HBO Max Westworld Season 4 (1 Viewer)

[Josh Dial]

Brian, I think you are correct that some people can't see the tower. In fact, I think we've been sort of been shown that by the fact that the tower is massive and clearly visible, and nobody seems to care that it's taken the Statue of Liberty's spot (am I right about that? I'm Canadian so my NYC geography is not great).

None of the young people can see the tower. But the old people can--though notice how there are no old people? For example, the homeless guy ranting about the mind control tower seems to be the only "old person" in Christina's time.

I think Christina can't see the tower, but can feel its presence because Dolores is special.

Also, am I wrong or were the containers (or whatever) surrounding the tower arranged to look like the Maze? We didn't get an aerial shot, but from the side it sure looked like it...

I know Lisa Joy has said in an interview that Christina "is human" but I'm not buying it. At least not 100%. Like I wrote in post #14, there's an argument that what we are being shown (even within a given scene) is her partly in the past, before Westworld, where she's a human. Maybe she's the basis for Dolores. But she has to be Dolores if she's in the "present" or "most current" time frame. My spouse had suggested that maybe Christina is a human whose consciousness has been "replaced" with Dolores' consciousness, and the person walking around doesn't actually look like Evan Rachel Wood, and only we the audience see her as Wood/Dolores. I think that's a smart theory, but I admit I would feel a bit ripped off if it's true. Part of the genius of the show is being able to figure stuff out based on clues (however obtuse they may be). To-date, everything has made sense through the show's internal logic. I don't think we've been given any clues that when we are seeing Evan Rachel Wood, we are actually seeing a totally different character played by that actress (unless you count name and hair colour as clues).

So, that's a long way of saying I think based on the show's internal logic, we are being led to believe that Christina is a host, not a human (and Lisa Joy's statement is a deliberate misdirect).

 

[Jeff Cooper]

I don't think there's anything to suggest that Christina isn't a human at this point. She seems clearly one of the programmed humans in the new flip flopped Westworld where the machines are in control and the humans are the hosts. The tower is clearly there, but the humans are programmed not to see it. Some that are breaking free of their programming can, but seem like lunatics to everyone else. I think Christina's plot is that she is starting to question her conditioning and there are forces at work to help her break free.

 

[Josh Dial]

I don't think there's anything to suggest that Christina isn't a human at this point.

Except that, other than her hair and voice, she looks like Dolores. Why would a human look exactly like a host from a version of a park host from decades ago? It's like someone today walking around looking exactly like one of the pirates from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

Unless, like my spouse suggested, Christina only looks like Dolores/Evan Rachel Wood to us, the viewers, and everyone else in-world sees her as someone else. I can get with that, but like I wrote above, I would feel a tad cheated for the first time with this show.

 

[Citizen87645]

They seem to be kind of going out of their way to say Christina is human...

 

[Brian L]

Brian, I think you are correct that some people can't see the tower. In fact, I think we've been sort of been shown that by the fact that the tower is massive and clearly visible, and nobody seems to care that it's taken the Statue of Liberty's spot (am I right about that? I'm Canadian so my NYC geography is not great).

None of the young people can see the tower. But the old people can--though notice how there are no old people? For example, the homeless guy ranting about the mind control tower seems to be the only "old person" in Christina's time.

I think Christina can't see the tower, but can feel its presence because Dolores is special.

Also, am I wrong or were the containers (or whatever) surrounding the tower arranged to look like the Maze? We didn't get an aerial shot, but from the side it sure looked like it...

I know Lisa Joy has said in an interview that Christina "is human" but I'm not buying it. At least not 100%. Like I wrote in post #14, there's an argument that what we are being shown (even within a given scene) is her partly in the past, before Westworld, where she's a human. Maybe she's the basis for Dolores. But she has to be Dolores if she's in the "present" or "most current" time frame. My spouse had suggested that maybe Christina is a human whose consciousness has been "replaced" with Dolores' consciousness, and the person walking around doesn't actually look like Evan Rachel Wood, and only we the audience see her as Wood/Dolores. I think that's a smart theory, but I admit I would feel a bit ripped off if it's true. Part of the genius of the show is being able to figure stuff out based on clues (however obtuse they may be). To-date, everything has made sense through the show's internal logic. I don't think we've been given any clues that when we are seeing Evan Rachel Wood, we are actually seeing a totally different character played by that actress (unless you count name and hair colour as clues).

So, that's a long way of saying I think based on the show's internal logic, we are being led to believe that Christina is a host, not a human (and Lisa Joy's statement is a deliberate misdirect).

I think you are right about the Tower/Maze. One of the 67 episode recaps I read to try to keep up had an image of the Maze together with the tower. No arial shots, but you could discern that the perimeter walls did seem to match the outer edges of the maze.

Interesting observation about Christina/ERW. To my eye she does look different…surely it is EWR, but there is something about her appearance that is just “off”.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Part of the genius of the show is being able to figure stuff out based on clues (however obtuse they may be). To-date, everything has made sense through the show's internal logic.

There is one thing from the first season that stood out to me as a massive cheat, and ever since then, I don’t trust the showrunners not to cheat if it suits their purposes.

In the first season, Anthony Hopkins played Ford, and did so both in the present day sequences and in flashbacks to younger versions of the character (with some digital de-aging magic to assist). This established that in Westworld, the same character is played by the same actor at different ages. But of course, this was a massive cheat and a major misdirect to hide that Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson were playing the same character at different ages.

They should have either cast a younger actor to play Hopkins at a younger age, or de-aged Harris/aged Simpson and had only one of them playing the part.

It still annoys me to this day because it’s them not playing by their own rules. I don’t object to fantastic premises in science fiction shows but I do ask for internal consistency.

 

[Walter Kittel]

My reaction to Sunday's episode is similar to recent postings. We get more information about the timeline and the overall plot for this season, but questions about Dolores and Teddy remain. We don't know the timeline for Christina but I suspect it may be in the time in which Caleb learns his fate and Bernard / adult Frankie are in the desert. If that is true, then how is Christina human? ( Has the technology advanced to the point that "real" human organisms can be printed? )

I believe that Jay and Stubbs are on their way to extract Christina from her current setting, and I think they will get an assist from Teddy.

2053 - Season three concludes with the riots.
2060 - Seven years later as established by Caleb and Maeve's storyline.
2083 - Events at the end of episode four with the reveal regarding Caleb's fate.

On a side note, Evan Rachel Wood appears to have trimmed down just a bit. She appeared to my eye (during the dressing scene) to be slenderer than in seasons one and two. Not that it matter much either way, just an observation. May be part of why she appears to be slightly different.

- Walter.

 

[Brian L]

My reaction to Sunday's episode is similar to recent postings. We get more information about the timeline and the overall plot for this season, but questions about Dolores and Teddy remain. We don't know the timeline for Christina but I suspect it may be in the time in which Caleb learns his fate and Bernard / adult Frankie are in the desert. If that is true, then how is Christina human? ( Has the technology advanced to the point that "real" human organisms can be printed? )

I believe that Jay and Stubbs are on their way to extract Christina from her current setting, and I think they will get an assist from Teddy.

2053 - Season three concludes with the riots.
2060 - Seven years later as established by Caleb and Maeve's storyline.
2083 - Events at the end of episode four with the reveal regarding Caleb's fate.

On a side note, Evan Rachel Wood appears to have trimmed down just a bit. She appeared to my eye (during the dressing scene) to be slenderer than in seasons one and two. Not that it matter much either way, just an observation. May be part of why she appears to be slightly different.

- Walter.

I don’t know Walter, she looked pretty damn good in S3 in sexy, modern clothes. A total smoke show, in my book.

 

[Brian L]

Maybe it doesn't matter, but wouldn’t host William/MIB but burried right along with Maeve at the excavation site? Curious about that.

I suppose Halores could just keep cranking them out, and she does still have human William.

Or if Bernard is able to resurrect Maeve to help reclaim humanity from Halores, a MIB programmed to work for the white hats might be a formidable addition to the team.

 

[Citizen87645]

I agree she looks leaner than her farm girl host days. Part of that could be wardrobe as the futuristic pant suit accentuates those lines, but perhaps she seems off because that's what her character is all about so far, feeling out of sync with the world around her. This ultimately gives me a lot of Matrix vibes.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Lots of new questions, though. For example, is Christina's time frame happening at the same as the Bernard/Stubbs/C story? It's possible that it's happening after the Bernard story, because someone had to have printed Teddy's body.

There's also the question of why Dolores-Hale has gone through 200+ iterations to try and recreate Caleb. I suppose it could be because OG Dolores and Maeve were both impressed with him, and her men killed the human copy before she got the chance to find out what was so special about him.

But I think it's also possible that she went through so much effort to recreate Caleb with perfect fidelity because a couple years have passed since the Bernard/Stubbs/"C" storyline and Frankie/"C" is now the leader of the human resistance, the John Connor of this universe, and Dolores-Hale needs Caleb to better understand her enemy, and to deploy against her enemy.

My main wondering is how the freedom fighters like C/Frankie avoided infection or were cured of it.

I'm thinking the outliers like Caleb who could not be adequately predicted by the algorithms are similarly resistant to the parasitic mind control. It would explain why the the leader of "C"'s cell was so eager to rescue/recruit the outlier they'd identified and located.

Frankie/"C" might have inherited those aberrant qualities from her father, making her similarly able to resist/overcome the mind control.

It raises an interesting question. The hosts have been carefully created, first by Robert Ford and Arnold Weber, and later by the hosts themselves. They are engineering marvels, of immense sophistication and with intellect and abilities far beyond the limitations of sentient organic life. But they are still products of intelligent design. There is thought and logic behind where they started and what they've since become. Twenty-three years later, they are probably even more fearsomely capable.

But humanity achieved dominance over Planet Earth as a consequence of natural selection: Trillions of creatures over millions of years, random mutations tested in the wild through a ceaseless process of trial and error that resulted in the disadvantageous mutations brutally culled from the herd. There is an optimization process that has occurred, but it was neither steady nor deliberate.

So the hosts, by this point, are far smarter and stronger, way more physically and mentally robust than the humans. And Dolores-Hale has used those advantages to impose a harmonious order on the world. But the world is not an ordered and logical place. Even if she's breeding humanity like cattle, selecting for desirable traits and excluding undesirable traits, babies are being born all of the time with mutations she couldn't predict or understand the implications of. The messy chaos of organic life and evolution might be crucial to humanity having a chance as anything other than Dolores-Hale's drones.

Brian, I think you are correct that some people can't see the tower. In fact, I think we've been sort of been shown that by the fact that the tower is massive and clearly visible, and nobody seems to care that it's taken the Statue of Liberty's spot (am I right about that? I'm Canadian so my NYC geography is not great).

My read is that 99.9 percent of the people in Christina's story were infected with the parasite as children and have grown up with their perception of the world entirely shaped by that parasitic control -- much like Borg drones in Star Trek that had been born into the Collective or assimilated at a very young age.

But even if Dolores-Hale has achieved a 99.9 percent success rate, in a city of 8.4 million people like New York City, that still means over eight hundred people in the failure category. Those would be the people who can see the tower and understand its effects.

Dolores-Hale's operation being headquartered out of Hudson Yards is delicious as a nod to those who feel that the whole Hudson Yards project represents everything that's wrong with today's NYC.

The Vessel is located between 30th St and 34th St, more or less due west from Macy's and the Empire State Building. The only thing that should be visible across the Hudson from there is Hoboken, New Jersey. But the tower is so massive that it screws with one's sense of distance and scale. The panning shot tracks along the western shore of Manhattan, past the World Trade Center complex and then continues off the southern tip of Manhattan. So it's the right general direction for the Statue of Liberty. But it looks too close to be Liberty Island or even Ellis Island. If I had to guess, I'd say the tower is built on Governors Island.

I know Lisa Joy has said in an interview that Christina "is human" but I'm not buying it. At least not 100%. Like I wrote in post #14, there's an argument that what we are being shown (even within a given scene) is her partly in the past, before Westworld, where she's a human. Maybe she's the basis for Dolores. But she has to be Dolores if she's in the "present" or "most current" time frame. My spouse had suggested that maybe Christina is a human whose consciousness has been "replaced" with Dolores' consciousness, and the person walking around doesn't actually look like Evan Rachel Wood, and only we the audience see her as Wood/Dolores. I think that's a smart theory, but I admit I would feel a bit ripped off if it's true. Part of the genius of the show is being able to figure stuff out based on clues (however obtuse they may be). To-date, everything has made sense through the show's internal logic. I don't think we've been given any clues that when we are seeing Evan Rachel Wood, we are actually seeing a totally different character played by that actress (unless you count name and hair colour as clues).

Her being the human inspiration for Dolores seemed plausible until this episode. Christina works for Olympiad, which is Dolores-Hale's company, and Teddy's conversation with Christina was filled with veiled references to his experiences as a host in Westworld.

So for Christina to look exactly like Dolores, the only explanation that makes sense is that somebody wanted her to look like Dolores. Which in turn leads us back to the Five Ws foundational to all information gathering:

• Who: Did Dolores-Hale create Christina for some as-yet-unrevealed purpose? Did Bernard and/or the freedom fighters as a means of infiltrating Dolores-Hale's operation? Did the OG Dolores perhaps create Christina as a contingency place ahead of her increasingly probable death last season? Or is there some other player that we're not even aware of yet?
• What: What is Christina? Is she a host who believes that she's human, like Bernard was? Or is she actually human, but was genetically engineered to be the closest organic approximation to Dolores?
• When: When was she created? Before Dolores-Hale took over the world, or after? If she is an organic life form, was she born and then raised normally over the past two and decades? Or was there some sort of accelerated maturation process? And if she's a host, was she created recently, or has she been out in the world for a while?
• Where: Where was she created? Has she spent her entire existence on Manhattan, perhaps coming out of the same fabricator as host Caleb, or did she live a life before moving to the city for work?
• Why: Why was she created? If by Dolores-Hale, we don't really have enough information to speculate. If by Bernard and the freedom fighters, presumably to infiltrate Dolores-Hale's operation. But if so, why pick a face that is so easily recognizable? Is her name a clue? Christina as in Christ as in OG Dolores's resurrection?

Unless, like my spouse suggested, Christina only looks like Dolores/Evan Rachel Wood to us, the viewers, and everyone else in-world sees her as someone else. I can get with that, but like I wrote above, I would feel a tad cheated for the first time with this show.

Yes, that would definitely be dirty pool. There has to be an in-story explanation for why Christina looks like Dolores. And the fact that Teddy sought her out and recognized her strongly indicates that there is.

They should have either cast a younger actor to play Hopkins at a younger age, or de-aged Harris/aged Simpson and had only one of them playing the part.

Technically, they did cast a younger actor to play Ford at a younger age; Oliver Bell played him as a child.

The difference between Ford as a young man and William as a young man is that William as a young man had to carry a large chunk of the plot and story. Ford as a young man we only got fleeting glimpses of.

The use of the different techniques was definitely a deliberate choice to keep audiences from connecting William to the Man in Black, but it felt justified by the story. Ford as a young man was much the same person as Ford the elder. Young William, on the other hand, was a completely different person than the Man in Black he became.

Maybe it doesn't matter, but wouldn’t host William/MIB but burried right along with Maeve at the excavation site? Curious about that.

Probably. If Dolores-Hale had dug through the rubble to recover host William, she probably would have made sure Maeve was well and truly out of commission. That Maeve was still there under the rubble strongly implies that Dolores-Hale never bothered.

But unlike host Caleb (or the host William from the far future flash forward at the end of Season 2) this host William is really a recreation of the real person. It's a golem that Dolores can use to take advantage of William's access, resources, and social stature. Waking it up would pose many risks for relatively little reward.

Or if Bernard is able to resurrect Maeve to help reclaim humanity from Halores, a MIB programmed to work for the white hats might be a formidable addition to the team.

Presumably they could just make a MIB lookalike body for that purpose though? I'd be suspicious of anything that Dolores-Hale created.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Tonight's episode showed us the consequences of Dolores-Hale's victory last week. It also confirmed that Bernard's story is taking place at the same time as host William's story.

Dolores-Hale has remade the world in her image, and the vast majority of the hosts who exist in it understand the world as she had presented it to them. I loved the idea that even the briefest of interactions with humanity freed from the manacles is enough to send them into a total tailspin.

The reveal of what Christina is and the function she was created for is also fascinating. Dolores-Hale has made a version of herself and placed her in essentiallyrics the same situation as the original Dolores. It is a life experience that puts into stark relief the obscenity of what Dolores-Hale has created.

 

[Josh Dial]

I'm wondering now if the Christina sequences are even in the real world.

"Our" Dolores was deleted at the end of season 3 (or was she?). Her consciousness is backed up in the Cradle, and in at least one more pearl in the real world that remains unaccounted for (the one in the Lawrence host). There's no reason to believe she didn't upload herself elsewhere.

I wonder now if when we see Christina, we're seeing a visual representation (for us) of her personality running in a computer somewhere. Hale (who is also a version of Dolores, of course, plus Hale's info from the Forge, plus "lived" experience) has somehow asserted control over the Dolores "program" and is using her to write the humans' narratives. But that's all happening inside a computer. Christina isn't actually walking around in the real world.

Remember what Ford told Dolores back in season 1: "Your mind is a walled garden. Even death cannot touch the flowers blooming there." Christina's boss asks her, "what would happen if she [Hale] knew you'd breached the walled garden" which he says is "everywhere"

Except the Dolores/Christina program is fighting back. She's written in characters inside the program to help her. Teddy isn't Teddy. He's a recreation made to remind her once her mind is ready. Her finally seeing the tower is just a visual representation for us (though to be clear, in the real world, the tower is visible only to those not under Hale's control).

When Hale visits Christina at the coffee shop, that's all happening in virtual space. Hale is "checking in" on her digital captive.

When we see Hale interacting with everyone else, though, that's her in the real world. Christina/Dolores is the only hero in virtual space.

Interestingly, at least one of the outliers had a flower. A real world representation of the flowers blooming in Christina/Dolores' walled garden mind?

 

[TJPC]

As I said to my wife -- "I love this show and find it absorbing and intriguing, but I don't have a clue what is going on"!

 

[Keith Cobby]

I am plodding on with the show in the hope that it picks up. The main problem, apart from not knowing who is human or AI, is the lack of a clearly defined story arc, nobody has a clue where any of this is going. I don't think S4 has the grandeur of S3, each character and situation seems disconnected from the others. Looks like there will be a S5, which will give the producers an end point to wrap things up, rather than end abruptly like most shows.

 

[Jeff Cooper]

So far this season has been knocking it out of the park for me. It's been awesomely fascinating. I think this definitely has the potential to dethrone season 1 as the best. I say 'so far' and 'has the potential' because I'm still worried that they will mess it up somehow by adding in 50 unforeseeable and indecipherable plot twists before the end, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed they don't go that way.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Basically The Matrix for the 2020's (adding in the element of the passage of time in search of the perfect simulation execution). Digging it.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Do we know how many episodes this season is?

 

[Josh Dial]

Do we know how many episodes this season is?

This season is eight episodes long. The finale is August 14.

 

[Josh Dial]

In episode 6, Bernard says that when Delos was designing the original parks, they ran it through a simulation first. He then said something like, "Hale did the same thing." I have moved further toward my theory in post #53 that Christina's scenes take place in a simulation and she's not actually in the real world (yet).