Surely Westworld hasn’t devolved from an intimidating philosophical treatise about what it is to be human, and whether our conception of that can survive a hyper-algorithmic techno-future, into a humdrum dramedy about sad twentysomething singletons? It does seem that way, though Christina’s interaction with a disturbed gamer reinforces what we’ve known since we first saw her: she is played by Evan Rachel Wood and must therefore, in some way, be Dolores. She is stagnating at work, writing inane backstories for minor characters in video games, and glumly resistant when her sparkier room-mate (Ariana DeBose) tries to nudge her back into dating. A woman named Christina, however, doesn’t so much stride as trudge. In what is ostensibly New York, fire escapes look down on outdoor cafes decorated with artificial grass and jazzily asymmetrical street lamps. We are certainly still in the future, because smartphones are transparent, cars are weird and window blinds have become obsolete, but the societal meltdown that was meant to be inevitable hasn’t occurred. What now? After a nicely unsettling pre-credit sequence confirms that the Man in Black (Ed Harris) – a surviving icon from the original 1973 film – is still around and is awesomely powerful, season four undergoes a bewildering deceleration. Hard to care any more … Thandiwe Newton as Maeve Millay and Aaron Paul as Caleb in Westworld. Dolores, Maeve and a kindly human, Caleb (Aaron Paul), stopped him in the name of free will, a quality the previously enslaved hosts value highly, but Dolores was apparently permanently deleted in the process. Meanwhile, behavior engineer Elsie Hughes tweaks the emotions of Maeve, a madam in Sweetwater's brothel, in order to avoid a recall. Bernard and Quality Assurance head Theresa Cullen debate whether a recent host anomaly is contagious. Season three was where many viewers gave up: it featured a new theme park but was mostly set in a benighted Los Angeles, with society on the brink of collapse and a wacky billionaire trying to do something funky with artificial intelligence. A pair of guests, first-timer William and repeat visitor Logan, arrive at Westworld with different expectations and agendas. Along the way we learned that the park was less about entertaining humans, and more about studying them. ![]() Season two was a battle between hosts and humans, with many of the people we thought were humans having proved to be hosts, withhosts’ capacity to upload themselves into new bodies – allowing the writers to kill characters off before bringing them back, sometimes played by a different cast member. ![]() Recapping seasons one to three is tricky, since their intention was to have more plot nuances than there are grains of sand on a beach, but quickly: season one was set in a future theme park where humans were permitted to abuse lifelike robots who couldn’t make memories or feel pain, but then these “hosts” – particularly Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) – achieved sentience and rebelled.
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