sigh. sigh. That’s the sound of someone seeing a big-budget HBO series spiral into a mess, or mediocre at best. And the series is Westworld.
When the HBO TV series based on the 1973 movie Westworld arrived in 2016, it received critical acclaim and audiences of viewers. And rightly so, because she was excellent. I was late to the party being in the UK and didn’t have a Sky TV subscription and didn’t have easy access to HBO Max. But once I got to Westworld, the series grabbed me by the virtual nape of my neck and caught my eye.
The premise of a garden inhabited by human-like robot “hosts” who existed to provide wealthy humans with a way to indulge their light and dark fantasies in a Western environment was intriguing. And the idea of the hosts slowly developing awareness and questioning their purpose, with glimpses of how the park was run behind the scenes, really intrigued me; This mix of western genres and science fiction was a TV catnip to me. It didn’t hurt that the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Thandie Newton, and Ed Harris had some excellent performances.
Westworld’s first season was also a beautiful mental experience, with multiple timelines and a great deal of hidden symbolism. I’ve been following each episode by watching its details, consuming details, conclusions, and theories that I might have hungryly missed.
Spoiler warning.
Ford moves Ward
Inevitably, robots gaining self-awareness while being abused by humans generally does not do well; After all, “these violent delights have violent ends.” The second season explores the effects of this robotics revolution, with the likes of Newton Maeve discovering its high-level power over tech and robotics hosts and Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard Lowe grappling with the notion that he’s not human.
While some of my colleagues lost interest in Westworld after Season 1, I enjoyed finding out what happens in the twisty, jumpy timelines of Season 2 (I can tell how they may have frustrated some). And Anthony Hopkins’ return to the role of Dr. Ford with scene-stealing shows was also a treat. Plus, adding other worlds beyond Westworld was good to get a glimpse of.
Season 3 took Westworld out of the park and into the real world. I enjoyed seeing an idea of Earth in the near future, but something is lost in the lack of mystery robots discovering a sense of blended with the Old West and feudal Japan.
Along with the rise of Deloris and her act of taking a form of revenge against the humans who tortured her and her fellow hosts for decades, another major plot point was Rehoboam, a quantum computer that essentially manipulates human lives to impose order on humanity’s chaos. As a tech journalist who is well versed in the various tools, services, and algorithms for data collection and tracking, this has definitely hit home. But Westworld is starting to get a little generic, with a “us versus them” feel that doesn’t feel as subtle as the previous two series. It was still totally viewable with some great moments.
Bigger spoiler warning.
Freeze all system functions
And now we get to the fourth season. From the initial trailers it looked like there would be a good mix of plot and decent action. I feel like we got the latter, with plenty of combat and hands-on sequences, although none of these look like an amazing combination. But the interesting part is all around.
Westworld offers several lines. Some easily follow the events of Season 3, such as Caleb Aaron Paul’s building of a family life after the collapse of the community-dominated Rehoboam, and Maeve leading a solitary life. While others are more interesting, like Bernard who appears to have rebooted after a long time in the virtual world Subline and Delores reimagined by Evan Rachel Wood as Christina, a humanoid character who lives what seems like an ordinary life in near-future New York. There is no explanation for how it ended up here or why.
This setup caught my eye at first, as I loved the idea of resetting the chaotic events of Season 3, which at one point turned Maeve into a pseudo-neo from The Matrix. But the speed and complex nature of these plot lines quickly spoiled things.
I’m Five Episodes, waiting for the next, Maeve and Caleb have already been reunited and broken up, with a quick visit through a Prohibition-era America-inspired garden piling up revealing a virus designed to take on humans and how Caleb is now a host and all the action in the episode , we are just flashbacks of unwavering fidelity. Oh yeah, Westworld is back in action on several schedules.
I don’t have a problem with things that move quickly, but to me I feel like there’s no real character development or growth here. Still, Caleb is a tough fellow who seems too happy to abandon his family so quickly. As great as I think Newton is cool, here Maeve’s character is somewhat two-dimensional, and seems to be constantly talking seriously about being in a new world and having a chance of being the person she wants to be or pointing out old lines about being in Westworld before; I feel like Maeve has moved from Neo to Morpheus.
I’m not really sure what motivates Maeve either; She ran away from the garden, freed her daughter, and got rid of people to enslave her. So other than saving Caleb from an attack, I see no reason why she would want to get involved in the affairs of supposed adversaries William/The Man in Black and Charlotte Hill/Deloris, because she owes humanity nothing.
Their “powers” are also highly inconsistent, appearing to be able to take over complex systems with one touch or one look, but no longer able to establish control over the hosts. It used to be that when the phrase “freeze all motor functions” was uttered, we get a wonderful sequence; Now nothing happens. This is particularly disturbing, as at the end of Episode 5, Maeve appears to be set up as the one who can save enslaved humanity.
As for saving the world, that would involve confronting Hill/Delores, played by Tessa Thompson, who has now taken over the world by actively controlling humans via some form of virus or neurotoxin. Thompson has an impressive screen presence and plays a god-like dictator very well. However, I feel that she is hugely underutilized, especially when she was caught by Maeve and Caleb, as they were all silent. Even worse, there was no clear line of how she went from being manipulated by “Deloris Prime” for season 3 and actually caring for a human husband and son, to becoming paranoid.
It’s as if a few plot steps have been polished or cut here. And if you think that sounds familiar, well, that was the kind of feeling that the final season of Game of Thrones gave, with a story that picked up at a fast pace, and that gave little room for character nuances. Think of Daenerys going from “Breaking Chains” to “Mad Queen” in just a few episodes.
Speaking of rapid character development, Bernard went from being a slightly confused robot trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, his role in it and what it means for the host to gain consciousness, to someone who can see into the future.
He became a pseudo Doctor Strange after reaching the Mind Stone in Avengers Infinity War, thus becoming a very troublesome and two-dimensional character. Bernard does the classic movie by saying he knows what’s going to happen without giving his friend Stubbs an alert; Makes me want to throw the remote control on my beautiful LG C1 OLED.
I really feel like this has taken one of Westworld’s most interesting characters, Wright’s performance bringing some low-key oomph to any scene, and turned into a vehicle to get certain A-to-B characters into the story. It is rotten and disappointing.
Delores? More like De-snore-s!
Then we have the story of Christina, who is basically the modern-day Dolores of the first season. In season four, we see Christina working a job producing computer game stories, with some strange events going on around her that hint that she’s somehow manipulating the real world and things aren’t what they seem.
This is eventually revealed to be the case with the return of Delores’ love interest Teddy, who in the form of the modern world meets Christina on a blind date; Lots of ‘look familiar’ style lines hint at. While this was all somewhat predictable, what bothered me was that it took until Episode 5 to get to this point, and it seems to move Christina’s story at a very different pace than that of the other characters. As a result, its story feels disjointed, almost like Westworld is about a short series rather than something that should be in the main show.
And I feel like that’s the crux of my issue with this season of Westworld: There’s a strange disconnect between the characters, the events, and the timelines. It’s quite the opposite of what the first two seasons did, where events of different timelines felt closely connected to both the small and the big details which helps tie them together.
When it became clear that Season 4 of Westworld also had separate timelines, I simply sighed. Not only did it telegraph, with Bernard’s scenes in a dusty post-apocalyptic pseudo-desert, it also felt like Westworld writers were undoing the techniques laid out in the first two seasons, but with less ingenuity or plot. That separate pace and repetition made Westworld feel a lot less compelling, and at times boring; Not something I was expecting at all.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of unanswered questions, such as what are Hale’s general motivations and what it means to “override” the host. But the indirect teasing of this—along with the multiple plot lines that don’t seem to converge logically—means Westworld Season 4 feels frustratingly complex.
The first two seasons of Westworld certainly were far from simple; If I peek at my phone even for a moment, I’d be lost hopelessly until I got the episode back. With season four, the edgy or subtle nature of each character’s story, the repetition of the trope in which nearly anyone can be a host, and the overall theme of the story – which once seemed to center around what it means to be human or at least self-aware – seem to have lost all semblance A manifestation of cohesion.
It’s not that Westworld isn’t inherently bad, it’s that it seems to have a degree of tyranny toward it, as if the good intentions and themes of the initial seasons are enough to continue it, rather than offer newer plots. Again, I can only get positive feedback from Game of Thrones Season 8 here, with the idea that viewers only need to accept what’s going on in front of them and the characters’ motivations rather than exploring how they got to this point.
Hero Harris
There is one reason to keep watching Westworld: Ed Harris. His portrayal as the older and fearsome William, The Man in Black, steals every scene in it.
Harris manages to convey danger, intrigue, a degree of humanity, a sense of cynical and tired understanding of the world, and pain when adapting to a new order – and does so with just a glimpse and a few lines. He really holds the show, and I’m so glad he got a lead role in the fourth season of Westworld.
While his host character is ultimately an instrument of Hale, his human character is (I believe) full of mundane knowledge of the human condition and a sense of restrained anger mixed with curiosity. And the way Harris carries himself in every scene really catches one’s attention.
With that saving grace, and the fact that we have three more episodes for Season 4, I hope Westworld can hold on to the landing.
There is still a lot of potential for Westworld. I really hope we don’t end up with a sci-fi equivalent for the final season of Game of Thrones; It will appear that writers know as much about ending a series as Jon Snow.
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