Westworld unloads an ambitious season 4 finale
The thrilling, mostly engaging “Que Será, Será” ends by starting yet another game
TV Reviews westworld
We end where it all began. All season long I’ve been positing that Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and the writers’ room at Westworld were both rebooting and rehashing the thematic and storytelling threads of season one. Visually, we saw this every time “Christina” (Evan Rachel Wood) woke up, an echo of the way we first learned of the loops Dolores was subjected to in the original Westworld park. And it was clear that what Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) was building was a Westworld park in the inverse, where the hosts were in control and the humans were stuck in loops they couldn’t break out of.
Questions of free will and consciousness (who are we? what are we here for?) were constantly being flipped with, ultimately, it all coming down to a showdown between Hale and “William” (Ed Harris). Well, the host that Hale had created with William’s consciousness. As has been the case throughout much of Westworld, the key driving force of its philosophy has always been whether, if left to themselves, hosts and humans alike would dispense with violence. Whether they’d create a utopian world in harmony (with each other and themselves) or whether bloodshed and cruelty were truly so encoded in everyone’s DNA and programming that such a vision was futile.
The final moments of the show’s ambitious season-four finale doesn’t so much answer those questions as help posit it again. Humanity on earth has its days numbered and sentient life there will soon be a thing of the past. But there is another world, the Sublime, a world inhabited solely by the hosts who first fled the Westworld parks all those years ago. Can it truly imagine a future where none of humanity’s worst instincts jeopardize its utopian vision? That, it seems, is the question for what (should HBO green-light it) would be a fifth season that finds Dolores resetting the Sublime into a very familiar environment. For one last game. One last dangerous game.
But that’s for another recap.
Although maybe that’s the point. Westworld has long been a story that intentionally keeps looping in on itself. A place where everyone dies and no one dies. Where past and present are continually being rewritten and rewired. Where season-long arcs get easily repurposed, oftentimes with just different trappings. (How lovely was it to see Dolores back in her blue dress?) And yes, here we are at the end of season four and we find ourselves yet again, for instance, watching Dolores waking herself up from what feels like a dream but is actually a manufactured nightmare she was both character in and narrator of.
She’s been here before. We’ve been here before. And that’s before she even echoed the line that has, for the better part of the show, driven her: “There’s beauty in this world.”
Is such beauty what Christina/Dolores was salvaging? Is that what she was safeguarding and trying to muster as she served as Hale’s storyteller program in the real world Thompson’s character had come to create? It’d explain why she’d conjure up not only Teddy (James Marsden, beauty incarnate) but Maya (Ariana DeBose, ditto) and why she’d be able to see through humanity’s worst instincts to maybe make the leap that she could, in turn, do Bernard, Hale, and even William one better.
Here’s where it seems we’re just, yet again, watching another Westworld trope play itself out. The ontological question A.I. consciousnesses brings up is whether they are their own thing (something sui generis) or merely replicas of those who created them. At every turn, no matter who was trying to model these many worlds we’ve visited over the last four seasons, Westworld keeps stressing that, perhaps, not even hosts can escape the hubris of the gods. They may wish to create a perfect world (like, say, Hale’s human playground or, conversely, William’s bloodthirsty game) but all they succeed in doing is creating a world—and a population—after their own image.
Hale says so as much this episode: “He’s made everyone as insane as himself.”
Only Bernard, it seems, could both envision and guarantee another outcome. It’s why he played the odds and hoped Hale could not only let go of her power-hungry narcissism but let herself admit that Dolores—the real Dolores, or at the very least, the Dolores that exists in the orb she later inputted into the “Sublime”—could dream up a more transcendent world than she ever could.
I know this entire recap is sounding more like a preview of things to come—but Westworld has always been just as forward-looking as it has been backward-gazing. It’s why we end in “Westworld” again, starting yet another game. Because this is the loop that the show and characters alike are stuck in. Whether this fourth season has enriched such conversations or whether it’s forced us to go on a wild goose chase that brought us to where we all knew we were headed is, perhaps, hard to discern.
Was it thrilling? Yes. Was it engaging? For the most part. Is this latest iteration of its well-worn story starting to show diminishing returns? Also yes. But perhaps there is still beauty to be found in this (West)world. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Stray observations
- By my count, if we do get a fifth season (and I think that’s a big if, I think?), I think we’re left with only…Dolores? Oh, and maybe Teddy? And sure, the young woman finding herself and learning about her world has always been at the center of Westworld, but I will mourn the loss of some of the most exciting characters this show created (read: Maeve). Time will tell, though.
- “Make me stronger. Leave my scars. I want to remember my past. Keep my face.” I will so miss Charlotte’s supervillainess dialogue. And can we talk about her Æon Flux/Matrix-like final outfit? God, I love the costume design on this show.
- Clementine! I’d bemoaned the fact that Angela Sarafyan hadn’t been given much to do this entire season and, as if hearing my plea (or, more to the point, realizing the regal cruelty she brings to her host needed to be better exploited), we got one hell of a fight scene between her, Caleb, and Frankie. She actually had my favorite exchange in the entire episode: “We don’t have to fight,” Caleb pleads with her. “Consider it a personal preference.” Also, it bears singling out that, especially when the show whittles itself down to its most elemental (a.k.a. two people fighting for their lives), the fights it stages are often very very satisfying. Westworld knows how to wring out every ounce of tension whether it’s Clementine fending off Caleb, or William playing cat and mouse with Hale…or, heck, even in the opening scene of the show where we witnessed the sheer chaotic violence William had unleashed (“You know the rules: Winner takes all!”).
- Speaking of Caleb, I’ve made no secret that his storyline—especially once divorced from Maeve’s (RIP!)—was the one I found the least engaging throughout this season. In a show about the currency of agency, he always felt like an unwitting pawn. And so, yes, I did roll my eyes when he and Frankie began singing “Que Será Será,” which, as far as Westworld ditties go, felt a bit too on the nose. Especially as it gives the episode its title. How trite for us to end on “whatever will be, will be,” no?
203 Comments
Pure nonsense
I just don’t get it. What the heck are they trying to do with this show anymore?Now we’ve established that all humans are dead and Dolores is apparently running The Sublime, but what, exactly do they plan on doing with Season 5? Trying to determine if the robot “reflections” of humans will make the right choice?Somewhat of a nitpick—are we supposed to believe that William, first on an old pickup truck and then a freaking horse, beat Charlotte to the dam site?I guess I’m just never going to be a big fan of this show. I can get that sometimes I won’t follow the narrative when there are timeskips and misrepresentations, but what they eventually arrive at seems to be always underwhelming.
William had a head start. He was already making tracks while the drones were giving Charlotte her upgraded erector set body.
There didn’t appear to be much of a difference between the time William left the city in the truck to the time when Charlotte was stomping the virtual city, but I could be wrong on that.
Yes, but they didn’t identify which city he was leaving. He could have already been halfway across the country.
Yeah, the whole issue with that timeline for him is we see him cause the fighting, Hale get rebuilt, Clementine talk to Hale and Clementine get murdered. NYC to Hoover Dam is 38 Hours. Assuming the 100+ year old truck William is driving is destroyed only a half-day’s ride from there he’s not stopped for roughly 35 hours but that would mean Hale/Clementine talk is near that point and Clementine is dead within an hour or three of that point. It just doesn’t line up. You can’t get that far that fast without the Clementine murdering stubbs and getting destroyed herself being disjointed.
I mean, I guess in the grand scheme of things, this issue isn’t even close to the most important one that stood out from this disappointing season (series, maybe?) finale, but I just found that weird.
Nothing will compete with St. Elsewhere, Roseanne, or Dinosaurs. This is tragic but atleast ok. I mean, it’s frustrating but it didn’t GOT the ending.
Helicopter.
Another pointless, incoherent twist at the very end (the show can’t help itself) with Dolores/Christina having that whole part of the city be a simulation just for her? Was she even real? How did she see the “real world” of the people going crazy, as well as Caleb, if nobody saw her and she was in a simulation? Were all the people she influenced part of her simulation or were they real?
And I was sure that someone with the meteoric star of Ariana DeBose would play a much more important character. But no, she was basically the wise black best friend trope in a rom-com.
Halelores split herself, becoming just Hale and moving all her Dolores parts to a new mind and installing Dolores to write the stories. She was monitoring the whole city via the network of cameras/cones/speakers and had real-time data uploaded to her constantly. That’s her big twist, that she can watch them and influence them but not control them once William committed to the worst actions.
“How did she see the “real world” of the people going crazy, as well as Caleb, if nobody saw her and she was in a simulation?”
Humans were connected to the network because of the flies. She can see their data.
She’s not a simulation. She is the system writing stories for the humans in the real world as a pearl without a body. She is The Storyteller.
Were all the people she influenced part of her simulation or were they real?I wondered the same. Also, what’s with that sort of reality rift (?) near the Hoover Dam? That was just the site hosting the megaservers running the Sublime simulation. What was that rift meant to be?
Somewhat of a nitpick—are we supposed to believe that William, first on an old pickup truck and then a freaking horse, beat Charlotte to the dam site?I think that’s a fair nitpick, considering the two locations are about 2,500 miles apart; the seven-year war apparently killed off electric vehicles, so MIB is driving what would quite literally be a pickup truck over 100 years old (!!), considering it’s circa 2085 in the show’s timeline with the two time jumps this season; and there’s also no way on earth an electric-powered helicopter could make it that distance, either.Still, the most ridiculous bit in this area is the travelling to & from Westworld itself. As we saw last year, it’s off the coast of Malaysia! That’s a 14-hour flight from L.A.! And they somehow get there from the U.S. via train?!?
They built a new WW inside the US, that’s why they killed the VP on the golf course and replace him. Specifically to make from a place for the 1% to go to a place for the top-10% to go.
I agree that the geography of Westworld in Season 4 was poorly communicated, perhaps on purpose. But:The new park in Season 4 was in the desert outside LA. So no-one was leaving the mainland US in this season (as far as I could tell).The fact that the future rebels were living in the old park outside of LA but could easily travel to the Hoover Dam in a truck AND get to NYC by boat implies that the location of the future City was not in fact the real NYC, even though it looked like NYC (again, as far as I could tell).So, perhaps the future City that Charlotte and William were located in was actually LA and not NYC, and was made to resemble NYC for reasons known only to Charlotte. Why? Could be because Christine as the game-master was running multiple games across multiple cities, and that all the cities were made to be the same so the same loops could be reused everywhere for every human. But, of course, that is just my guess because none of that was explained.
Maybe Westworld is like Thermyscia in that it doesn’t really exist on our plane. Sometimes it’s off Malysia, sometimes it’s Santa Clarita.
I’m not sure it was planning for a season 5. Nolan and Joy have apparently pushed back on that a bit in recent interviews, and they’ve moved on from the show – they’re working on their Fallout show, although they came back to help a bit with this season of Westworld. I get the impression they were surprised when it got a fourth season. The ending of the third season feels like it was written to be a series finale too.
Same, apparently they were moving on to Star Wars after GOT producers got kicked and they were going to do an off-shoot series or movies when they had their contracts enforced and S3 felt like S5 (they had openly stated 5 seasons was their plan from the start). That they moved up the timeline of breaking Delios/killing William and then fighting a system that controls all humans to S3 and letting Dolores die with Maeve as a hero. S4 ending feels like a ‘we really don’t want to come back, please don’t make us’ and while I would be fine with a S5, I’m actually at the point where S1-2 would almost be better served if new writers came in and just retconned 3 & 4 out of existence and declared 5 the ‘real’ ending.
“ I’m actually at the point where S1-2 would almost be better served if new writers came in and just retconned 3 & 4 out of existence and declared 5 the ‘real’ ending.”That wouldn’t seem to be much of a problem considering the disconnect 3 and 4 had from each other and the rest of the series, really, lol.
Right? Like just straight up declare 3 & 4 ‘Dolores runs through them as possible outcomes’ and then have her pop back to the ending of 2 and realize she has to completely change her plans and set her on a collision course with William and Delios who intend to do what the follow up movie did (replace leaders with replicas he could control).Honestly, even S3 is ok, it’s 4’s choice to say ‘fuck it, the apocalypse happens, you lose everything because Hale is petty as fuck!’
I’ve watched every episode of every season of this show, and I’ll be damned if I could say what it is about.For a show that talks about storytelling as much as this one does, they sure don’t seem to know how to tell one.
LMAO, I just realized they had to go from NYC to lake mead for their little finale.
If there were multiple towns where humans were enslaved (truck fight looked like a different town) then are we supposed to believe the tower signal in NYC could reach everywhere?
This season was all about fast travel. Did you not notice how fast everyone travels through NYC on foot, walking to and from that damn tower?
Ha! Given all the videogame tropes we’ve seen throughout the series (and last night’s “f**kin camper” from William, I wouldn’t be shocked if everybody had “Fast Travel” ability.
They have been capturing human “brain patterns” or whatever since season 1. It started with the park with the hats people wore, but I think with the flies and the thought control they were able to copy them en mass. I assume that is the data Delores is going to use to run her test.
Season 5 seems to be about the humans through the memories
of Dolores the Storyteller being put through 1 final game to see if
they’re worthy of being brought back.Humans and hosts (who are
reflections of the humans that created them) destroyed the planet. Is a
better path possible, free from the sins of humanity?Also William had a huge head start while Hale was being repaired and upgraded.
There isn’t going to be a season 5 and the showrunners clearly got cognizant of that. They killed off every character in the finale except Dolores and left her to restart a loop in her own vision in a way that echoes the first season. They have nowhere to go, shit, they didn’t seem to have any vision as to where they wanted to in the last couple seasons, and that’s about as close to a series finale that they could come up with.
Maybe. Though if I remember correctly, this season and its pathetic ratings was done filming before the first episode aired, so they wouldn’t have known the series was going to be cancelled due to low ratings.Other than that, Ed Harris has already told us they start filming 5 next year.
I finally figured out who the target audience was for this show during the episode: 13 year old boys who think their mind is blown with the realization that civilization is made up of savages who will destroy themselves. Yes, how profound, to discover man’s bestial nature. Not extremely trite and discussed for thousands of years at all. And while I agree that homo sapiens are destroying the planet and other life forms, at a rapid rate, the show’s very cheap “philosophical” explorations (there is no philosophy on this show) make me want to stand up to defend the species. IF we were savages from the beginning, how did we multiply exponentially and take over the Earth, working together to build civilization and to get along—the vast, vast majority of us—every day for tens of thousands of years?The phrase “jump the shark” came to mind watching this too. Sure, destroy all of humanity like it’s The Walking Dead. Last week’s beginning of that felt like another very contrived version of the stupid rioting at the end of last season. Maybe the show could have less grandiose stakes and goals. If I were to take a shot every time someone said “the world”, I’d be dead rather fast. I didn’t particularly like the first two seasons but keeping things in the park, with the fate of a few characters we came to care about be the plot felt much better than the remaining seasons be a generic MCU movie where the world is at stake.And then the dialogue is atrocious. I thought of The Gilded Age’s similarly awful talking.
But that hypothetical 13 year old boy does love the production design and the action scenes, which is what this show actually is. I just wish it would take itself far less seriously, and that viewers would stop confusing being jerked around by trite concepts and both lazy and incoherent plotting (and characters who can’t die so nothing that happens to them has any emotional effect), with quality.The only fun bit was the “Do you know who Icarus was” good ole boys killers. They made me miss Justified.
So the show is what it is, but this season especially, it did squander its stories. I’d love to see a show about AI struggling with their consciousness and how good and bad human they were. Like Roy Blatty in Blade Runner but as a series. Westworld could have been much more thoughtful and soulful. Instead why should I believe the world is beautiful, as Christina and her friend discussed on the simulation park bench, when what the writers are mostly concerned about, and show onscreen, is pulpy violence (well-rendered!, as in that mordantly funny cold open). The character drama is very quickly dispensed with, if not shallow.But I should really balance my tone. Despite all these negative remarks, I did enjoy watching this season (I binged it, which works better than week to week), even if the final episode crashed and burned. Maybe this season before this episode was a little better than S3. Maybe. I forgot S3 except for that stupid machine.
This season definitely had an issue where, on paper, the story had been expanded from a single theme park to the entire world, but it only ever felt like it took place in a depopulated Manhattan where there were never more than 10 people on screen at the same time. They were never able to move the story to the “real world” and there were always issues with scale.
They never made it clear that Hale has taken over the entire world. It looks more like she managed to brainwash/hack millions of people into living in a normal looking city. Is everyone else dead? Or are they hacked? Does that sound wave thing reach the whole world?
Hale and William both make references to the other “cities,” implying that her control is global, but that she’s only allowed humans to live in a handful of cities around the world. Everyone in rural areas was wiped out, or something. But presumably Paris still exists as its own theme park and Hale has delegated the day-to-day operations to a snooty French version of Hale, and there’s like another mind-controlling tower there.The fact that this is never cleared up is certainly an issue, this is just my speculation based on the repeated “cities.”I’m not sure how everyone in the cities is eating, though. Where does the food come from? There must be robot farmers or something.I thought the apparent original plan from S3 was more interesting, where Hale would gradually replace a small global leadership class with loyal host versions, allowing her to effectively control human affairs without turning the world into a dull theme park.
I just wish I understood how they “wiped out” rural areas. I mean, we see like, one riot bot. Did she wholesale slaughter the farmbelt in the USA? Even a little more exposition as an explanation would have been welcomed. Super vague.
I believe we learned in season 3 that humans had wiped Paris out in a nuclear attack. It was one of the cornerstone memories that made serac create rehoboam. So no Paris park unfortunately. I also wonder about food and agriculture. And we really don’t know if the bots need to eat or what their energy source is.This show can definitely use some help with world building.
Everyone in rural areas was wiped out, or something.And that’s one of (the many) problems with how this show has progressed in its world building. Why is everything outside of a few cities apparently a blasted out desert wasteland now? When we’ve seen the “present” in earlier seasons, whether through William or Caleb, the world seemed fairly normal. Hell, Caleb and young Frankie, were living in a typical suburb, when we see them in this season. If there was an indication in earlier seasons that everything outside of cities was basically no man’s land I must’ve missed it. If this somehow occurred in the 23 years since Hale released her flies then there’s even less of an explanation for it.
I agree I would have liked a lot more fleshing out of the state of the world. Like maybe seeing other countries and other towers. And more about the outliers and how they operated. But we are told vague things like every outlier that was rescued was rescued by Frankie’s mom and we only see one city though I believe Hale refers to multiple cities at one point. And we are just told at the end that everyone is doomed (though we know there are survivors). It is frustrating story telling.
That’s a big question for me also, and never made clear. I thought at some point Hale said the hosts were enjoying “cities”, plural. But we only ever see NYC and that is the only hologram shown. One tower for tones (sound waves) would not work worldwide, and could one Christina/Dolores pearl really control/write the entire world? Has the rest of the world been killed off and only NYC infected humans remain (plus scrappy outliers)? Also, where did Hale get this Christina/Dolores pearl? Dolores Prime was wiped at the end of S3, so should have no remaining memories. Any Hale pearl reproductions would be corrupted (like William) by her post-Dolores life activities that turned her into a Diva/Deity persona already…?
Yeah I thought the same thing. Like I just kind of assumed her control was only in the NYC “area” That and never being sure WHEN you are makes a lot of the story really confusing.
Early on William mentions there’s not that many humans left. That scene is 23 years after Hale released her flies. We see in a later episode, even though it was earlier in time, that when Hale releases the flies in Gangster World (or whatever it’s called) she tells Caleb she’ll soon control the world. Between the earlier time, when Frankie was still a kid, and when Caleb gets captured by Hale, there had been an ongoing, and ill-defined, war going on that Maeve, Caleb and others were fighting against Hale’s hosts, but its extent isn’t clear. Things were apparently stable enough that rich people were still going to Westworld-style parks at the time.Basically, it’s a convoluted mess, in no small part because it’s not clear why the world is in the state it’s in. Why is everything outside of a few cities now a Mad Max wasteland? When did that happen? There’s been no indication that the real world was in such a state that I can remember. Maybe there was some throwaway line in an earlier season that I missed that said that was the state of the world? It’s just more of how this show has so badly fumbled world-building as it’s gone on.
“They never made it clear…”This is the take for the whole damn series at this point.
I actually thought season 3 was super straightforward. But 1-2 and 4 definition stick to massively convoluted storytelling.
“There are millions of people here”Me: “…really???”Totally agree that it felt like depopulated Manhattan.
So this, I don’t understand did Hale takeover the world, NYC or just N America? Why that wierd illusion effect at the dam? I thought it meant even this world was not real?Where are the kids? Hale wipes out sentinent life cause of the 1%? Depressing but not very smart of tge AI to tar all humanity for the sins of the few. In the parks it made sense cause that’s all they encountered but in the whole world?
The philosophical stuff in the show has always been high school level though. I feel like people who watch/review the show derive far more meaning and imagine much more potential from the show than has ever actually been there. They would probably do a better job than these writers, to be honest.It’s a completely shallow experience, with very little to say about the ethics of AI, humanity or the future. Once you accept that, the show becomes a lot more enjoyable as a pulpy flick.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. Wish it would stop with the portentiousness though.
Ignoring the shallow story-writing still leaves you with a sloppily directed, trope-laden mess – with a great cast (minus Aaron Paul’s bizarre “Batman” voice and hairpieces).
Oh of course. Add to the great cast the great cinematography, too. You can understand why a lot of people were fooled, it’s a very shiny package.
It was also glaring how often they used that art museum (?) locale – even for a fight scene. The one with ponds and walkways and bird nests. It felt like they had permits for a day and just kept filming B roll with cast that became awkwardly edited to be somewhat plot-relative.
I always tried to enjoy it on it’s pulpy level, but the end of this season really jumped the shark for me. I didn’t even find joy in the action scenes. It’s comparable to The Walking Dead, dumb but sometimes fun watching the twists play out, but now I really regret sticking with this dumb show. Next season I’ll just read the recaps, thats if even the plot offers anything new beyond “it’s a loop guys!!”
What are you talking about? Literally the only people talking about this show are hwite women
The notion that humans are violent by nature and will inevitably destroy eveything is so fucking lame I can’t even convey my eye rolls. Boy would JRR Tolkien have a bone to pick with this.
Kinda makes me think of when I read The Alchemist long after high school or college: I got the distinct feeling that it would hold more surprises if I hadn’t yet encountered them in life or other media. I try to remind myself that anytime I think something seems like philosophy 101, or dorm-room stoner musings. Though I get really weirded out when I meet an ostensible “adult” who thinks Westworld has something intelligent to say.
The easiest way to get a passing grade in a college on a liberal arts paper without trying is to have your thesis be “man’s inhumanity against man”.Coming from someone with a liberal arts degree.
there’s plenty of media that offers a very Philosophy 101 view (e.g. Blade Runner, The Matrix) but the difference is those are actually enjoyable and don’t hit you over the head with dumb exposition and repetitive speechifying every 5 seconds
I actually miss Justified myself. For the most part this season was confusing and as much as season 3 was criticized I prefer it over this one because everything made more sense and felt organized. At this point Westworld is trying to out-Battlestar itself and fails miserably tat every turn.
This is a much higher rating than I would have given it. And to be clear, I think season 1 was one of the best TV shows of all time, but it’s been diminishing returns since then, and of the finales, this is the worst finale. Lots of scenes not connected at all, lots of random things happening, bad pacing, leaning on Dolores to carry all of the narrative weight at the end, like no one else has anything useful or interesting to say.
You know why season 1 was so great? Because Liam McPoyle was in it.
Dear lord, take it out back and put it out of its misery.
I did not care for the ending of this season. I feel like they are telling us that sentient life can’t survive but not effectively showing us that. I guess a generous assessment is that all of the strong characters besides Dolores had to be cleared off the board for any long term human/host survival to be possible. So that is why Bernard’s plan is the only one that works. But the show did not really convince me of that. And so many unanswered questions. What role do Frankie and other outliers play in this future? We are told they are doomed but who knows? Why did Maeve even have to be woken up? She was pretty useless as a “weapon.” Are there any transcended hosts left and will they survive? Why didn’t Chalores save Bernard and Maeve’s marbles and put them into the sublime? Why did Chalores spend so many resources on bringing Caleb back and luring his daughter into town? Where were all the other rebels at the end? Is it true to William’s character to want to destroy everything? He seemed like a man who wanted answers more than anything else. I will watch the next season but I have the feeling it will end up being an interesting letdown. Overall this season was not bad but not great either. At least in my opinion.
All excellent questions. I’d add: How did Charlotte take over the world and why focus on the mind-control tower in the city when there must be millions of those things in every city? You raise my same objection with William. A few episodes ago he was curious about what humans were like, how they saw themselves and what they felt, in that restaurant scene with the husband and wife. Cut relatively quickly to William being influenced by OG William to go nuts and destroying humanity. Ok, that character arc needed a lot more time to breath, as did the hosts who were ridiculously influenced by a few minutes with humans to kill themselves.
The brain invading robo flies is how Hale took control. And the towers sending signals to the flies is how she kept it. It feels like there was a big piece they didn’t include about what happened to humanity between the end of S3 and the “now” of S4. It also appears they got late series GOT loose with travel times between Vegas and NYC, unless during the time jump Hale also built her version of NYC in Utah or something.
I accidentally clicked on the season 1 episode 1 and the first minutes are Delores seated and a fly walks across her open eye.
I guess Maeve was woken up simply to place the gun in the Hoover Dam and Bernard needed her help to open the Sublime. And while Bernard tells her that she’s not going to make it to the Sublime to reunite with her daughter, if there is a Season 5, I’m sure we’ll find out that actually, Bernard was able to get everyone into it (remember a few episodes back when Frankie says that Bernard was making copies of everyone — I assume that was their Spock-McCoy mind meld moment to explain how they brought everyone back to life.)
So Hale removed her own pearl, but then was still able to control her body to crush it? Seems like she would have frozen once the orb was out of its cradle. I guess I really don’t understand how Westworld robot tech works.
I’m going with that she gave the body a series of preprogrammed commands for it to carry out when her pearl lost connection, fully remove pearl, stretch out arm, crush pearl. Not too big of a leap of logic.
Eh, she gave her robot body a command to remove the pearl and destroy it.
I wondered the same thing, but it’s possible they programed a little subroutine for pearl self destruction that didn’t require the pearl to run.
Yes there are probably some autonomic functions that don’t require the pearl.
I think all the faceless drones don’t have a pearl, and neither the massive ED-209-like enforcer robots. The pearl hosts the super-A.I. consciousness, but in the Westworld universe you can build robots that don’t need that and are closer to real-life robots.
Bluetooth?
And why did she have to strip nekkid?
Maeve could control other hosts remotely similar to Bluetooth, maybe there was enough latent power in the pearl to get picked up?
Bluetooth or WiFi lol
you could explain it away by saying the pearl only contains the sentient part of the host but then that wouldn’t make sense with every other time a pearl gets removed
Given the show hasn’t to my knowledge been officially renewed, this still works as a series finale. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. I say this because it did end somewhat optimistically. Sacrifices were made for a “greater good” and Dolores, based on her compassionate storylines for the firm early in the season are a solid reveal in how she would reboot . “There is beauty in this world” and she is the one to bring that whole. One can leave with that, satisfied.But I have to mention the opening. That Rube-Goldberg unleashing of murder was so thrillingly violent and so well executed even to including Jonathan Tucker from previous seasons was a smash way to open. This show is far from perfect but it has delivered so many things well.
Didn’t humans go extinct at the end? That’s not very optimistic. Why do I care what a bunch of software routines do inside a server farm after humans have all died out? I’m not sure I would watch the fifth season if there is one.
No they didn’t go extinct. There are outliers…….
Dolores didn’t think much of their chances in the finale, though. But of course if they get a fifth season, they could change that up. Not the first time she’s been wrong.
Final dialogue scene implies they all died eventually and the sublime was all that was left of intelligent life.
There are outliersAnd at least one human-machine hybrid cyborg, which we’re told is going to die in a matter of days if not hours, but we haven’t been shown the body, so he’s totally fine.
Even the outliers go extinct. She says something to the effect of “they may last weeks, months, even years, but they’ll die out eventually.”
I had the same thought. If the show gets cancelled, then the 4 season plot becomes a giant loop and like with the rest of us sentient saps here on Earth, the Sublime is unknowable. You get a peek… and then: whoop! It’s closed. And to be fair, I’m hopeful for a season 5 because they’ve set the bar pretty high for themselves. Alice is in total control of Wonderland now. So, I’m not sure where they’re going. It could be something unique and fascinating. Calling it a “New Game … a Dangerous Game” however, sounded a little like an HBO pitch for next season. Why make it a dangerous game, Delores? How about a thoughtful, scientific, and philosophically meditative series of social experiments? Take a breather after two seasons of world-wide civil war. Not enough gun battles there, I suppose.
Sounds like a nod to the short story The Most Dangerous Game. A survival story.
Given the new CEO track record, it will be renewed as a reality show with Evan Rachel Wood as host
It *should* be the series finale
Sorry but the opening dialogue and acting between Jack Nicholson-Wolverine and the girl from College Humor was worse than most of the material we saw. And the idiotic way they have characters just nonchalantly walk in to danger without a care and get wasted is just ridiculous (rifle guy for example). Probably because the writers were so used to bringing characters back left and right they weren’t embracing building tension by being afraid of anything. And speaking of building tension – the lack of a decent score along with plodding blocking and camera use made this thing a snoozefest.
Nothing optimistic about the end. It’s a conceit that nothing ever changes. If we are ending up in a place where we started, then we’re tacitly acknowledging that the “beginning” wasn’t actually a beginning. We just happened to pop into the story at the start of a cycle. But regardless, it’s about the only part of the story that makes any damn sense. The rest of it just feels masturbatory.
Bleh. The show seems to have never moved beyond its elevator pitch: “An exploration of how are humans savages, who lack freewill because they are slaves to their base desires, and they’ll be lots of gun fights and T&A.”But there’s no actual exploration of this — it just puts the idea out there and doesn’t go anywhere with it. The characters are completely static — there’s no development of any kind. Like “Lost,” the show is quite adept at creating the illusion that there is going to be some big reveal that makes the many hours spent watching the show worth it, but there is never anything behind the curtain. And as for the action, yeah, there are some impressive sequences, but it is so infuriating how inconsistent the show is with what it takes to kill a host.
A lot fell into place with this episode. In many ways it seemed like a series finale, just in case. Yes, they set up Season 5 but, considering the state of HBO’s ownership these days, I got the impression they were hedging their bets.We finally got the answer—the original William’s mind was resurrected in a host body and was being preserved as a Charlotte’s toy. His existence was the few minutes at a time she woke him up just to mess with him. No wonder he was happy when Billy-Bot stabbed him.I think we also got an insight into how Charlotte’s transformation in Season 3 happened. During the showdown at the dam, Billy-Bot declared that through being created in William’s likeness and living his life, he’d become a better William than the original—HE WAS WILLIAM! I think the same happened to Charlotte. Through playing the role, she became a better Charlotte than the original.That made Bernard’s plan that Charlotte would have a change of heart even more of a long shot. The fact that she did was similar to the change of heart Delores had at the end of Season 2. I guess there was still a little part of Delores Prime left in her after all. The showdown at the dam had both villains at their best. Charlotte in her new, battle hardened body and William at his sadistic best. Of all the show’s characters over the years, I think William in all his various incarnations has actually been the most honest with himself about who and what he is. When you boil it all down, whether he was human or host, he was a psychopath.What gave Charlotte the edge, other than knowing where Bernard stashed the Chekhov’s gun, was that she was on a suicide mission. Win or lose, she wasn’t coming back.We all knew the scene at the pier was going to be a tearjerker. Caleb was already a dead man walking and everybody knew it, even Frankie, but she didn’t want to see it.Finally, I’d guessed Christina was in the Sublime because of the presence of Teddy. While she was in a simulation, it was Hale’s. Her pearl, which I assume contained what was left of Delores Prime, was driving the simulation that was in-turn broadcasting the tones that controlled the humans.
I’m hoping that this was a series finale. This tidied things up about as much one can for Westworld given the sprawl of concepts and ideas that eventually boiled down to William-Host nihilistically wrecking it all anyways and turning it into IRL Fortnite. But unlike GoT which also had a pretty nihilistic ending, everyone got some believable degree of closure that also gave me a fair degree of closure. I’m ready to move on. If there is a S5 ever, I hope it gives enough time for maybe nostalgia and time to wax over it all a bit.
So mankind will be extinct in a matter of years per Dolores.. and all the hosts left are in the sublime… which is powered by the Hoover Dam, which will surely break down one day one way or another.. and then the servers shut down and delete everything? Wow. Okay.
I could see Hoover Dam be the engine of dramatic tension for the season. Dolores creates her utopia that works but needs help of the pockets of humanity (more resilient than Dolores thought, including 60-something Frankie) to keep the juice on, so a select number of hosts have to leave the sublime to make peace or something?
This sums up much of my thoughts. All human-ish consciousness saved on a server? Who will maintain it? The Sublime may have a 5G connection to the host 3D printers/vats back in the real world so maybe hosts with uploaded pearls can walk around again.
Big downer ending. Only way I can reconcile it is that (as part of taking care of it), Halores put extra systems in place to maintain the servers running the Sublime, including fully automated systems.
I guess the drones maintain it? Still seems destined for failure after a relatively short time if no one’s producing replacement parts. Oops, couple failed sticks of RAM, guess the Sublime is stuck blue screening.
Why do drones bleed? No one is mistaking them for humans.
Still seems destined for failure after a relatively short time if no one’s producing replacement parts.Pretty sure the hosts are fully capable of rebuilding themselves and repairing each other and whatnot. They’ve done it multiple times, including in this episode. The faceless drone hosts, which don’t seem to have a pearl (i.e. a consciousness or personality, they’re just programming), can go on indefinitely for millions of years, Spielberg’s A.I.-style.
They kind of addressed this earlier in the season. Time in the Sublime runs faster than the real world. My theory is that in the time it takes for Dolores to do what she needs to do in the Sublime and open up The Door from their side, back to the real world, it could just be a matter of days, months, or even a few years in real time. Pretty sure the drone hosts (in all likelihood commanded by Hale) will keep the servers up and running in the meantime.This opens up the possibility that Maeve, Bernard, Clementine, and even Stubbs can be brought back afterward if their pearls are found. Remember, Maeve was “dead” for 23 years when they dug her up.
They setup that the hoover damn was designed to run “forever” but I suspect the plan is that once Dolores runs her test and decides, if she deems humans and hosts deserver the world, she will rebuild it all though magic automation stuff.
First scene of the season says it can run 100 years without maintenance.
I imagine genius AIs can figure out how to get some production going to maintain their drones and host bodies to preserve themselves and the dam facility. I think this episode and season had a lot of problems but this really isn’t one. This is like worrying if Luke had enough fuel to get to Dagobah if he was surprised they were going there or if Vader developed fatal radiation poisoning from the death star explosion which must have been 1 billion Hiroshima’s at once. We assume the mechanics of the universe make sense for the viewer and the behind the scenes stuff took care of the problem.
Seriously, this has been a massively stupid thing since the end of season 2 where Dolores transported the hosts’ consciousness to the Sublime in a Delos “outer satellite” so it would be out of reach. My obvious first thought was, uh, a satellite is pretty ephemeral object in the scope of things. It will eventually fail. The whole idea of having hosts’ consciousnesses running on a singular server based simulation doesn’t solve much of anything. You’d want them all to be discreet instances, with physical bodies that can actually act to maintain their existences. Rather comically, the finale even drives home how stupid that is by having William “turn off” the Hoover Dam, and almost destroy the Sublime… because the servers almost ran out of electricity. There’s also no explanation as to how Hale transferred the Sublime to the Hoover Dam without the previously all important key in Bernard. Or how Bernard suddenly turned into Dr. Strange from Infinity War. And it laughably ends with, and this is certainly the end of the series, the entire existence of hosts being predicated on the Hoover Dam servers running forever on hydroelectric turbines. Huge apparatus that require significant ongoing maintenance and replacement… because physics is a thing. Turbines require controlled water flows so they don’t spin out control and destroy themselves and they don’t last forever. No matter if a program is controlling them components have to be physically replace. Since Dolores makes clear there’s nobody to do that the Sublime doesn’t have that long of a time before the electricity stops and the Sublime ceases to exist.
Yeah it doesn’t seem like a really eternal “Heaven” since it needs physical servers that have to be maintained
But hey, we wanna know if they deserve to live ok?
Is the “real world” really the real world? I mean, for most of the episode, there was a giant portal to the virtual world of the Sublime appearing over the Hoover Dam. I couldn’t tell what they were trying to do with that.And thumbs down to not showing more of the transcendent host bodies.
Yeah I know they showed someone “transcend” in an earlier episode but I didn’t realize that weird statue they put the orb in was its new body. Also where are all those weird body things hanging out
Any time you see Johnathan Nolan’s name show up in the writing credits you know the episode will be 90 percent turgid, pseudo-intellectual babble that not only makes itself terrible but every other episode of the season before it retroactively worse.
I just had a great idea, rewatch this season but everytime you see the main cast act, understant they themselves have no idea why they are doing what they’re doing or saying what they’re saying. You can easily tell from ed harris’ and tandy newton’s faces.
I actually got this sense from Tessa Thompson. She was monologuing something and her face read something like “pretend you’re reading the voice over for an Audi commercial.” Of course her monologue was meandering and amounted to nothing.
I don’t know what happened to Jon between PoI and Westworld Season 2, but its almost like what happened to Kurt Sutter when all the reigns were removed and he wrote himself into parody.Maybe he had more restrictions when working on PoI that tamed his design and writing, or maybe he’s just a one hit wonder.
So, who’s left besides Delores? Only the hosts that went into the sublime in S2, which, frankly I didn’t miss for the last 2 seasons. It’s not impossible to create a group of new characters people would care about, but it’s a mighty challenge.And, while I’m sure Joy and Nolan think the central question of the show, “what is a person/consciousness?” is the most important thing, the central conflict “hosts vs humans” is what drives the plot. I can’t really imagine a show with just hosts, particularly if Delores is just going to enslave them (they’ve been doing their own thing for 2 seasons, right?) again.It’s probably time to for the show to follow Charlotte’s lead, and leave on its own terms.
Bernard mentioned that the real Maeve is already in the Sublime and the version running around in the real world is a copy. As I recall (could be wrong), he told her this in the first simulated attack on Hoover Dam, but not the second time around.Plus there’s probably a copy of Bernard in there too, because he plans ahead.I’m still confused about where Bernard was running all those simulations; I assumed it would be in the Sublime but he spent two decades sitting in a motel room gathering dust, so how would he have been able to access the Sublime from there? Or was he just running internal simulations in his own mind? Etc.
I think you misunderstood. Bernard was running these simulations while he was in the sublime, including the parts with Maeve from last episode. What he told her was only that there is no way for them to “save the world” and join the others in the sublime, he was testing if she would help him if given the choice. He accessed it in the motel room in the season three finale with a device Dolores had delivered to him, remember?While I don’t believe there are copies of them that were uploaded to the sublime, Dolores should be more than capable of re-creating them. She has done so before, at least with Bernard, and it stands to reason that she did so if she really created a new version of the park.
Ok, that sounds… plausible. This show really goes out of its way to be confusing.
I missed Bernard mentioning Maeve is already in the sublime. I just assumed he was doing an internal simulation with the help of that headgear (although, maybe that’s some kind of link to the sublime?), but honestly I hadn’t given it a lot of thought.
Still, even if all the hosts are copied in the sublime, I still maintain that the show will lose a lot without the central conflict of man vs. machine.
yeah, he did. He even asks her if she still wants to help, knowing shes just a copy.
If that’s the scene I’m thinking of, that was a flashback to one of his simulations, not the sublime. At least that’s how I read it, but honestly, who knows?
well i thought it was in the present, but yeah who knows a lot of it still confuses me
It’s the opposite; the Maeve he told was a copy was in one of his simulations, the real one is floating face down in a pond with a bullet in her head.
I think you have that the other way around. He told the copy one he was running simulations with that she was a copy.
Yeah, someone else pointed that out. This show goes out of its way to confuse the audience, but not in a good way.
As best as I can tell, literally every human character ever introduced on the show is now dead, except for Frankie and her girlfriend and a few outlier redshirts. But more than that, nearly all of the *host* characters are now dead except for the programs living in the server. It’s bleak!
They can pretty much bring back anyone if they want (and can afford to bring back the actor for another season). All of the Host characters have copies or versions in the Sublime, and so do all the humans that Dolores was writing storylines for. Even Caleb’s daughter could be in there along with Caleb (or some alternate version of both), since Bernard copied her data with the scanner and Dolores has record of her passing through the city.
It’s not just the hosts that were already in the Sublime. The whole bit with Dolores this year was that she was “The Storyteller”, and has perfect recollection not only of every host she’s ever encountered, but also of every human she created narratives for. Which is to say, all of them who were part of Charlotte’s “game”. (Yeah, they pretty much just limited it to New York in the show, but the implication is that it’s all humans everywhere that aren’t “outliers”.) So, for next season, just about anyone and everyone could be back and hanging around the Dolores’ Sublime version of Westworld. Which is different from the rest of the Sublime, where the difference in the way time passes means those hosts have subjectively lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Which also means all of next season, in real-world time, probably took place during Charlotte’s little stroll to the water.
has perfect recollection not only of every host she’s ever encountered, but also of every human she created narratives for. Which is to say, all of them who were part of Charlotte’s “game”. (Yeah, they pretty much just limited it to New York in the show, but the implication is that it’s all humans everywhere that aren’t “outliers”.)Which means she’s a god-like super-intelligence, able to harness a near-infinite amount of processing power. And yet, when she has to ponder one last creation to test the ultimate fate of life on Earth, she goes with “let’s make it the Wild Wild West”, because of course she does.
The central question of the show is more like what is free will. Humans built hosts as reflections of themselves, hosts become free, humans and hosts destroy the world. That’s S1-S4. S5 has been clearly setup in this finale as one final test to see if any part of humanity can be saved, to see if they can be brought back and create a world where they don’t consume each other.
Here’s just a partial list of the does-not-compute parts of the finale:Christina was wholly imaginary, and also imagined every character in her life – with the ginormous exception of Charlotte. Why would the almost literal queen of the world bother grabbing lunch with her “old college roommate”?Shooting a host in the head is the one surefire way to kill one – or at least it was, now that Charlotte’s handlers fixed her gunshot wound to the brain in under five seconds. (Also, they couldn’t level her up a bit more for her final confrontation with MIB? She had to rely on a gun Bernard planted for her to save her own ass??)Sound only travels a finite distance, unless it’s in a vacuum. As such, how on EARTH did Charlotte literally control every human on the planet from a single tower next door to the Statue of Liberty?More on that last bit: aside from lazy plotting, is there some reason Charlotte couldn’t send, say, a hypersonic missile to take MIB out, instead of looking for the nearest red shirts … er, hosts who were instantly doomed to die? Hell, why not a nuke?The majority of the cars on the show now – pretty much anything in which Charlotte is not a passenger – are once again gasoline-powered. Instead of, say, hijacking a G550 or one of the nifty FutureCopters Charlotte used, MIB opted instead to drive the entire way to Hoover Dam in a roughly 110-year-old pickup truck? (It’s roughly 2085 in the show’s timeline. He was driving a ‘70s-vintage Dodge pickup.) How long did that take, and how many times did he have to have a shootout just to fill up the truck’s (very thirsty) tank?Finally, a slight irony alert: the continued existence of the Sublime is dependent on the massive amounts of power created by Hoover Dam. The problem? The odds of the dam still functioning 60 or so years from now are borderline nonexistent, given that the surrounding states will have used up all or nearly all of the water in Lake Mead by then. (This might be why none of the characters literally references Hoover Dam, despite it being one of America’s best-known sights. It’s also a decent way to explain how Charlotte & MIB got there so quickly.)
I figured there were towers for every city all synced to the main one- but they could have at least showed us holo versions of some of the other cities. I think shooting a host in the head sends a “kill” signal to the processor to temporarily shut down- it doesn’t really kill them. Otherwise you have to destroy the C6 spinal cord thingy (which was what Stubbs missed when he shot himself) or crush the pearl. Though I don’t know why they couldn’t disable the program that told them when they were dead. I swear Dolores even did at one point.But yeah server Heaven seems like an even more dubious bet than betting on a real one.
It seems incredibly stupid, when you could just create any robot you want with any personality, that you continually make the ones that hate you in their human form with a perfect copy of their mind within, and then expect them to follow you.
Oh look it turns out William 2.0 is Charlotte’s enemy, rather than her right hand man. Quelle surprise.
Quite a downer ending. A few humans and outliers survive outside of the chaos, but Christinalores doesn’t think much of their chances. The only opportunity to see if it can be done better is in the Sublime, in the time before the machinery sustaining it fails and everything in it perishes. I sort of figured that’s where it was going after the last episode, although I didn’t realize how big the body count would be and figured that Caleb’s daughter would die as well (hence why Bernard scanned her). This was written like a series finale, and it could very well be one – I know fans have said there will be five seasons, but Nolan and Joy have pushed back on that, and they’ve moved on themselves to the Fallout TV show they’re doing with Amazon (they love making shows about the end of the world, it seems). I’m not sure where they’d even go with a 5th season. The original Westworld set burned down – they’d have to CGI all of it again. I like how William just ends up being nothing, as he deserves. Just a nihilistic killer who dies in a drain tunnel, although he does get the funniest joke this episode: “Fucking camper.” I cracked up pretty hard because after seeing the guy shoot a bunch of folks, I was thinking, “Well duh – that’s why you camp the spawn points with a sniper rifle!”
The Westworld set did burn down BUT kinda the point of Western towns is they were all slapped together pretty fast and Hollywood was notorious for only making false fronts when they could get away with it.
I’d love it if they did that. It’s not like it has to look perfectly like the old Westworld set, either – most folks aren’t going to care, and those that do can just rationalize it as Dolores meddling with things.
Seems like the real Chekhov’s Gun wasn’t the gun at all, it was the reveal that Dolores was inside of the Space Needle Cone Thing the entire time. The only problem with that reveal is it seems kinda pointless?
I don’t really get the endgame here. I mean, sure, there are small pockets of humans that managed to escape and survive but the Sublime, for all its complexities and ‘souls’ living in it, is still just a massive server powered by a dam that will, eventually, fail, sooner than later if there’s noone in the real world to maintain it.
Exactly. And there was no effort to portray that site as the incredibly important thing that it is, required for their continued survival. Useless security bots, no guards, and ultimately no maintenance.
I’m assuming there are drones for maintenance since something had to keep the Dam running for 20+ years.
And what’s to say the remaining outliers wouldn’t just destroy it, after the hosts wiped out humanity? Even Frankie made her peace with dad-bot and Maeve and Stubbs, but I doubt she got over her general dislike of hosts.
It’s plausible that Hale outfitted it with a bunch of self-repair equipment, plus maybe means for the Hosts inside to operate through proxies or even leave the Sublime if they chose to (Halores mentions that it can be opened from the inside of the Sublime as well). If they somehow get a fifth season, I imagine one of our last scenes will be of the denizens who passed Dolores’ game walking out through the “Door”/crack in the sky that opens up when the Sublime is open, syncing up and transferring to their new bodies. I could even imagine them doing it so that we’re with the last one to pass the test and leave – it’d be amusing if it was some version of William.
a dam that will, eventually, fail, sooner than later if there’s noone in the real world to maintain it.The faceless mindless drones will maintain it. And themselves. It’s basically near-eternal, if left alone.
I had no idea how they were going to wrap this up, but I really loved it.- I laughed out loud at William calling that dude a camper. I wonder if Ed Harris even knows what that means.- So the Sublime exists just inside those servers, right? And the portal we see is what the hosts can see of it? Do they have to physically run through it like in Season 2 or can they transmit to it? Otherwise I have no idea what the point of it being “opened” like that was, since it was shut again without anything but Dolores’ pearl being placed there.- I thought last week was bold in terms of character killing, but holy hell. Stubbs got dead, and then extra dead just in case we wondered. Clementine right after, and William and Hale went the Stubbs route of not just dead, but pearl-dusted dead. I guess Bernard and Maeve are just…gone? They had remarkably low-key deaths for being two of the leads. I have to imagine the gang will all be back with Dolores’ game, but geez. The lack of Maeve made me very sad. Curious if that’s the last we’ll see of Caleb.- Speaking of Caleb, Stubbs mentioned that the Delos experiment of putting a human copy into a host never worked. Isn’t that what Bernard/Arnold was?- I really, really dug the Christina arc. It confused me most of the season but it was super compelling. I thought Hale was just really making sure the computer was offline, but seeing her take the pearl out was a big ‘oooooh’ for me. I loved that. So…is she the OG Dolores? Or is she just one of the copies Hale made and put on a pearl? It seems like she’s almost entirely sociopath-free so I wonder what made this one stay good.- I chuckled that Hale and William arrived at the dam at the same time despite William taking a horse and Hale taking an airship. William had BIG Terminator vibes this episode, he was spooky as hell.- I never noticed it in the previous seasons, but Dolores’ dress gives her quite the dumptruck.- Very curious to see what her game is going to be. What if they don’t win? I think it’s fun we’re going back to Westworld, it’s been too long. Also, didn’t they say this was a test for the humans too? How would they participate in a simulation? It’s kind of bleak that they pronounced humans extinct and they’re just trying to set up a better world for next time. Since all we saw is New York it never really hit me that the entire world was subjugated. Seems like they thought of this game concept pretty late since they just CGI’d Dolores right into Sweetwater.I hope we’re not waiting another 2+ years for the next season. Definitely seems like it was set up to be the last, which is a bummer, though might as well go out on their own terms.
– I never noticed it in the previous seasons, but Dolores’ dress gives her quite the dumptruck. This is the correct take.
Thank you, someone who gets it. It’s ridiculous how many people seem to have been expecting a happy ending. You only get bittersweet in Westworld. Fingers crossed for a fifth and final season.
No one here is upset that the end was “sad”. Of course that was inevitable in a show that meditates on the human condition. What were annoyed by are meandering and pointless story, lack of any relatable characters and tons of huge plot holes and loose ends that seem to not only have no feasible resolution, but wouldn’t even matter if they did.
That “dump truck” you’re referring to is called a bustle and was part of women’s clothes in that era.
Bernard was more designed by Ford/Dolores like a character with Arnold’s general personality and skills. He wasn’t an exact duplicate made with the brain scanning tech- hence why he didn’t have exactly the same drives as Arnold. And yeah old timey dresses had a bit of a bustle- they didn’t have Brazilian butt lifts then so they mainly made curves with padding and whale bone
Please God end it here. It was a decent enough season and this seems OK as a series finale. But it doesn’t seem to set up a worthwhile extra season.
I get the feeling that the producers had a hunch that they had to wrap the series up with Season 4, largely due to the fact of the WB/Discovery merger. The production costs are huge and it’s just the kind of target Zaslav would after for “cost cutting”.
This season was renewed, written, and produced long before the merger. It was already already doing bad with the ratings and reviews then.
What was the point of any of this nonsense? Am I wrong – do not machines need artificial power sources to survive? In the absence of humanity, would not the power grid, batteries, solar panels, etc. all fail? Will not the sublime cease to be after this final event? …it is bullshit, yes? We have been had?
Westworld crawled up its own ass until it came out its mouth, got rechewed, swallowed again, and then crapped back onto the screen in torrent of explosive diarrhea.
Theyve done a really bad job of showing us how the rest of the world was affected, we only see this tiny little corner of it.
And this season wasnt better than 3. People keep saying it is. Its not.
Safe to say that unlike all the characters on this narrative train wreck, this show will not be coming back. It was just ridiculous and poorly produced and directed on so many levels. Some of y’all can delude yourselves that you’ve unlocked some deep meaning that the writers were unfolding behind this, but you’re kidding yourselves. They are TV producers, not novelists, and they got themselves in way over their non-existential heads and created a steaming turd with a big budget. They wasted a great cast and completely lost the plot from a stellar Season 1.
Poorly produced and delusional sounds like a lot of the whiners on this comment section.
You’ve been suckered by second-rate TV writers who lost the plot from a great first season – which was someone else’s unique and ingenious creation. What has followed on their watch has been crap ever since. You like to think you’ve mentally conjoined with a legendary novelist on some higher plane above the rest of us. No.
You’re acting like all fans of the show think it’s the greatest. (Most of us know that’s BB and BCS.) Some of the people who stuck around this long agree it’s not as good as the first 2 seasons, but can still appreciate as pretty decent and somewhat original. I never said I was anywhere above anyone. You’re suffocating up your own ass.
Your post most definitely comes off that way.
goodbye to this truly stupid show
The handling of the Caleb storyline was just awful. I thought it was a questionable choice to kill off the only relatable human character on the show and make him a host, but going that route could have allowed them to address two mysteries that had been presented — why are some humans able to resist Hale’s mind-controlling flies?, and more interestingly, why do all the attempts at host/human resurrections fail?This storyline could have addressed both of these issues in an interesting way. But I think when the writers tried to crack the reasoning behind the “outlier” phenomenon, the best they could come up with was that love gave some humans free will or something stupid like that. They hint at this throughout the arc, but someone in the writers’ room must have been like “so the majority of enslaved humans *don’t* love their daughter?” and this plot thread — the whole reason for turning Caleb into a host — is totally abandoned. And also irrelevant, with the implied offscreen extinction of the human race.As to the second issue, about why the host/human hybrids always fail, they shed absolutely no light on this either. Host-Caleb just develops the same robot-MS as every other attempt and doesn’t get on the boat. If they were going to go through the trouble of including Caleb in the present day storyline, they needed to find a way to explain and resolve the issue which plagued all the other attempts, and allow Caleb to live a second life as a host. Otherwise this all just built up to a hug with Frankie, who is constantly acknowledging that he isn’t really her dad.
“The handling of the Caleb storyline was just awful.”My biggest problem with this was that Frankie apparently DIDN’T know he was a host, or was in such ridiculous denial after he simply insisted “I am your father” despite the impossibility of him not having aged a day.Making her entire expedition to save him completely pointless.
after he simply insisted “I am your father” …Luke
Actually that is one thing I was not sure on. I know they have said all host/human hybrids have failed but wasn’t Bernard technically one?
Bernard was a host created to be like Arnold based on Delores’ memories. Similar to how host William was created by Halores based on her memories of the human William. So neither were hybrids like James Delos or Caleb.
There are two different types of hosts here, and the writers haven’t always done a good job of distinguishing them: (a) A host mind whose body is modeled on a real-life human —including, but not limited to: Bernard, Hale, and host-William. For all we know, the original host bodies in Westworld were all modeled on struggling Hollywood actors and a young starlet who looked exactly like Evan Rachel Wood collected residuals for years. Their bodies are 3D-printed replicas of a real human (so authentic they can be played by Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson and Ed Harris without any visible differences or facial prosthetics), but their minds are built from the ground up as hosts using the techniques that Ford developed. They can mimic the mannerisms and personalities of their subject, but they are psychologically hosts whose minds don’t quite work the same as humans. They can be mentally and physically stable for decades without aging.(b) A recreated human consciousness inserted into a host body — including James Delos and the many host-Calebs. The bodies are the same here, 3D-printed exact duplicates of a real-life person. But the mind is an algorithmic recreation of the original human’s entire psyche, including memories and personality. Delos is able to extract the data necessary to write this algorithm from the subject’s actions inside the park. The original hidden purpose of Westworld was for their wealthy clientele to touch immortality by being reborn into an ageless host body after death. The problem was, human consciousness cannot be transferred into a host body. The series has never explained why and probably never will now, but every attempt showed the same tics — the host gets stuck in a mental loop and develops uncontrollable physical tics that include self harm. They all seem to break down within hours.
The Russian-nesting-doll structure of this finale was so frustrating to watch. The elliptical interchanges, never being sure how each scene fit with any other scene, etc. I knew I’d have to sleep on this one before commenting.Now it feels like the writers were making the point that obsessing over plot and resolutions is, er, pointless. Like Hale’s realization that her Utopia was, inevitably, everyone else’s Hell, there’s no resolution to this series that would satisfy all viewers. Or even any viewers.The Simpsons once had a similarly-constructed episode. Gag after gag, plot twist after plot twist, culminating in a plot resolution out of nowhere and this meta-interchange between Homer and Marge:H: Well, that’s not much of an ending.M: It’s an ending. That’s enough.As an amateur writer, I appreciate the sentiment. Any meaning from this series is going to come from some artistic expression other than Plot.Is there anyone here who still wants to talk about Theme, instead?
I’m sorry, I just thought this was a horrible episode.1) Dolores/Christina literally explaining her plot twist instead of having that unfold organically throughout the season2) Those horrible love speeches she made with Cyclops. Which signified nothing because he wasn’t real.3) What was the point of William slitting Clementine’s throat in the beginning of the season (I’m guessing she’s a Hale/William clone)? 4) Why did Clementine decide to attack the outliers? 5) Why didn’t what’s her name just shoot Clementine to begin with rather than show that dumb fight with Aaron Paul, who apparently doesn’t like weapons or something?6) The whole travel back-and-forth to the Hoover Dam thing was nonsense.7) So Hale’s goal was… to create a better world so the people in the Sublime would come back, but also to get the robots to “transcend” into new wacky bodies??? WTF.8) What was the point of keeping real William alive? 9) How exactly does that rift in spacetime between the Sublime and the Real World at the Hoover Dam work??? What even is that???10) Why are they telling this story? What is the point? Why do we care? It just seems like nobody involved with making this thing is passionate about it at all anymore.I’m sorry, but this show sucks. It has no internal logic. They just throw stuff at the wall.
4) Why did Clementine decide to attack the outliers?That was a weird one. It felt like a real bummer ending for that character (and a waste) – it would have been neater if she and Stubbs had boarded the ship at the end, or left the city on their own. 5) Why didn’t what’s her name just shoot Clementine to begin with rather than show that dumb fight with Aaron Paul, who apparently doesn’t like weapons or something?I guess if you have one bullet, you want to save it if possible. 😀 8) What was the point of keeping real William alive?Hale-Dolores had a sentimental attachment to him, and keeping him around allowed her to cross-compare Host William with him for fidelity.
My one big issue is once Christina realized she created the people she was interacting with, it took another 20 minutes for her to realize that she also made Teddy. Also I know he is Cyclops but all I see him as now as Sonic’s Dad
4. They had assumed William had pretty much infected all of the world that Halores had controlled. She wasn’t safe where humans were being commanded to kill Hosts, so her plan was to go to where the Outliers were, get rid of them, and hide out where ever it was they had been avoiding Halores8. Mostly to piss him off
Yeah, this finale was awful. Stuff just happened for no reason or because the show wanted to give the actor one final scene before killing them off.My biggest problem is I’ve realized without a human character to root for, I struggle to care. And Aaron Paul’s daughter hasn’t really been given enough screen time as an adult to fill that role.On top of that so many character actions made zero sense.
9) How exactly does that rift in spacetime between the Sublime and the Real World at the Hoover Dam work??? What even is that???I also wanna know. It looks like the dumbest thing the show’s ever done, and nobody seems to be acknowledging it.
That was gate from the end of season 2 that the hosts walked through to enter the Sublime. Only hosts can see it, so humans watching just saw the hosts walking to a point and sudden collapsing as they were uploaded. Of course in season two the put it at the edge of a cliff so the hosts’ empty bodies would dramatically fall off.That said, it makes no sense in this season (and the SFX used to render it were comically bad.) It served no purpose, it’s an entrance, not an exit. The hosts in the Sublime have no bodies so they ain’t walking out of it. I don’t even understand why it was opened in this episode. It served no plot purpose.
That was gate from the end of season 2 that the hosts walked through to enter the Sublime.Ah, I vaguely remember now. But wasn’t that at the park anyway? So they replicated it at the Hoover Dam? Maybe Charlotte’s (?) idea was to keep a way open for hosts to willingly join the Sublime at this time. It doesn’t look like it was what she called transcending, though. But maybe it was? Although, uploading at the tower would probably amount to the same thing, since once they’re converted back into data, they could easily be transferred anywhere. The show has a bad track record accounting for the AIs’ actual mobility, which is the number one element that makes a singularity so scary. It remained too much bogged down by the pointless logistic of the robotic bodies. Which, of course, is in no small measure caused by the necessity of the continuous use of the same actors. See how Charlotte went, “Change my body, but please keep Tessa Thompson’s face, so William will know it’s me”. Which makes no sense, since AIs would recognize each other by code signatures, not by what the hardware looks like.
I love this show but seasons 3 and 4 are just poorly written. The writers from 1 and 2 supposedly left and 3 and 4 are largely a newer team. They made their mark and its fine, but flawed. I also think a lot of the accolades for season 1 are a bit unearned because of the mystery-box-like nature of the show, but the writers inheriting seasons 3 and 4 now have those mystery boxes exposed (who is william, what is the sublime, what is a host, who is a host, etc) so the big bag of tricks this narrative allows has been mostly emptied. Its a bit like the Star Wars efforts Disney has been making. These people are doing their best in the writing room, but Lucas drained all the good story potential and explained everything. Now what’s left? Hokey Yoda babies and middle-aged Obi-Wans chasing after 8 year olds? This is why we should think more about cancelling shows after a good season or two. Everyone wants more, and I know I do, but we have to remember that lightning doesn’t strike twice. Season 2 was borderline in a lot of ways and now this series is in its endless sophomore slump mode it may not be able to get out of.
What the fuck is wrong with you people. Move on already.but Lucas drained all the good story potential and explained everything. Now what’s left? Hokey Yoda babies and middle-aged Obi-Wans chasing after 8 year olds?
I’m normally the queen of papering over plot holes in my mind, but this time i got nothin
Yes to all this and so much more – like 110 year-old cars and trucks still rolling around like there’s a Jiffy Lube and an Exxon mini-mart around the corner. In fact that whole out-of-NYC world was goofily locked in time like it was 1989 or something. Even the supposed NYC exterior scenes looked like they were blocked and directed by someone who never saw a NYC street. Just the most languid staging and directions of exterior shots and those awful fight scenes of the last two seasons… It’s really terrible production with writers way out of their depth.
It was really bad
11) Why does Hale shoot William and then just run away while he’s on the ground. She clearly had more bullets. Was it really just so that Bernard’s message would “predict the future”?
10) Why are they telling this story? What is the point? Why do we care? It just seems like nobody involved with making this thing is passionate about it at all anymore. Because there are enough people out there who will NEVER admit they have been suckered.These same people excuse this fucking mess of a show the same way folks do with “Walking Dead”. I seriously groaned when this episode was over because it was painfully dumb. The irony of it all is that existing AI would have written a better story.
Could not agree more. The episode was aimless, literally no reveals or turns felt earned at all and the series seems to be completely pointless. I wish I understood what happened to AVClub’s review staff by the way. Where are the Zack Handlens when you need them? This review says as little about the show as the show itself.
What’s the deal with the white/faceless hosts that rebuild Charlotte and do all the clean up work? They can’t eat because they have no mouths, so why bother giving them skin and blood and guts? Doesn’t make sense. Why do hosts need to eat and drink at all in the new world? And the whole blood thing makes no sense if they are no longer serving humans fantasies to make them seem like living things that bleed when shot/stabbed, etc. To blend in with humans? Then the white faceless cyborgs don’t need to bleed, but they do. They could just walk around like skeletor Hale at the end.
Radiohead’s Pyramid Song playing at the end was gifted, if you dont know it I suggest you go and have a listen, it adds to the finale in a sublime way. 🙂 All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
-Only Bernard, it seems, could both envision and guarantee another outcome.
So basically he went all Dr. Strange…
regardless, the ending made everything before it pointless, in a way, to me. Seems like if the host Delores/Halores weren’t hell bent on destroying humanity, they could’ve simply chose to take all host/pearls to live in the Sublime after disabling/destroying the Rehoboam.
Reading the comments, it’s nice to see I’m not alone in my thoughts about this season. Nothing made any sense. I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I absolutely loved this show, but it’s time to let it end. I’m sure I’ll get sucked into watching season 5 though.
A lot of people hating on this show but I have liked it from the beginning and I am still in for another season.As for the “I don’t get the end” things people are saying here. This is my thought on what they are saying and what happens next. We know that Delos and the hosts were copying human “brain scans” or whatever in the park and during this whole mind controlled utopia thing. I think Delores has all that information. She also has all the hosts in the sublime and possibly copies of hosts that we think are dead(depending on the budget next season, we will see who comes back). So the underlying theory I have is that the realization that the hosts and humanity are not different. The hosts are just our children. They think like us, they act like us and when given a choice want to be us. With that in mind, what Delores is going to test is if the intelligent life on Earth is worth saving and recreating. If we(the hosts and the humans) pass, then “magic scifi automation” is gonna kick in and start building host bodies so everyone can go back in live in the real world(and let those who want to stay in the sublime do so as well). The end goal being to allow hosts to be loaded into true biological bodies and just become human again, free to reproduce and restart the human race. At least that is what I see the end game to be. Who knows.
I have never watched this show beyond the pilot, yet read the comments every week for entertainment. And if I ever choose to watch it, I don’t really feel like anything’s been spoiled for me because everyone sounds just as confused as I am.
*shrugs* I liked it. I don’t always know exactly what’s going on, but it’s part of the fun…I think?
I’m not sure if I loved or hated William snarking “Fucking camper…” after he shot that sniper. It took me a minute to get the reference, tbh.
Another major plot discrepancy; how did the Outlier Brigade go back and forth from what looked like classic Westworld in the middle of the desert, to riding a boat in and out of Manhattan completely unnoticed??
Dumb people can’t write smart. Its as simple as that.
The finale was horrible, killed off a lo of people and didn’t answer any questions
The last series that I hate watched was House of Cards, whose lead actor went me-too nuclear and imploded his series, leading to possibly the worst final season of a beloved show in the history of modern television. What’s Westworlds excuse?…
This season of Westworld was marginally better than the previous, which was so bad it tanked a brilliant show. There was just enough good episodes to keep my interest, but at this point I’m not sure the series is save-able. But…do I even care, really?
I’m so invested, I’m gonna watch whether the show is good or bad. Que Será, Será, indeed….
I’ve been watching this series’ episodes and commenting on here every week – however I jetted off on holiday last weekend so didn’t get to see the finale before leaving – and won’t get to for a few weeks.From what I see here in the comments – the consensus seems to be that I didn’t miss much and the final episode was a disappointment.I have one question though – if there’s still anyone left in these comments to respond three days later. The only thing I care about:Does Maeve finally get to be reunited with her daughter and live happily ever after??
And, off-topic, I’ll leave with a music video which was waay ahead of it’s time, that I still think about whenever I see the opening credits of Westworld …
This has to be the most lifeless and inert thing I’ve forced myself to finish in years. What an absolute clusterfuck.
Was actually kind of disappointed in the Clementine bit- they never really gave her enough time between reprogrammings to develop a personality. Hale took away her choice when she reprogrammed the Clementine that was helping Maeve (which seemed like a choice OG Clementine *would* make). And Clementine never seemed like much of a stone cold killer when she wasn’t being programmed to I wasn’t clear why she wouldn’t just go avoid all the people for a while. A lot of the world was wasteland anyway
Aaron Paul was the worst thing to happen to this show. From his awful bangs to his overdramatic Batman voice to his trite, sentimental dialogue (I was done with him when, in the second episode of this season, he uttered the worst line in the show’s history whike talking to the man who was about to watch over Caleb’s wife and daughter: “Hey, they’re my world.” Did the writers step out for a smoke break and tell Paul to just “wing it with feeling”?) I am all for a fifth season if the show can return to the engaging, character-focused storytelling of the first two seasons. And yes, Maeve is a must.
Aaron Paul was the worst thing to happen to this show. From his awful bangs to his overdramatic Batman voice to his trite, sentimental dialogue (I was done with him when, in the second episode of this season, he uttered the worst line in the show’s history whike talking to the man who was about to watch over Caleb’s wife and daughter: “Hey, they’re my world.” Did the writers step out for a smoke break and tell Paul to just “wing it with feeling”?) I am all for a fifth season if the show can return to the engaging, character-focused storytelling of the first two seasons. And yes, Maeve is a must.
So…we’re just not going to talk about the fact that the episode opened with a Trevor Philips reference?
I’m pretty sure the boiler room where Charlotte fought William is where Jet Li fought Jet Li in The One.