Westworld season 3 ended over two years ago, but Sunday’s season 4 premiere took us seven years after the events of last season’s arc which saw the destruction of Rehoboam, the super-computer that predicted the lives of every human and essentially removed free will.
In the time between seasons, the show’s hosts and humans have moved on with their lives: Caleb (Aaron Paul’s PTSD-stricken sack of depression) got married and had a kid, Maeve (Thandiwe Newton’s ex-madam turned katana-wielding assassin) lives in the woods, and someone with the face of the previously thought dead Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is a video game character writer going by the name of Christina.
Their new normals are disrupted when William (Ed Harris), or at least a host with the appearance of William, buys (or rather, takes by force) a data-storage facility and apparently sends assassins to Maeve and Caleb. Maeve, being Maeve, effortlessly takes out the squadron sent to her and skewers the one host sent to Caleb just as he’s about to kill his daughter. Eagle eyed viewers might recognize the two assassins as the former hosts of Colonel Brigham, an officer of the park’s fictional Confederados, and Walter, a minor outlaw in the park. The end of the premiere sets up Maeve and Caleb on a quest to fight William and, eventually, Charlotte (Tessa Thompson, who last season had a host version of William kill the real William).
Christina’s story is a bit different. In an ironic turn of events, she writes the narratives of non-playable characters for a video game company called Olympiad Entertainment. The stories she pitches are cheesy and skew towards romance, much to the dismay of her boss, who favors violence. Her stories are a bit on the nose in their parallels to her own history as Dolores in the park: a young woman, living alone with her “infirm” father, who is “missing something.” As she struggles professionally, her roommate (Ariana DeBose) forces her to go on a date with a laughably stereotypical rich guy and then abandons her to go home alone.
On the walk, she’s predictably confronted by a scary-looking guy named Peter, revealed to be the man who has been leaving her concerning voicemails begging her to stop doing whatever she’s doing. He assaults her, but she’s saved by a mystery man revealed at the end of the episode to be her soulmate from the park, the charming host Teddy (James Marsden), who died by suicide back in season two after he realized Dolores was manipulating him. Towards the end of the episode, Peter calls Christina one last time before jumping off the roof of a building. Based on the premiere, it seems as though Christina will spend the season reckoning with both her past self in a likely reunion with Teddy and her present self as a story writer with a scary and still unknown effect on those who play her games.
The season seems to be already struggling with the problems that plagued the last two, principally that there are too many storylines to keep track of. We still don’t know what’s happening with either Charlotte or Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), who we last saw accessing a bunch of data collected from the park. Last season, the show struggled to bring its hosts and convoluted plots into the real world (that is, outside of the world of the parks). It’s still unclear the extent to which Maeve, for example, is independent. As the show continues to dive deeper into the massive world of data and its threats to modern society, it seems to lose its more broad philosophical intrigue.
This season, which sees citizens of the world still reeling with the knowledge that their free will was taken away and then apparently returned with the destruction of Rehoboam, perhaps that more philosophical approach will continue, specifically offering a continuation of the free will discussion. That said, I yearn for the nuance and sophistication of the show’s first season, which took a complicated approach to the topic of consciousness. As the plot gets more complicated and drastically changes settings, this nuance gets lost. Hopefully, as the show adjusts to its version of the world outside of the parks, it will be able to deliver more of what it was so great at in the earlier seasons. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely given its early focus and emphasis on the threat of big data.
Westworld is currently airing new episodes every Sunday on HBO.
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 !