Warning: The following contains full spoilers for the Westworld Season 4 episode "Zhuangzi," which aired on July 24 on HBO.
To read our review of last week's Westworld episode, "Generation Loss," click here.
It's almost a given that the episode following last week's "Generation Loss" would have a comedown quality, after all the big reveals we absorbed, but "Zhuangzi" kept the fires burning nicely, giving us a much closer look at the dystopian future -- the flipped robot/human theme park -- the world had become. Christina's realization of the truth (well, most of it) about her role in it all dragged a bit, but the story still pushed us into new, intriguing places.
After "Generation Loss," Christina was the one character seemingly left out in the cold, as an unwitting programmer of humans in this new playground of the gods. Christina is so singled out here, when compared to the other human-hosts, that she's almost certainly a remodeled/reworked version of Dolores -- Dolores, who might now be getting punished by Hale (in a way only Hale can enjoy) as writer of these new human narratives that transforms all people into NPCs, toys to be used at the whims of the robots like the Greek deities of old.
We already knew what was happening, so all that was left was for her to learn about it. Teddy, who's still Teddy apparently (a small mystery in its own right -- is he in her mind?), spelled it all out for her, but these parts of "Zhuangzi" sort of felt like they were fighting to catch up with the rest of the story.
A big interesting element here though, one born of Christina's new realization, is that her brain (as she's presumedly still a host) can sync up with the goo-virus in people and control them. Like Maeve with hosts, she can telepathically puppet humans. Since Christina, more or less, is the dark tower at the edge of town, she now uses this skill set to get out of jams. Once Christina and Maeve unite against Hale -- no Maeve this week, as she's still being dug up -- it'll most certainly be a very fun battle.
Due to Christina getting caught up on everything we'd figured out, there was a middling quality to "Zhuangzi," but that in itself was almost a trick because within this new sandbox came a brand new arc for the bots -- which is that they now are fritzing out and experiencing existential dread because of the outliers. The entire world, as a globe, is sort of unclear still, geography/capacity-wise. Is everything a wasteland except for the "city"? Is humanity now just a couple million people? Or are there still cities like this one all over? The show still uses crowds when needed, to make everything feel appropriately populated, but an overall sparseness remains. A head count would be nice, regarding Earth.
Now that Westworld has veered fully into A.I. apocalypse territory, it's also playing with the notion of immortality and the thought experiments involving the curse of a perfect, eternal existence. Hale is bored (and making people play Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" on piano until their fingers bleed and rot), much like tales of our own cosmic overlords using us as pawns because of ennui and weariness, but she's also set the hosts up to "transcend" in some manner, to undergo surgery and become something new. But the hosts are having too much fun using the human theme park and it confuses her. William is her watchdog, but he's starting to crack.
You see, the people who break free of the virus are hunted down as part of a game within a game. But they, either with their words or some other frequency that transmits from their shattered mind (Hale thinks there's a new virus), they can make the hosts goes nuts too (and take their own robot life), so they're a double-pronged danger. William makes the mistake of listening to an outlier and now he's losing it, talking to real, cold-storage William about the meaning of life. Of course, there could be an outlier virus but the point here is the humanizing of the hosts and the idea that all sentient life questions reality, even if they actually know, for a fact, who created them. After all, origin is one thing and purpose is another.
The endgame is starting to form; as the rebels free outliers and excavate Maeve, Caleb remains on the inside as the 247th version of himself, Christina secretly uncovers truths about the world and herself, and William is poised and ready up to splinter off from Hale in a way she didn't/couldn't anticipate. It would be nice, too, if Oscar winner Ariana DeBose had more to do as Maya, Christina's roommate. She's been having nightmares, so maybe an outlier breakdown is in her future.
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