Westworld Season 4

 2022, HBO (8 episodes)
created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan

Season 1 was a phenomenon. Season 2 was a let down. Season 3 was a radical reinvention.  Season 4 brings it all back full circle.

These are, of course, oversimplified statements about each of this rather remarkable show's four very varied seasons.  I don't know that any season has even come close to building the same anticipation episode-to-episode as the first one did, so well developed was its mystery, and so unexpected was its playing with timelines in its storytelling.  Season four attempts the mystery again, to lesser effect, and also with varying unclear and unannounced timelines, again to lesser effect (after three seasons, we've come to expect this storytelling trickery.  At least the reveal of the timeline trick is half-way through the season and not meant as a season-ending "gotcha").

My Season 1 review, over 5 years ago, and from a pre-Disney+ era, I realize how quick I am to forget about a time when television didn't have cinematic production values.  Every season has looked great, but by Season 4 it really does feel like TV, just the new standard of TV.  Shots are just a little hastier, effects just a little below cinematic quality, and some of the set design showing its seams a little.  But the world of Season 4 (which piggybacks off of the world of Season 3) is a futuristic cityscape, requiring a whole other world of effects, fake building edifices and a much more intense amount of CGI to keep up appearances.  Plus, Season 4 was a COVID shoot, and in that it does also feel a little more contained.

Season 4 really does try to be the culmination of its three previous seasons, picking up where last season left off, and catching us up on what happened in the interim.  Following the civil war that ended last season, the omniscient machine that was in effect controlling society last season was destroyed by Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul), and society is in a very different place.  A resurrected Delores is now "Christina" (Evan Rachel Wood), a writer of stories for NPCs in an online game, unaware of her past, but receiving strange phone calls that unsettle her sense of her reality.   Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) is resurrecting the hosts within a new "world" set in the 1920s era, but it's secretly a place for her to experiment on humanity with a new control mechanism, delivered by common houseflies.  Charlotte also has William, aka the Man in Black, under her control, both as a host, and the real thing in cold storage in her corporate headquarters.  Maeve has retreated from society, knowing that she would be hunted were she to make her presence known, while Caleb is now a father and husband, but paranoid of who might still be after him.

So, *spoilers*, ok?

As the timelines start to collide, and focus is pulled on what is exactly happening. Caleb goes from being father and husband in a very homey life to on the run after Maeve turns up and tells them there's work still to do.  But in the process they both are killed and we find that 30 years have passed, Caleb's daughter has grown up as one of the leaders of the resistance.  It turns out that Charlotte now controls the "world" (I'll get to it) as she's been mostly successful with her human control mechanism, but she's also cloned Caleb over and over and over again sort of as torture, but also because she's trying to discover how some people are resistant to her control.  Despite otherwise having complete control over society, Charlotte remains unhappy.  She wanted the humans to experience what the hosts felt, but finds her revenge delivers no satisfaction, only insatiable boredom.  Christina, meanwhile, is awakened by Teddy (James Marsden), who helps her see what she truly is....not an actual person living in Charlotte's world, but the creator and conductor of this world.  Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) returns from the other side where he's been running seemingly endless probability scenarios for decades, and with Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) by his side the two hosts try to convince the resistance that they have the only plan to success and liberty.

In the end it seems they get the chance to start it all over again, where it began, at Westworld, a very puzzling ending indeed.

Season 3 didn't really ask a lot out of the audience in terms of remembering how the prior seasons were impacting the present, but boy does Season 4 ever count on you remembering it all, and isn't great at providing you context along the way.  I don't have a problem with the show striving for tighter continuity and its past having relevance, but my time with the prior seasons was years ago and I've forgotten much which I'm sure would help.

The series finale was a real puzzler, and it seemed to intone that what's gone on in Westworld has been a whole repetitious cycle that keeps happening over and over...or at least is destined to, but I can't make sense of this.  One character at some point mentions the hosts would be overwhelmed by the millions of humans they would face, intoning that there are only millions of humans on the planet (like, one percent of the population survived the civil war or something).  My alternate take is the city that we see in season 3 and 4 is not a city representative of the outside world (meaning outside of Westworld and the other fantasy lands) but instead it's the Humanworld that is a mirror society to Westworld.  This Humanworld is all that Charlotte has gained control of, an isolated megacity of millions, but hers to do with as she wants.  If there's a world that exists outside of Humanworld or the other theme parks, I have no idea, and the show doesn't seem to even consider it a question.

So if the sister cities of the Humanworld and Westworld co-exist then it's entirely possible that the cycles of human and host relations keep repeating (see also The Matrix Revolutions).  

What I found most intriguing about this season, though, was Charlotte's utter dissatisfaction of the world she runs.  More than anything she wanted to control the humans, to get revenge on them and make them be the line-towing automatons that the hosts once were, appeasing every whim.  The city/Humanworld is completely under her every control, except it's tiresome. Revenge is boring.  She feels her people should have something more, be something more.  The key point is that the hosts are created in their creator's image.  Therefore their imagination is pretty much limited to that of their creators as well.  Where they should be able to transcend humanity, to be free of physical bodies and even the earth (see also Her), the hosts just can't seem to get past petty human emotions, desires, and body types.  It even makes me wonder if any humans exist in these stories at all, or if everyone is just programmed to believe they are human or a host, and let the experiment repeat.

I found the ending obtuse and unsatisfying, but I've also enjoyed thinking about it afterward.  The season was a pretty brisk watch, but I found there was a fair bit of repetition and, at times, Dolores/Christa's story seemed to drag under its own weight.  I'd been quick to forget that it was Dolores who resurrected both Charlotte and Bernard, and in effect both are facets of her own being, one representing her darkest instincts, the other her brightest.  It makes strange sense that the endgame would be Dolores' angel trying to convince her devil to change.

Before I leave, much credit to Ramin Djawadi, who created a very specific sound suite for the show to operate under, but more importantly his reworking of popular music tracks from the likes of Radiohead, Billy Eilish, The Rolling Stones and Nine Inch Nails (among others) into stringed versions or player piano versions.  They're really enjoyable and worth seeking out.

I will likely revisit all of Westworld as a whole someday, but there will need to be a significant gap in the TV schedule to accommodate it.  Too much content.