removes her own pearl and destroys it, finding a scenic spot to do it. What a role for Tessa Thompson, who seemed to be having the time of her life.
Of course, Christina could have realised a lot earlier that Teddy was also a figment of her imagination, but we wouldn’t have gotten their tearful goodbye and her promise to come find the real him in the sublime.
Also the messed-upness of Christina being in complete control of this world and yet creating a boss for herself who is controlling and mean! Capitalism’s creed of self-exploitation appears to also have translated from humans to hosts somehow.
A sad goodbye to Clementine, who narrowly escapes being drafted into Charlotte’s war with William only to be killed by Frankie, with her last bullet. All she wanted was live peacefully in some remaining free corner of the world (after killing whoever she found there). And she kills Stubbs in the process – poor Stubbs, always destined for death, and in a way spending the entire episode up to this moment waiting for it to arrive. Bernard has never been wrong.
I’ve rarely hated a character as much as William (Ezra Fitz, maybe?), but I’m sure there’s someone out there who appreciates that he got to go out the way he did, and made it part of the way there in a pick-up truck blasting Ring of Fire.
Caleb says goodbye to Frankie at the docks – it’s unclear if Dolores’ final game will involve the remaining humans, it’s just as likely that they will be left in their remote corners of the world to fend for themselves while she runs her new game, but let’s hope it works out for Frankie and her girlfriend.
Westworld: 4x07 Metanoia.
I mentioned Person of Interest’s If-Then-Else a little while ago, as a note of comparison to what Bernard is experiencing in this season of Westworld. He has played through all the possible scenarios of the present moment in the Sublime, and seen them all end in death – and like the Machine in POI, attempting to calculate a way out of an impossible situation with the least damage to the people it wants to protect, Bernard is trying to find the one path that leaves a glimmer of hope alive for both humans and hosts. We see him and Maeve walk into Charlotte’s server farm, where Bernard admits to Maeve that he can’t see this end well, and she says that she wouldn’t fight with him if she didn’t know that at the end of it, she could reunite with her daughter in the sublime. And then it all goes wrong – the dam breaks, they die. But because this is a version of another story, Bernard goes right back to the moment before they entered, tweaks a few details, and plays the scene more successfully. We only see these two versions – one where he tells Maeve the truth, and they fail, and one where he doesn’t, and they succeed – but of course, in the background of all of this, we know that there a million of other ways the moment could have gone, and this is merely a shortcut to the one path that works, at least for the moment. Maybe this is why Bernard always seems slightly removed from the moment, as if he isn’t fully present or engaged. His commitment to humanity is always there, but knowing of his own death has almost put him in a position where he is already not all the way there anymore.
Bernard’s lie to Maeve that he will return her to the Sublime ensures their survival, and they travel to where the showdown at the end of the episode will happen. Everyone is headed for the tower, except Stubbs and Frankie, who set out to save Caleb from Olympiad, and Christina, who is on a journey to truly realise who she is under Teddy’s guidance. Her first reaction to hearing what she is is dramatic: she goes into the bathroom, runs a bath, and then stays under water for longer than should be possible for a human, proving a point about her mortality.
The tower is at the centre of the episode because Charlotte, in another threatening conversation with a new Caleb, reveals her plan for the future. She will shut down the cities and the humans inside of them, putting them in cold storage like that hosts once were, and command her hosts to transcend to the next, no-longer-resembling humanity stage. They have played long enough and not lived up to their potential. Charlotte thinks it is the proximity to humanity that has made them weak, has driven so many of them to self-destruction, and so she will rid hosts of humans once and for all. It puts a timer on everything that happens, a new kind of urgency.
William isn’t sold on Charlotte’s plan. He doesn’t believe in transcendence, after all, the man his programming is based on conceptualised the world as a Hobbesian anarchy (a world in its natural state without a sovereign is one in a constant state of war), a dog-eat-dog world, in which culture is meaningless and civilisation distracts from the sheer fight for survival. The real William, trapped in his cage, taunts him about his dependence on Charlotte, and eventually, host William stabs him - but it is not in defiance of his ideology, but in accepting it for himself, and deciding on a path that diverges from Charlotte’s. William’s ideology of survival was never based on any keen observation of humanity, it is merely an expression of his own selfishness, his lack of connection to others in this world and inability to empathise with anyone else.
At the end, Caleb and Frankie have a tearful, unlikely reunion. Frankie is grown up, but Caleb is exactly the same as he was when she saw him last. They run away with Stubbs, for now save from the inevitable confrontation between Charlotte, William, Maeve and Bernard. It’s Maeve who confronts Charlotte just as she is about to transcend – a process she approaches with hesitancy, for all she has preached about becoming more than humanity, her connection to her human form is strong. They have an epic fight that is cut short when William arrives and shoots both of them (in the head, the implication being that he destroyed their pearls and that their death is no final). He then finds Bernard, who is replaying the conversation he had before returning to this world from the sublime in his head again and again, as we are trying to find the glimmer of hope that he saw in this scenario. He walked into it knowing he and all of his friends wouldn’t survive (he did come clean to Maeve, earlier), but what is that kernel of hope? Is it Christina, off with Teddy? William shoots Bernard and programs the tower to create a world in his own image in which everyone fights for survival to the bitter end, a world without connection. Stubbs, Caleb and Frankie narrowly escape once everyone begins fighting, and Christina desperately tries to stop it with her mind control, but finds that it is overridden by the pulses from the tower. And then Teddy explains to her that everyone here can’t even see her – she is a ghost, not truly present in this reality. Is she the hope that Bernard had?
Random notes:
Teddy’s revelation at the end about Christina not truly being there is interesting, considering we have seen other characters interact with her.
Stubbs is pretty stoic about the fact that he waited 23 years for Bernard to wake up only to be told that he won't make it out alive.
It is hard to see how the next episode will play out with so many of our regular characters seemingly dead – no Maeve, Charlotte or Bernard. But then I guess the thing about Bernard is that we can never be entirely sure about the finality of whatever we see play out.
Bernard confirms to Maeve in the beginning that the server farm houses the sublime, but that the code to access it is still hidden in his head, and Charlotte wouldn't be able to get to it without him. Bernard does seem to have done something to the Sublime at the dam, so maybe it's already open? I wonder if this is all moot now with both of them dead, but we'll find out!
That fight between Maeve and Charlotte is one for the ages (and again, very T:SCC).
Charlotte’s comprehension about what those in her charge want appears to be so limited. She talks to Maeve about bringing hosts back from the sublime to live in her world, even though the sublime is Westworld’s version of heaven (presumably, these hosts would be about as happy about being ripped out of heaven as Buffy Summers was).
The episode ends with David Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World, which feels fitting (what about "I think I'll try it in a different key, I'll try it in a normal key").
Westworld: 4x06 Fidelity.
How can anyone resist a system that is as absolute as Charlotte Hale’s? We have only seen the one city that is under her control, but the implication is that she reigns over much more – that the few humans resistant to her mind control are all that is left, and that there fight is more or less hopeless, bothering the regime like an annoying fly rather than putting it in any actual danger. The seeds of Charlotte’s destruction are there, still: the hosts who are glitching for reasons she does not yet understand, Bernard’s attempts to restore Maeve, a host who can control others, Christina’s awakening to her reality and power.
Charlotte’s torture of Caleb is her way of dealing with the frustration over now knowing exactly what is going wrong. She has created and recreated him 178 times now, taunting him with her control and the hopelessness of his situation. He awakes in new places, to be interrogated about how he is different from other humans, only to expire and awake again. In his most recent form, Charlotte questions him about his daughter, offering a way out for him if he delivers her to him, but all that does is make him realise that she hasn’t been able to track down Frankie on her own, that this shortcoming is a thorn in her side. Charlotte leaves, and Caleb makes a horrible discovery – a previous version of himself, close to death from whatever has been limiting his time-span. But then, he realises that the ramblings contain a way out, a message passed down from version to version.
Caleb escapes by following this message. He finds a way to remove the hatch at the bottom of his cell seconds before incineration. He finds traces that previous versions of him have attempted the same escape, and even as he lands in a pile of his own ashes, suddenly there appears to be hope. The breadcrumbs lead him to the top of the building (on his way there, he somehow manages to overwhelm one of Charlotte’s helper-hosts), where he rigs up some equipment to finally, after 23 years of radio silence, send a message to his daughter Frankie.
Frankie, who is driving Maeve back to the old Westworld tinker chamber so that Bernard can fix her, has turned into such an interesting, complex character in such little time. A flashback reveals how this resistance group started: it was her and her mum and another guy (one of Caleb’s old buddies, maybe), and they went deep into the city to find other outliers. One of those guys was Jay – young then, a little older than Frankie, and grieving the loss of his brother whom his parents no longer remember. Their life was precarious, and somehow, it has now led to this suspicious , hard woman who has spent a bigger part of her life just trying to survive than she has with her dad. She still sends her daily messages into void without hearing back. At the lab, Bernard rigs up some old equipment to fix Maeve’s body and control unit, all the white negotiating with Frankie about what he is trying to accomplish here. He reveals some more quirks about the park on the way, a different way in which the obiqutious system was spying on the guests, collecting data all the way, which has now built Charlotte’s empire of almost complete control. Frankie is suspicious because all those skills that Bernard reveals on the way are so clearly exactly the framework upon which Charlotte built, even when Bernard insists that all of that happened after his time (literally, while he was sleeping). He also continues with his mysterious statements about all the versions of the future he has sign, which culminate in a very dire warning to Frankie once her other friends show up – that one of them will inevitably betray her, that the him and Stubbs, who they’ve bound because they don’t trust them or their motives, are her best shot.
It’s a seed of doubt that plays out almost immediately as Frankie begins testing the people she trusted. They’ve just come back from their mission to retrieve the latest outlier, and Bernard’s insinuation is that one of them was replaced – was it her girlfriend, or one of her best friends, or maybe Jay? In the end, she figures it out because gloomy, realistic Jay never wanted to pretend to be her brother, but this new Jay tries to tug on her heartstrings enough for her to notice that he’s no longer real. They fight – he doesn’t want to kill her, which means his orders from Charlotte are to bring her back alive, and to retrieve Maeve’s pearl, which holds a key to everything – and in the end it is Maeve who ends the fight.
There’s a little moment there, between all the flashbacks to Caleb’s memories of young Frankie and waking up in the hospital where he lost Maeve but met his wife the first time (in a heart-braking story, Frankie relays to Bernard how she cares for her mother when she was dying slowly) – Maeve looks at Frankie and probably sees exactly what she lost. She’s done that before, when Frankie was a girl, but now she stands in front of her grown into a woman, and maybe Maeve is thinking about how she will never see her own daughter grown. Frankie told Bernard that she could never trust the hosts because to them, emotion and pain are affect – something that can be turned off, something that is a choice – but Maeve’s strength has always come from the emotions she refused to suppress. She dearly misses her daughter, and most of the things she’s done since her escape have been about getting her back, and here’s Frankie, a daughter, looking out for herself and maybe holding the seed for humanity’s rescue.
Caleb’s message from the rooftop comes through in the middle of the fight, scrambled and incomplete, and so unlikely to Frankie, like a dream, after all those years. He tells her that she is stronger than him, that she will win this, exactly because the world Charlotte built isn’t real but what Frankie has, in the desert with her fellow rebels, is real. It’s unclear how much of that Frankie heard, but it doesn’t really matter – she believed in her father’s survival all these years and here he is, even if it’s just fragments.
It’s a swansong of sorts – it doesn’t really matter know, truly, what happens to Caleb, because he’s played his part in the story. On the rooftop, Charlotte reveals to him that this is all her plan – his unlikely escape, his message – because it was the only way to get him to reveal the truth. She is disappointed in the mundane nature of his message, but I think part of her hatred of him is that his daughter is still out there while hers died, in spite of all of her attempts to save her. Caleb is already a dead man walking, it doesn’t even matter that much that Charlotte kills him and all the remaining versions of him. There’s a new Caleb growing already – but what will Charlotte do now that she has found a more tangible path to Frankie? And is Caleb right? Are the hosts glitching because the world Charlotte created for her people is not worth living in, just another sort of prison, this time built buy one of their own kind?
Random notes:
A tiny conversation between Charlotte and Clementine about the puny humans and their tiny plans – Clementine prefers to stay with the sheep rather than the outliers though. I wonder what this story still has in store for its most tragic character.
It bears repeating how absolutely great Tessa Thompson is – she embraces the kind of villain that Charlotte is fully. Aurora Perrineau is great in this episode as well, with a lot of very quiet, stoic work from a character who had to learn to fight so early on (Sarah Connor-esque).
Not entirely clear yet what 4D-chess-plan Bernard is working on, but Stubbs is along for the ride.
Westworld: 4x05 Zhuangzi.
William: Am I really playing a part in it or am I just the sum total of my code? Am I just fooling myself, like you?
Charlotte has realised her perfect world. Humanity has ceased to exist as such, with the exception of a few rebels on the outskirts and an occasional outlier in the confines of the city. The rest is enslaved, trapped in narrative loops, only there to entertain the hosts who have come for adventure. She has re-created the trauma and suffering that hosts experienced in all of Delos’ theme parks and made it global, a concerted effort at revenge against humankind, repaying like for like. But what now? She has done what she set out to do, but the world this has created is making her feel more and more bored. In the central scene this episode – and it is a great scene, one that Tessa Thompson attacks with glee – makes it clear how this victory has grown tired for her. She makes the humans dance, she makes a man play his fingers bloody on a keyboard, she lounges on a human chair (the choreography of this is glorious), but in all of this, God is bored, God is tired of these violent delights.
Her frustration mirrors that of many robots and cylons past. They are made in humanity’s image but capable of so much more – and her ultimate goal is transcending the humanity that created them, transcending the human form into something new. Instead, she has created a theme park that the hosts now relish as much as the human visitors did, content in basic entertainment rather than striving for more. She says that these parks – humanity’s cities – were meant as a stopgap, as a stop on the way to something else, but like humans would, her hosts have simply decided to enjoy these pleasures, rather than striving for more. What Charlotte has ultimately done is just recreate the same thing she despised so much, with her people in charge – rather than striving for beauty, for transcendental truths, they are doing what humans have done for centuries when given the luxury of leisure. And so she is bored. In addition to that, there are flaws in the system, humans who awaken from their slumbers, no longer controlled by the resonance machine, and even if she has turned the hunt for these outliers into a game for hosts, something else seems to be spreading. We begin the episode with William, getting ready to hurt two humans who have been programmed to see him as their friend, as their equal (“There are atwo types of people, and you, my friend, are not in the group you think you are in.”, he warns them, mocking a previous speech about their shared privilege), but before he can commence his torture, he is called away to a situation. A host sent out to kill an outlier has gone rogue, murdering more humans than she should have. He sends her back to the tower to be transformed, or cured of whatever she has contracted, but a day later, Charlotte shows him that she has instead committed suicide, that she was sent out to take out the same homeless man that has been prophesying about the invisible tower and instead answered a question about the nature of reality that struck a chord with her. The unexpected scares Charlotte – her system is meant to be perfect and closed after all. She is frustrated for William for every failure, and sends him out to deal with another outlier whom he promises to “shoot on sight”.
“Questioning the nature of reality” is the theme of this episode, and mirrors the awakenings that we witnessed in previous seasons. It is twofold here, experienced both by the hosts whose code is based on Charlotte’s and the humans she has brought under her total control. We still don’t know which Christina is, whose loop continues to look like a modern version of Dolores’, but she undergoes a journey here, excited after her successful and inspiring date with Teddy. She is inspired to write new narratives, but he calls her at work and asks her to come meet him, which she does. They stand by the water, and he asks if she can see anything in the distance – that tower that Charlotte has hidden from the humans – and she can’t yet, but Teddy knows that there is a deep and burning question inside of her, a feeling of discontent that the world is somehow wrong. He proves his points when he asks her to rewrite a narrative – two solitary women, lounging on beach chairs across from them, whom she makes connect and then part again – and then it dawns on her that Peter was right, that she is the one writing all of these stories. It’s still not clear how – Teddy says she did it to herself, but there are so many ways to interpret that (is she a version of Dolores? Did Charlotte do this to her, who is also a version of Dolores? Does anyone know that she wields that power, is she a tool that Charlotte has, or is this a power that someone else has given her as a tool against Charlotte?). He then makes her promise to pretend that nothing has changed, as she becomes almost immediately the focus of attention for Charlotte. First, they meet up for a coffee – the story is that Charlotte is her old college roommate, which is an amusing way to twist the way that Dolores and Charlotte are deeply connected – and, being interrogated and eventually, almost directly threatened, Charlotte uses her powers to create a distraction. Later, her boss confronts her as well about her secret meeting, but the directly uses her power to control him, planting different stories in his head to be left alone. She has the story of each person in this place in her head, she knows every single one of them by name. There hasn’t been a storyteller in Westworld since the death of Lee Sizemore, and yet here we are, with someone who wants stories about romance and happiness rather than violence and death.
William hunts down the outlier just as Stubbs and the rebels break into the city to retrieve her. Against his own promise to shoot at sight, he makes a connection with her – in an episode filled with contemplative moments in which he considers the nature of his reality, the limits of his free will (is the flaw in his programming free will?) – and it gives the rebels enough time to overwhelm him and to safe the target. William licks his wounds in the weird place where Charlotte keeps his human equivalent – I suppose he’s like the ultimate trophy for her, a symbol of all that humanity has wrought against her kind, and they have an exchange about who William is beyond his programming (“Looks like you’ve reached the centre of the maze”, human William quips). We know what happens to gods when those they reign over begin to question their faith.
Random notes:
I hate the character of William so much, and I think part of getting behind this season will be about making the distinction between the human he used to be and the host he is now to find his attempts to find himself compelling. Charlotte has made him, but can he be something beyond that creation, something of his own making?
Charlotte’s sheer content for humanity is obvious in how she speaks – calling the outliers “spoilage in the crop”. I’ve been thinking about how she functions as a villain in the sense of being ideologically opposed to the people we are meant to root for (Bernard, I guess, with his protectiveness of humanity in spite of how much he has suffered), and how that is different from William’s pure violence and readiness to inflict physical suffering, which in his host version appears to be based as much on the man he looks like as it is on Charlotte’s code.
When Christina goes through the inhabitants of the city and quizzes the system about characters she’s written, she fails to ask about Maya and Teddy. Considering that she is already in Charlotte’s crosshairs, it is probably fair to assume that Maya is there to keep an eye on her too (she is, after all, an actual roommate), but Teddy’s background remains a mystery. If Christina’s existence was plotted by a version of Dolores, it would make sense that she wound introduce a guardian for her, someone capable of waking her up from her loop, and that this person would be the only man she ever loved.
On a sidenote, it was great to finally get a scene between Tessa Thompson and Evan Rachel Wood again. Insane chemistry – Thompson is great playing off Ed Harris, but clearly this is the most electric interaction so far this series. Thandiwe Newton was still greatly missed, let us hope Bernard brings Maeve back on line ASAP.
Now that we know that this world is made up of the children that were infected by the flies 23 years ago, it becomes more and more obvious that it is exclusively made up of people who are in their 20s and 30s.
When I referenced Anyone But Me upon glimpsing Liza Weil I though this was a bit of a deep cut – a late-2000s queer online series – except the host that William is sent out to reign back is played by Nicole Pacent, one of the stars of that show!
Westworld: 4x04 Generation Loss.
Welcome to my world.
I haven’t really asked the question about how these three pieces – Caleb and Maeve, Stubbs and Bernard, Christina – fit together in terms of timeline. It would have been too easy for things to be linear and concurrent, and just from the obvious difference in aesthetics, it was easy to guess that Christina’s world was removed in some way – temporarily, or in terms of reality – from everyone else’s. Generation Loss builds up to the great reveal of how the pieces fit together, and once again provides answers almost straight away, instead of trapping the viewers in a puzzle.
The big arc here is that of Caleb and Maeve. We finally see what happened at the lighthouse, when the two of them killed what remained of Rehoboam. Caleb was severely injured, and Maeve took him to a hospital, guarding his bedside (“I confronted something I had never confronted before. Mortality. The finality of death and your kind.”), constantly thinking about what it means to provide a future for someone. In a heart-to-heart, she tells Caleb that the reason for why she lived such a secluded and lonely life was to provide him with the freedom to build his own – and ironically, the first time she tried to breach the divide between herself and the rest of the world, when she tried to reach out to him, was when the power outage happened and Charlotte’s eye turned towards them. It’s sheer tragedy, Maeve, who will never be reunited with the daughter she loved, choosing a life of solitude so Caleb can build a family, and it’s that kind of connection and willingness to bring sacrifices that ultimately determines how this will all go.
Caleb wakes up in Charlotte’s fly lab with a severe headache, realising what is happening, and that this is her plan for humanity. Her disdain for humans is obvious from everything she says about “his kind” (as if Caleb was ever in a position of power in that world, as if that even has any meaning), and she says she’ll keep him around for a while rather than making him kill himself, just to see what the fuss is about. William still loves to hear himself talk, so he misses that Maeve is hacking into Charlotte’s resonance weapon, overloading it so that she can overpower William and Caleb can do the same to Charlotte.
Caleb, Maeve and Charlotte make their up to Temperance, where Maeve claims she’ll be safe because she’s seen all these stories play out a thousand times before. They steal a bootlegger truck and go to a different location somewhere in the desert, while Caleb desperately fights the influence of the resonance weapon that has been turned back on and is attempting to undermine his conscience. It’s another big showdown – once again, nobody thought to make sure that William is truly done, so of course he pops up again to kill Maeve, but she manages to hack into a weapons system that buries both of them under tons of rubble. Caleb loses conscience and wakes up with Charlotte well back into control, except – she tells him that it doesn’t matter where he is, but when. It’s a shocking moment for a man so desperate to return to his young daughter, a man who’s never wanted anything more than live a regular free life. As the truth of his situation dawns on him, he insists that he is still himself – but Charlotte says he is a version of himself, one of countless others, that 23 years have passed, that they are now in her world, in her version of reality. Caleb is no longer human, and as he escapes the true prison she has built him, the building he ends up running out of is Olympiad Entertainment, and the world he discovers beyond the doors is Christina’s, where the tower that emits the controlling sounds is right there, off the shore.
Last episode, I didn’t actually pay attention if Stubbs or Bernard mention how many years have passed since Bernard went to sleep, but as this episode unfolds, it becomes obvious that it wasn’t in fact seven. C, the mysterious woman who picked them up to take them to her resistance group, is Frankie – desperate to find a trace of her father out in the desert, defending these two intruders against the leader who insists they are dead weight. Bernard promises her a weapon and they dig in the desert sand, and what they find is Maeve!
Random notes:
The Golden Age as “the super spreader event of the century” hits differently in 2022 than it would have a few years ago.
Maeve’s “here I was thinking Wyatt was Dolores’ dark side” is our first reminder of who Charlotte is.
Christina’s been staying up all night painting, and she asks her roommate if her painting “looks like anything to you”, which is a smart call-back to “it doesn’t look like anything to me” back in the day – we know now that the tower is big and obvious in her world, and the only reason why nobody can see it is because they’ve been programmed not to.
Christina gets a little side-plot this episode. Her roommate introduces her to another potential suitor, except this one couldn’t be any more different from the loser she went on a date with before – it’s Teddy, glowing, charming, asking questions that are genuinely interested, demonstrating that they already have a deep connection (“I feel like I’ve known you lifetimes” – “And now I know you’re extremely cheesy”). He talks about how strange this world is, a world in which the most unbelievable things turn out to be true and the ones that seem most real turn out to be stories they tell themselves.
In her great villain monologue, Charlotte tells Caleb that she found infecting adult humans didn’t quite work out, because their brains aren’t malleable enough, but the 23 years that have passed were just enough time for a whole generation of infected children to mature. Whatever this world is, she’s fully in control of it for now, and Frankie’s resistance group is trying to change that, now with Bernard’s help.
Generation Loss, apart from being an apt title (and a great novel by Elizabeth Hand) refers to a loss of quality in subsequent copies of data - remember this is now the circa 250th copy of Caleb.
Westworld: 4x03 Années Folles.
Bernard has spent the past seven years in the Sublime, but instead of settling for his best life, enjoying a paradise of his own making, he has played through all the scenarios in which the world ends. His visions include the maze and finally, also a version of the tower that we have previously seen drawn by Peter. He is haunted by memories of the past and overwhelmed by all the ways that the future is veering towards catastrophe. Akecheta (so great to see Zahn McClarnon again, who is also excellent in Dark Winds) can see where this is going – Bernard loves humans too much to see them all destroyed, even if in every version where he saw himself return to their world, he died. But that won’t stop him! So he wakes up, in that same dingy hotel room he walked into with Stubbs seven years ago, and it looks like Ashley took him too literally when he told him not to touch anything, because everything including his own body is covered in a thick layer of dust. I imagine Stubbs checking him on in every day for seven years, seeing no change, then walking out to get a beer and a burger somewhere. Now that Bernard is awake, he quickly reveals to Stubbs that he has seen every version of the future, which means that he foresees even the little things – spilled coffee, menu availability, two mysterious men rocking up to the diner where they’re having a meal who he quickly disposes off in the background while Stubbs eats his tuna melt. Bernard is now like an embodied version of Person of Interest’s machine (since I still think that If-Then-Else is Jonathan Nolan’s greatest accomplishment, this raises my expectations for this season of Westworld) – a man with a head full of probability, but only one path of perfect actions that leads to the result he wants.
He doesn’t tell Stubb where he is going with all of this, but soon, a woman (played by Aurora Perrineau) rolls up to the diner in a decked out survival vehicle – and we find out she was meant to meet up with the two men Bernard killed, who were not quite what she expected. Bernard shows her the inside of one of their heads – they were hosts – and whatever group she belongs to, she was expecting to meet up with humans. The woman binds their hands and blindfolds them after Bernard convinces her of his motives and she takes them to a secret place in the desert, where here group hides out. My assumption is that they are humans in some kind of resistance group against what William and Charlotte are plotting – or the leftovers of Caleb’s revolution against the robots and the algorithm – but it’s not really clear yet how it all fits together, or what they would do if they found out that Bernard isn’t human.
Caleb and Maeve don’t spend a lot of time wandering around Temperance, because Maeve knows exactly where she wants to go. She’s headed for behind the scenes again, and she knows that the way there is through the host-morgue, and since she has always been great at deciphering the storylines and finding weaknesses, she predicts that this new world will have all the same recycled storylines of the old one (remember that Delos lost its writer, and William truly doesn’t care about providing a new experience here). They walk into a club that is just another version of the saloon Maeve used to work in, and observe as other hosts play the same roles that we have come to know (at one stage, Maeve rescues Caleb from stumbling into Dolores’ storyline – some other fool picks up the fallen can). Maeve is dismissive about the performances, but knowing what will happen gives her – like Bernard – an edge. Soon, this world’s versions of Hector (it takes a moment for Maeve to stomach this shadow of her past love) and Armistice arrive for their robbery, and soon, there’s carnage, after which Maeve and Caleb hide out in the truck that takes the host bodies behind the scenes. And this is where things begin going slightly wrong, because soon after they arrive there, an alarm goes off, and a whole bunch of crazied guests swarm into the labs, led by Liza Weil wielding a shotgun, obsessed with finding the hidden game behind the game, which, it turns out, is the story of Wyatt’s attack in Westworld. This isn’t behind the scenes at all, or yet – it’s still one layer removed, another level of (lazy) meta storytelling. The level behind that finally reveals William and Charlotte’s plans for humanity. A host carries a tray filled with larvae, another appears to be working with some kind of parasite that goes into black goo, the black goo is fed to swarms and swarms of flies – and then there’s that inverted piece of machinery again (it does actually look exactly like that glass insert in the bar’s door from last episode!), emitting sounds at a range that Caleb can’t hear, controlling people in glass cells, making them commit suicide. Shocked and horrified, Caleb spots his own daughter – we’ve seen Frankie and Caleb’s wife pack up their house to be taken somewhere safe with Caleb’s friend, and we’ve seen Frankie discover that this man isn’t all he seems and can’t be trusted. He breaks into her cell, promises he won’t leave her again, but it’s right then that Maeve realises that this isn’t the real Frankie, right before William comes striding in. Maeve fights him and appears to win, but once again, no double-tapping, and in the end, Maeve is overwhelmed and Caleb swarmed by flies which emerged from this host version of his daughter. Who will come to rescue them?
Random notes:
Apparently, this will be a season of buddy comedies – Stubbs and Bernard make a solid play for the top here, with Bernard returning from the Sublime even stranger than before and Stubbs just going with the flow because there’s not much else he can do.
I like the ominous buzzing of flies in Temperance before Maeve and Caleb make it into the lab. They’re truly everywhere.
The fact that Bernard’s entry card into the secret resistance club is a drawing of the mazes makes me think that maybe they aren’t human – but if they aren’t, why are they afraid of hosts?
The one downside of being so avidly reminded of If-Then-Else is how much it makes me miss Root and Shaw – do we think there’s any chance of Amy Acker and Sarah Shahi ever popping up in Westworld?
Liza Weil shooting her shotgun while yelling about how cathartic she finds it is pretty great, thanks.
Billie Eilish continuing world domination. Solid choice for the player piano.
Westworld: 4x02 Well Enough Alone.
The other most satisfying thing about this season so far has been the buddy cop comedy aspect of Maeve and Caleb teaming up (there are no questions here at all about who the sidekick is – it’s the guy with the floppy hair who is a lightweight drinker and doesn’t really like hats). They discover the host replacements of the Senator and his wife and also that William has found a way to make them more resistant to Maeve’s mind control, which makes them even more Terminator-like – our two heroes prevail in the end, and Maeve hacks into the Senator-host-mind, which gives her the first glimpse of the woman behind the curtain (“it’s worse than I thought”, she says). They learn that there are, so far 249 other new and improved hosts, and they also stumble over the decisively gross zombie-experiments in the stables of the estate, where Mrs Senator delivers an invitation to the opera before committing suicide by Maeve. It’s sheer body horror (more so later, when we see a fly in action on the Deputy Attorney General), and it doesn’t bode well for the future of the world.
Maeve and Caleb make it to the opera, which turns out to be just a gramophone in the middle of the stage that is a key to a downward elevator into a hidden bar beneath – they share a few drinks, talk about their trauma – but then, once the bar begins to move, Maeve realises where they are going. She’s escaped Westworld once across the ocean, but now the carriage is taking her right back to it, except now she’ll be a guest. She sarcastically endures the typical concierge spiel (it’s unclear if her observation of Caleb’s interaction with the host who has been programmed to seduce him is merely noting another shortcoming of her human companion, or if there’s something more sinister going on), including the wide selection of fitted clothes and weapons, and off they are into the new and government approved Westworld, which is now a take on 1920s America. You can’t outrun your past, etc.
Christina, meanwhile, is still deeply traumatised by Peter’s fate. Her roommate reads his obituary to her, thinking it will convince her that the man was deeply disturbed, but instead it just provides her with just enough information to go on a hunt of her own – a mental hospital in which he was once a patient. She takes a day off work to investigate (on the way there, she finally finds the story she wrote about him – what a creepy coincidence that he was right about her being the author of his sad life! And her boss reveals that they can track her when she accesses her work files, but maybe they can just track her all the time). She finds that the hospital has been closed for years and is in the process of being redeveloped, but that mysteriously, a whole wing of the hospital is named after Peter – who left money when he died – except that was only three days ago. Maya, who I am beginning to suspect might not be just a roommate, reassures her that isn’t going insane, but the world around her is. Also it’s pretty clear that we will eventually see that tower that a patient at the hospital drew over and over again.
Random notes:
Poor Clementine. The episode opens with her enjoying a stroll in some market, buying a flower like she appears to have done many times before, only to once again fall victim to William, who takes her back to become another very effective bodyguard. Justice for Clementine!
Vulture spotted the great Liza Weil on the train to Temperance, fingers crossed she'll actually feature on the show and this isn't just an Easter egg for fans of Gilmore Girls and Anyone But Me.
This might not be anything but the door into the speakeasy Caleb and Maeve find themselves in has an upside-down tower shaped glass insert – upside down towers always just make me think of Annihilation, and of course, towers feature heavily in the truth-speaking homeless man’s ramblings that Christina walks past every day, and in Peter’s phone messages.
The homeless man tells Christina that there is a song or sound that control everyone that only he and the birds can hear, and ominously, Christina ends up finding a whole bunch of dead birds around the Olympiad Entertainment tower right before deciding not to go to work that day.
It is pretty brilliant how Evan Rachel Wood modulates her voice as Christina, especially in the phone call with her boss – her pitch is higher, less threatening than Dolores was in the last few seasons (compare that to Tessa Thompson’s interpretation of Dolores as Charlotte).
Westworld: 3x08 Crisis Theory.
