‘Westworld’ Season 4, Episode 1 Recap And Review: The Auguries

Westworld is back and, unsurprisingly, the Season 4 premiere leaves us with more questions than answers.

Much has changed since the end of Season 3, when our heroes overthrew the powerful AI Rehoboam, sparking an anti-AI revolution against the Incite corporation that had, up to this point, ordered human affairs via its powerful supercomputer.

Curiously, we do not pick up right where we left off. Instead, a full seven year time-jump takes place between the end of Season 3 and the Season 4 premiere—though perhaps not for every character. There is some evidence to suggest that we are, once again, dealing with multiple timelines. More on that shortly.

The Man In Black

We begin our story in the American southwest. Here, a Mexican cartel has taken over ownership of the Hoover dam somehow (our corporate dystopian future really is hell on earth it seems). The dam is used not merely to generate power and hold back water reservoirs, but also to power a very special server hub.

Robot William, aka The Man in Black (Ed Harris), shows up and takes the tour, offering to buy the entire facility from the cartel. The servers contain something that was ‘stolen’ from William eight years prior—quite possibly the Valley Beyond and the Delos immortality data that Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) previously entrusted to Bernard (Jeffrey Wright).

The cartel isn’t interested in selling, so William gives them a choice: Sell today or have it taken by force tomorrow. The violent, powerful cartel bosses laugh this off as an idle threat—much to their peril.

The next morning, the unnamed cartel guy (Arturo Del Puerto) walks into his home to find it infested with flies. Presumably these are robotic flies because he’s somehow ‘possessed’ moments later, stumbling into the room where his colleagues are sitting and violently murdering them.

When he’s done and hands over the property to the Man in Black he asks, “Is my work done?”

“Yes,” William answers. “You can rest now.” The man cuts his own throat as William walks away.

Maeve & Caleb

Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) has spent the last seven years in isolation, hiding from the world in a small cabin in the woods. She is dragged out of this voluntary retirement when a group of assassins shows up at her door.

Fortunately, she’s inadvertently warned by a local shopkeeper that ‘friends’ are paying her a visit. She manages to get the jump on her assailants, killing several via exploding her pickup truck. Another she shoots in the forehead. The leader of this group gets a hatchet to the chest before Maeve decapitates him.

Naturally, she lops the guy’s head off for a reason: He’s a robot and she needs to access his memories to find out who sent the men to kill her. As she rewinds, a familiar figure appears: None other than the Man In Black, who nobody but Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) knows is now no longer human. Of course, Hale is only part Hale. She’s also part Dolores. It’s confusing.

Maeve burns her cabin down and heads off to find an old friend.

Caleb (Aaron Paul) is married and has a child, Frankie (Celeste Clark) and wife Uwade (Nozipho Mclean). The two apparently wasted no time shacking up and making a baby given Frankie is seven and about seven years have passed.

Haunted by the dangers of his past, Caleb teaches Frankie target practice with a BB gun along with other self-preservation tactics, like lighting up the perimeter so that you can see anyone approaching but they can’t see you. These lessons all fall by the wayside when she drops her teddy bear out of her window by accident one night.

Outside, she’s startled by a creepy man who asks if her daddy is home. Just then Caleb walks outside and the man draws a gun. Caleb rushes to tackle Frankie and shield her when we hear the distinct sound of a katana cutting through flesh. Maeve has shown up just in the nick of time.

“Hello darling,” she says. “It really is you,” he replies. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

Uwade—who doubted Caleb’s paranoia before—realizes that her husband have every reason to be on guard. But she’s not thrilled when he tells her he’s going away with Maeve to put a stop to the bad guys. Even Maeve doesn’t want him to come along, but he does anyway. Certainly she can empathize with his desire to protect his daughter.

Christina

The most puzzling and tantalizing subplot in the Season 4 premiere centers around Christina. Dolores is the one character in the show with no memories of her previous self. She is Christina now. She writes storylines for a ‘game’ at Olympiad Entertainment. I’m not sure if this is a video game or a game for a park like Westworld, but it’s interesting to see her in this role.

She lives with a roommate, Maya (Ariana DeBose) and frequently receives calls from a mysterious stranger who we learn is named Peter (Aaron Stanford).

Maya wants Christina to find a boyfriend and sets her up on a date with an investment banker that goes spectacularly badly. After dismissing her job as superfluous—she writes NPCs and side-characters rather than the leads and he tells her that most players just consider NPCs to be ‘canon fodder’—she tells him that she writes for herself because the real world can be so disappointing.

“Maybe you just haven’t found the right man yet,” he says, putting his hand on hers. She pulls away from the sleezeball and excuses herself to go the bathroom where she’s called once again by the stranger. He tells her that she needs to help him. The game is ruining his life, he says. “You’re real and the Tower is real,” he tells her before she hangs up.

A couple interesting points here. Earlier in the episode we see a homeless man with pictures of a tower drawn on cardboard who seemed to be mumbling something about a tower of some kind, suggesting that this tower will play an important role this season—but Christina/Dolores doesn’t bat an eye when she hears about it.

When Peter does find her, he assaults her outside her apartment telling her she needs to help him and that the story needs a new ending. He holds a knife to her throat when suddenly someone drags him off of her. She sees them fight but when she glances back both men have vanished.

We learn later that the man who saved her is none other than Teddy (James Marsden) who has been dead and gone since Season 2, his consciousness uploaded to the Valley Beyond along with many other Hosts. Curiouser and curiouser.

We also learn how Peter’s story ends. He calls Dolores and tells her to look up. He’s standing on a building stories above the ground. As she watches in horror he hurtles to the ground below.

One final strange clue: At one point, Christina is walking when a group of men hurry past her. One of them tells his compatriots, “This place is f**king wild, I can’t believe this is your first time.”

All of these tidbits—Christina’s total lack of memory, Teddy’s reappearance, Peter’s strange accusations, the comment about “this place”—suggest to me that Dolores is once again in a park of some kind. It’s an oddly mundane park, however, with none of the historical themes that define Shogunworld, Westworld, Warworld and so forth. What could it be?

Also, when could it be? Dolores doesn’t age, and in this subplot there is no mention of the past, no discussion of seven years between now and the end of Rehoboam. It’s possible she’s actually in the real world and we’re seeing red herrings, but something isn’t as it seems.

Verdict

All told I thought this was a pretty solid episode of Westworld. I’ve said many times in the past that everything after Season 1 has been a little messier and less compelling than the tightly woven, brilliant first season, but it’s still a fascinating, well-acted glimpse into a futuristic society that’s always thought-provoking.

This time around, it appears we’ll have Maeve and Caleb squaring off against William and Charlotte. Where Christina/Dolores fits into the mix remains to be seen. Delos, now run by the very robots it created, is buying up land in the southwest in a new quest for robot domination. It’s unclear what their plan is exactly, but I’m definitely curious to find out.

We didn’t see Bernard or Charlotte this episode but we’ll see them, along with Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) and Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) in coming weeks.

What did you think of the Season 4 premiere? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook. And be sure to sign up for email notifications for this blog for weekly recap/reviews of Westworld and lots of other shows.

P.S.

When I tweeted this post I noticed that the #Westworld hashtag includes a little fly emoji, so these flies are definitely going to play a larger role this season than just the cartel scene. It made me think of Emily Dickinson’s poem, I heard a Fly buzz – when I died.