Leave it to HBO series with cinematic effects and impeccable world building (and scores by Ramin Djawadi) to completely fall apart in later seasons. Season four of Westworld concluded Sunday night in typical form – major deaths, copious violence, and the iconic “Sweetwater” theme. Let’s dive in.
This season dealt with four main host characters and one main human character. For the hosts, a version of Dolores in the body of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) was the villain: she was the architect of a city that looked like New York but acted like The Sims. She used flies as a mechanism to spread a “virus” that turned humans into hosts, and then used sounds to control them.
On her quest to turn all the humans into near hosts, she comes across our sole human Caleb (Aaron Paul) and his new family. When Caleb leaves his family to go help fight Charlotte with Maeve, he gets captured and “infected,” though for some reason he’s able to resist it and ends up a captive for over 20 years. His daughter Frankie, now an adult, managed to escape the virus and now works with a resistance group that feels like a plagiarized version of a plagiarized version of The Matrix’s Nebuchadnezzar crew. She always believed her dad was still out there, so she goes out to save him.
Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) wakes up from his Season 3 finale trip into the Delos data having seen all the possibilities for the future and how to save humanity, a la Doctor Strange. He sets off with his sidekick Stubbs (a very Hemsworthy Luke Hemsworth) to enact that future, even though he knows the only path involves his death. He works with Frankie to dig up Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), who died and was buried in the sand at the same time Caleb was captured.
Maeve spends the season after she’s resurrected helping Bernard, though in her attempt to take out Hale she’s shot through the head by a host version of William (Ed Harris) who has decided to rebel against Hale and has just essentially become a more psychotic version of the original Man in Black. In his rebellion, he turns Hale’s city into a real-life battle royale, because he is still obsessed with games and winning things.
Still with me? The arc for Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) makes even less sense. About halfway through the finale, we learn that she’s actually just running as a program in some fictional reality and that basically nothing in her storyline has been significant. She has created all the characters in her life (her roommate, boss, and especially Teddy) to help wake herself up, much like she did in the first season.
In the final minutes of the finale, Charlotte kills William (for real this time) and allows Dolores the chance to choose if humanity is worth saving. She does this by reconstructing (in her simulation world) Westworld, presumably to see if humans will behave better than they did.
By this point, it may be helpful to include a list of who’s fully dead (with the destruction of their program-containing “pearls”), who’s sort-of dead, who’s real, and who’s not. As for the fully dead, we saw Charlotte destroy William once and for all before crushing her own pearl at the end of the episode. Maeve, Bernard, and Stubbs remain sort-of dead in that their bodies are dead but their pearls presumably remain intact. Caleb is technically alive, though he’s left for dead in the burning city as the “virus” will soon kill his human form. Dolores is alive as a program but not in the material world. Of course, this is Westworld, so all of this is basically subject to change.
If my rambling is any indication, this season was a disaster. As soon as the hosts left the park, their motivations became unclear, and this season boiled them down to either a) platitudes about saving the world or b) psychopathy. The writing dealt in a similar binary: Thompson’s Charlotte was reduced to a power-hungry robot and William to a sadistic gamer (“fucking camper,” he says in the finale) while Dolores and Teddy spewed cliches about romance and beauty (“you’re my cornerstone”). For those characters that didn’t die, they ended up right where they began – Frankie, after spending the whole season trying to find her father, ends up leaving him behind as death consumes him. Dolores remains in the simulation, though this time she knows about it. Even Maeve’s usual quips and charms are getting old.
The show has previously excelled technically even when its narratives fall flat. This season seemed plagued by horrible green screens – the views from Charlotte’s headquarters of “New York” were oddly bright and especially the opening of the “Sublime” were particularly egregious. The fight scenes lacked energy, especially in the consequential final two episodes. The one true constant of the show’s success seems to be Djawadi’s score, which brilliantly uses covers and leitmotifs to convey feeling and nostalgia in important moments.
I wish there were more positive things to say about this season, but the lack of clear and/or interesting motivation for any characters is a problem hard to surmount. “You know what happened to Icarus,” one host taunts William. “He flew too close to the sun.” Westworld, it seems, has done the same.
Season 4 of Westworld is currently available to stream on HBOMax.
Emmy is a big fan of all things TV and movies. Among her current favorites are The Matrix, Midsommar, Titane, and Fleabag. Catch her on Letterboxd @ewenstrup !