Delos park guest warning : I am about to go down the Maze which is filled with spoilers so, if you haven’t watched season 4 of HBO’s Westworld series, please take yourselves offline.
Superfans readers, we are at the end of the first truly brilliant season of Westworld since Season 2 in 2018. Season 4 sees our last remaining protagonists Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) and the Man in Black/William (Ed Harris) return for multiple bloody adventures that all lead back to the original Westworld park.
Our complicated fivesome are joined in their journey to the endgame by Season 3’s newcomer Caleb (Aaron Paul) and the ever sarcastic but dependable Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) as they betray, shoot and slay their way to the biggest human vs host showdown this series has ever had.
I have always been endlessly fascinated by the basic premise of Westworld, the show. Its creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, taking their cue from original Westworld movie writer and author of the Jurassic Park novels Michael Crichton, ask their viewers to truly reveal who they are if they were allowed to f***, kill and fight to their hearts’ content in the safety of a theme park. I work in the attractions industry and part of my duties is to do a deep dive in the psyche of visitors. Why do they return time after time?What makes them spend money on certain rides, merchandise and experiences above others?
In Westworld, park guests are stripped down to their most basic human instincts and made to feel ok about it because it’s just a game, right? And they’re only raping, murdering and beating up robots (or hosts, as they are known in the show) so where’s the harm in that? Crichton, Joy and Nolan hold up a mirror to the true horrors of humanity and it is a savage reflection that stares back at us, the audience. It’s my life long dream that if I was ever given the chance to have dinner with a dead author, it would be Crichton. I have SO many questions about why he loves depicting theme parks as horror landscapes. What happened to him as a child in a park that he felt the need to unleash those terrors on the world? Engineered dinosaur or renegade robot, his creations are utterly terrifying.
My favourite part of Westworld is that there have been hints that Jurassic Park/World exists on the same island. I would absolutely die for a crossover!
Back to my review of Season 4. This season opens once again with Dolores waking up in a bed and walking through her life in a daze. Except, she isn’t Dolores in this new “real” world. She’s Christina, a lonely story writer for the video company NPC. Christina lives with her bubbly roommate Maya (West Side Story ‘s Anita, Ariana DeBose) who is forever trying to get her out of the apartment and forcing her to go out on dates. One of those dates turns out to be with Teddy (the always ridiculous handsome James Marsden), Dolores’s fallen true love and her cornerstone, who has returned to bring Christina back to herself: the OG host Dolores from Season 1.
If anything, Season 4 of Westworld is one long, huge therapy session for Dolores so that all of her split personalities/ copies return to one hive mind and she can save humanity from the host-infested and violent world she created at the end of Season 3. Tired of being raped constantly by The Man in Black and his ilk over more than forty years, abused by those same men and having her memories, Teddy and her father erased from her memory every single night; Dolores broke free of her creators and set out to take over their human world. She succeeded in this mission by making a copy of herself that wore the face of Delos CEO Charlotte Hale (Thompson) but died at the end of Season 3. The Hale Dolores copy went rogue because of Hale’s cunning personality override and rules the new world in Season 4 with a heavy, bloody hand. Using flies to infect humanity, she now controls them at will:
Fake Hale, meanwhile, captured evil human William and created a copy of herself, using his DNA as the overlaying code. She might have thought that would keep Host Man in Black loyal to her but WIlliam was always going to William. It is his god-awful vision for a murderous, chaotic world that sees hosts and humans have an apocalyptic battle the likes of which they’ve never seen.
Fighting for the survival of both species is our anti-hero host Maeve (Newton), Host Bernard (Wright), Host Stubbs (Hemsworth), Human and Host Caleb (Paul) and his now grown Human daughter Frankie (Aurora Perrineau). All of these actors are grossly underused this season but the moments they are in, they completely steal the show. I had my doubts about Paul in Season 3 because he somehow didn’t gel well with the already established cast. That fear was assuaged this season because Paul as Caleb has found his stride and brings to the fore the true human experience in a world controlled by robots. Even when he is one himself, Paul manages to make Caleb a sympathetic Host whose sole mission is to see his daughter to safety.
My impressions:
This season gets my stamp of approval because, after the jarring journey that was the third season, season 4 has gone back to what made the first two seasons so binge-worthy. It is a complete mindf*** of convoluted timelines, deceptive alliances, stellar acting from a hardworking cast and cinematography that is breathtaking. Joy and Nolan have gone back to their roots of asking philosophical questions and wrapping them up in a game within a game. I love shows that make me question everything I know and ponder what I might do if I were given free range to indulge my every impulse without consequences.
Westworld Season 4 ends with Christina finally waking up to her Dolores reality and bringing her true self back online, just in time to return to the original Westworld park for one last game. Like the Maze that began William’s descent into evil at the start of the show, Dolores has found her way back to the start, While a fifth season has not yet been confirmed, it looks like we are definitely being set up for it and the end of the show. I cannot wait to question my reality once again in 2024.
I will be playing Westworld’s theme song, composed by Ramin Djawadi (yes, the Game of Thrones guy!) on repeat until then:
Westworld Season 4 is available for streaming on Showmax.
