I’ve never been happier to hear the needle drop on Ramin Djawadi’s “Sweetwater†theme. In wrapping up an increasingly bleak (and fun!) two months of television, the season-four finale of Westworld set the pieces for what is sure to be an even goofier season five. Time to dig into what we learned and what’s coming next. It turns out that the world was never going to be saved.
The episode opens with a series of murders that feel like a thought experiment to determine which kind of white man is the most dangerous. Is it an unhinged dirtbag with a baseball bat? No, it’s the businessman in a suit with an ax. No, it’s actually a teenage boy with an assault rifle. No, it’s actually the Man in Black — who embodies all three like a predatory Breakfast Club. William, who in the penultimate episode set the code in motion for humans and hosts alike to fight to the death until nobody was left in the real world, revels in the game he’s created as he travels from Hale City to the Hoover Dam, where the Valley Beyond is open and ready for him to corrupt next.
Meanwhile, drone hosts rebuild Hale. She asks them to leave her scars so she can remember her past. (Okay, Papa Roach.) She also asks them to leave her face, pulling an Olenna Tyrell by revealing that she wants William to know it was her who killed him. Which she ultimately does, but not before doing some errands. Hale is unable to stop the tone sequence put in place by William, but she does receive Bernard’s message.
Bernard gave Hale a task and a choice. He also gave her a gun in the Hoover dam to shoot and kill host William, which was rad. RIP, host William. We hardly knew you. Bernard’s last instruction is for Hale to have Christina run a final test to save what’s left of their world in the Sublime. She does this and then smashes her own pearl, dying by suicide while sitting by the water. Wild to have a season-long Big Bad just kind of quietly give up, but it’s been clear that Hale had been bored and over it for a while. Who knows? Maybe she copied herself to the Sublime before she left and we’ll see her again.
Caleb-279, unfortunately, is also not long for this world. As he and Stubbs take the injured Frankie to Red Hook, his body is glitching and twitching and slowly shutting down. Stubbs tells him he won’t make it far. “The old Delos experiments — they never took,†Stubbs says to Caleb. “The body always rejected the mind.†Stubbs is referring to the experiments that the park did on James Delos. They determined it was impossible to truly replicate a human and grant them immortality by placing a human’s mind in a host’s pearl and body because the two could not reconcile their reality. The only reason that host William made it this far is that Hale reconstructed his code from memory. Knowing this, Caleb-279 gives a tearful goodbye to his daughter and stays in Red Hook while Frankie and Odina sail away.
Before that happens, Stubbs is unfortunately killed by a rogue Clementine. Kind of rude, IMHO. Luke Hemsworth’s character has done nothing wrong! Clementine wanted no part of William and Hale’s conflict. She asked permission to go off the grid and live, laugh, and love like she was at the beginning of the season. Unfortunately, she was down to murder as many hosts and humans as she deemed necessary to make that happen, and unfortunately Frankie (rightfully) took her out. She really picked the wrong moment to start her villain era.
On the flip side, we finally know Christina’s whole deal. She was not only writing the stories for the fly-gooped humans in her world and living in a simulated version of it, her mind pearl is the program at the center. Hale named her “The Storyteller.†She created a room of her own. She created Maya because she craved companionship. She created Emmett, her boss, because she craved … capitalism, I guess. She even created Teddy because she craved love and clarity and to be woken up. It’s a beautiful and sad metaphor for being a writer, creating characters that are ultimately just reflections of yourself.
As Christina realizes that she’s been talking to herself, she also observes Hale shutting down “her world†and taking her on a little trip. While Christina’s pearl is rolling around the bottom of Hale’s purse, she summons Maya and imagines talking to her on a park bench, a little like Neo and the Oracle in the Matrix movies. Maya reminds her to look past the chaos and the violence and see the beauty in this world, which is, of course, one of Dolores’s catchphrases. At the beginning of this series, that little line of dialogue, that core drive that once powered Dolores’s narrative in the park, made her seem like an Old West manic pixie dream girl. It identified her to guests and the audience as innocent, sweet, and something to be rescued in a dangerous world. Now it symbolizes her strength as a hero.
She later observes that she’s in the Sublime, which we can observe by noticing that the aspect ratio has changed. Why does it still kind of look like her little bougie NYC neighborhood? How is she able to walk among the wreckage at the end of the episode in Christina’s hair and Dolores’s garb and rebuild Westworld from Times Square? Well, we saw Bernard walking through many versions of the past and present in a flashback to his Sublime time in episode three. Christina is able to reconstruct it from memory. She then, without knowing it, takes Bernard’s suggestion to run one final test for the fate of robot-kind. “A game of my own making,†she says. “One last loop around the bend.†Suddenly, we’re back in Sweetwater with the player piano plinking along and the train rolling into the station. “Maybe this time,†Dolores says, “we’ll set ourselves free.â€
It seems like Westworld is leaving the human world behind and that season five will take place almost entirely in the Sublime. Christina/Dolores’s monologue at the end of the episode implies that the so-called real world was pretty much over, thanks to William’s tone sequence. Whether or not any humans or hosts survive the apocalypse is none of her (or our) business. Buckle up, letterbox nerds! We’re going to the Valley Beyond. We can presume that Christina/Dolores will be looking for Teddy, but other than that … what’s her game? Is it to be NICE?! It has to be dangerous and high stakes without bringing the corruptive elements in from the human world. That’s a pretty big challenge.
This opens up many possibilities for returning characters we haven’t seen in a minute and may mean the end for several characters who never made it to the Valley Beyond. The characters we followed in season four fall loosely into three categories. Characters we will almost certainly not see again: Caleb, Hale, and both Williams. Characters we may not see again: Maya, Frankie, Clementine, and Stubbs. Characters we will almost certainly see again: Dolores, Teddy, hopefully Bernard and Maeve.
The finale provides fans with a gift of two cameos from characters we haven’t seen this season. The first is Rebus, played by Steven Ogg, a host with a villainous loop in the original Westworld park who hasn’t been seen since season two. He appears as the aforementioned dirtbag host with a Hawaiian shirt and real chaotic energy. The second, and even more brief, is Jonathan Tucker’s Major Craddock, who first appeared in season two and returned for another short moment in season three. He attempted to stop William in the finale and failed spectacularly.
More of this in season five, please! If Dolores has free rein to summon anyone for her final loop/game/test in the Valley Beyond, then Westworld better have fun with it. If this gleeful, full-title boogie season is any indication, we’re in for quite the ride.
Loose Screws
• If you thought characters traveled too quickly in Game of Thrones’ last couple of seasons, that’s nothing compared to this season of Westworld. Hale and host William somehow made it from New York to the Hoover Dam in under a day. Hale was flying, but William traveled by car and horse.
• I love how the only recognizable logo in Times Square is for Coca-Cola. That feels right. Even in the apocalypse, even in a simulation, it’s the real thing.
• Remember that tag at the end of season two, where William woke up as a host in a cell similar to James Delos’s, with his daughter giving him a fidelity test? That future, allegedly, has still not been reached on Westworld despite multiple time jumps. The world that has any use for fidelity tests, and William, is dying as of the season-four finale. I really, really hope we aren’t going to learn that that scene was taking place in the Sublime. Keep William and his toxicity out of there!!
• If it was not clear, I should point out that the structures surrounding the Tower are in the shape of the Maze — meaning Christina is at its center.
• Another thing we’ve alluded to but haven’t directly mentioned all season is that the Olympiad Entertainment building is located approximately in the same spot as the HBO headquarters in New York IRL.
• We may never know the answer to this for certain, but I think I figured out what makes Caleb and the other outliers so special. They have someone to remember them. That’s why, when fly-gooped humans became outliers later in life, their family members soon followed. They were “infected†by memory. It’s not a perfect theory, but Westworld is too cerebral for perfect theories.
• If this episode had aired in 2002, I 100 percent would have put Caleb’s “I’ve died before. This isn’t so bad†as my emo AIM Away Message.