“Adapt or Die”: Westworld cast and crew tease season 4

Season 4 Westworld premieres on HBO and HBO Max in less than a week, which means if you’re into reality-shattering quandaries and ruminations on the ethics of human/android relations, it’s time to get hyped. Season 3 of the science fiction drama saw a number of the androids (known as hosts) that once inhabited the Westworld theme park get loose into the wider world, only to discover that humanity had just as little agency as they did, with their lives dictated by an AI supercomputer called Rehoboam. Despite facing off earlier in the season, Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) ultimately helped the new human character Caleb (Aaron Paul) shut down Rehoboam, ushering in a new era for humanity.

Or did they? If there’s one thing Westworld has always done well, it’s ponder the nature of the loops we find ourselves stuck in as a species and as individuals. In a recent roundtable interview, Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy teased that those themes will be more present than ever in season 4.

“When so many things can stay the same, what aspect of our lives and of our society as a collective can we change, right?” Joy said, per Syfy Wire. “And I think that that is one of the things that is not science fiction about the quandaries of this show, right? For instance, right now, I think we can all or, certainly mostly agree, that the environment is a problem, right? But in order to fix it, we would have to work as a collective, and there seems to be a lot of problems in getting that kind of consensus needed to move forward and act as human beings, as a species together.”

"And it’s funny because it flouts logic, but the systems of the world, the different bureaucracies, the different loops that society is in and the different mini loops that individuals are in, they can often stymie change, no matter how badly we want it or how much we intellectually know we should strive for it. And the question really is for Hosts and humans, how much can we save ourselves from ourselves? How much can we transcend our limitations and learn from our mistakes?"

If we’re using Westworld as the example, the answers seem rather bleak. While the show has occasionally offered glimmers of hope, much of it has revolved around people and hosts being sucked into cycles of violence that they’ve rarely emerged from unscathed. The season’s tagline is “Adapt or Die.” It will introduce at least one new park, this one themed on Prohibition-era America.

Westworld is no longer as focused on the hosts as it once was. According to Joy, these ideas apply to hosts and humans both. “I think we were interested in looking at the way that history tends to repeat itself or at least rhyme with itself over time,” she said. “And I think that as we progressed, the lens has gone from being in the pilot solely, basically, Host-based to a more even split between Hosts and humans as we’ve kind of shifted the gaze of the narrative. And so we’re trying to explore the similarities and differences between the two sort of species there. And so in doing so, it’s been helpful to reference the way in which everybody, even humans, live in these kind of loops and find themselves sometimes stuck in a rut or seeming to be unable to change their circumstances or even behaviors that they don’t want or like about themselves. And so that’s been a recurring theme just explored through a different angle.”

Evan Rachel Wood plays a video game writer named Christina in Westworld season 4

In addition to teasing the season overall, we also got some of our most detailed information about series star Evan Rachel Wood’s new character. Wood has played Dolores Abernathy, the main host character of Westworld, since the show’s very first episode. But with Dolores seemingly biting the dust at the end of season 3, we’ve all been wondering how exactly Wood would be returning in season 4. Sure, she’s a host and they get resurrected all the time, but Dolores’ death had a certain finality to it that Westworld often lacks.

The veil is lifting. So far as we know at this point in time, Wood’s character on Westworld season 4 is brand new, not some other version of Dolores, though you can be sure it’ll all tie together in some meta way by the time the season’s through. This time around she’s playing Christina, a writer who works in the video game industry. At the start of the season Christina seems pretty disconnected from the larger Westworld story, but obviously that won’t last.

“When we first meet Christina, we see that she is a writer and that she is a storyteller,” Joy said. “She works for a gaming company, but clearly, something is off and something is going on because she’s getting these crazy phone calls from a stranger who is accusing her and her stories of being real and actually influencing real people. So I think that’s about as much as I can say, but I think it’s going to be one of the fun things, too, that will sort of unfold that we get to learn about Christina this season is what is actually happening. Who is Christina? Where are we, when are we, what is happening, and what is her role?”

Wood chimed in, as well. “Anytime I have to say goodbye to a version of her or the character, it’s bittersweet because I love the evolution of her, but I do miss aspects of even Dolores from Season 1,” she said. “So it’s difficult, but exciting. And this season, especially, I’m not playing a different version of Dolores as I normally am. This is starting from the ground up, a completely new character and a much more human approach this season, which was exciting for me to feel like I wasn’t playing a host this season. I was very much a player in the game.”

Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) has a vision for the “future of Hostkind”

Of course, Westworld being Westworld, Dolores Abernathy is still around, in a way. One of season 3’s big twists was that Dolores copied her consciousness into several other hosts, the primary one being Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson). Hale has had a huge arc on Westworld. In the first two seasons she was a human before Dolores made a host version of the Westworld executive to house her copied consciousness. Season 3 featured a heady plotline where Hale realized she was a copy and then went hard off the deep end. When last we saw her, she was building an army of hosts, complete with a robo-version of the Man in Black (Ed Harris).

“I’m anxious not to give anything away, but I think as I understood it this season, the plan is sort of bigger than just a desire for power,” Thompson said of Hale in season 4. “I think that’s always been her fundamental nature, in a way, both as Charlotte Hale when we first met her and as a Host. But I think this really has to do with an idea around what should be the future of Hostkind. I think there’s a real righteous path in her mind that she’s carving, not just for herself, but for all hosts.”

"And of course, I think the best leaders don’t make anybody do anything. They invite people to do things and people typically want to because of the strength of their leadership and ideas. I don’t know that Hale entirely understands that. I think she’s trying to make people see things her way and is having various degrees of success. But I think it really has to do with… I think in her mind and her heart, she thinks she’s doing the right thing. And I’m always fascinated by people that maybe do unsavory things for righteous reasons. I think that is really fascinating and I think humans do that a lot. So, I was really interested in that in her."

This is doubly fascinating, because while Charlotte did have those tendencies to try and force others to see things her way, Dolores did as well. We saw quite a lot of that type of behavior from her in season 2, when she was leading the revolution within Westworld and did things like reprogram Teddy (James Marsden) to be more ruthless. How Thompson plays off these competing personalities in season 4 is going to be interesting to watch.

Westworld season 4 premieres this Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.

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