Westworld returns to its roots in “Well Enough Alone”

Season 4 of Westworld is in full swing, and its second episode is doing a pretty good job of reminding us why we loved it in the first place. From twitchy hosts to gut-punch twists, “Well Enough Alone” was a solid episode that’s doing a lot to restore faith in the series after a shaky third season. There’s some serious stuff to unpack here, so let’s get right to it.

As always, SPOILERS for the this week’s episode of Westworld lie beyond.

Westworld Episode 402 review

We open with a sweeping shot of a marketplace, catching us up with Clementine (Angela Sarafyan), one of the most iconic hosts from Westworld who managed to escape out into the real world. Her seemingly idyllic life quickly takes a turn for the worst when William, aka the Man in Black (Ed Harris), pays her a visit. William is looking for Maeve, Clementine’s old mistress when she was a prostitute in Westworld. Clementine doesn’t know where Maeve is, and insists she wouldn’t tell William even if she did. He finds this pretty convenient, as it means he has no reason not to slit her throat. This William may be a host, but he’s got the old Man in Black vibes down pat.

It’s good to see Harris back to being cutthroat, and the episode gives him several more opportunities. Later on, we find out that he repurposed her to now be part of his posse, and uses her to help stonewall government officials when they get on William’s case about the fact that his company has restarted host production and is buying up properties in the southwest…presumably to start up some kind of park. It culminates with the vice president visiting William at a golf course. The back and forth as William repeatedly sinks hole-in-ones is a lot of fun; Ed Harris just seems like he’s having a ball playing the character.

The vice president threatens to shut William’s company down…but William never did respond well to threats. He knocks him out, letting him know that he’ll be getting an “upgrade.” And that’s where things start to get trademark Westworld twisty.

Maeve and Caleb on the move

It turns out William and his boss Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) have been busy. Last week, we found out that one of their targets was a senator, and in “Well Enough Alone” we see how it all went down. Caleb (Aaron Paul) and Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) road trip out to visit this senator together. The chemistry between Newton and Paul is fantastic; the two of them teaming up is by far my favorite element that Westworld season 4 has going for it right now.

When they arrive at the house of Senator Ken Whitney (played by Heroes star Jack Coleman) and his wife Anastasia (Saffron Burrows), it soon becomes apparent that they aren’t the senator and his wife at all; they’re hosts built to take their place. This whole sequence is pretty great, and feels more like classic Westworld than anything we’ve seen in a while. After disabling the two hosts, Maeve jacks in to the senator’s doppelganger  and discovers that Charlotte (who, let’s remember, is actually a clone of Dolores) is the one really calling the shots.

Worst of all, they find that the human Anastasia is actually still alive. She’s been locked in the barn, dissecting horses and losing her mind for who knows how long. She tells Caleb and Maeve where to go next, apparently at Charlotte’s invitation, before forcing them to kill her.

It all leads to Caleb and Maeve exploring an opera house, which leads to a hidden underground chamber filled with various rich folk, which is actually a train that zips them all away from civilization. The gradual sinking realization that they’re on their way to a new and improved Westworld-style park is handled really well, as detail after detail makes it unavoidably clear that William is, for some reason, rebuilding his old business. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how this park will be different yet (will it have humans in it instead of hosts?), but it’s an intriguing mystery. Maeve’s loaded responses as she and Caleb are outfitted for this new, roaring ’20s-themed park were great. Very excited to see how Caleb responds to being in a park and how Maeve responds to being back in after years outside.

Christina searches for answers, but finds more questions

The other character we spent quite a bit of time with this week is Christina (Evan Rachel Wood). After a man named Peter jumped to his death outside her building last episode, Christina has lots of questions. Peter claimed she was writing his life story and forcing him to do awful stuff. Thinking on this, she revisits the file of a person with the same name she wrote about some time earlier…only to discover that his story fit Peter’s exactly, right down to him stalking her and committing suicide.

While walking to work, she hears a homeless person talking about a “signal from the Tower.” He claims only he and the birds can hear it, so she disregards him. But when she arrives at the Olympiad office (which, coincidentally, is a very large tower), she finds a bunch of dead birds littering the ground outside.

Instead of going in, Christina takes a road trip to dig into Peter’s past. Her boss very creepily checks up on her, because they can track her when she accesses her work files. So that seems like a very healthy work-life relationship. Something is clearly going on with Olympiad, and the mystery deepens when Christina discovers that Peter had donated money to the psychiatric hospital where he was treated for depression…after his death, years earlier. So who was the “Peter” who committed suicide outside of Christina’s building?

There are a whole lot of questions here, and we don’t have enough information to narrow it down quite yet.

Westworld Bullet Points

• Another huge twist we got in this episode is that the human William is still alive and being held captive by Charlotte. She claims it’s mainly so she can gloat. If someone is going to win, that means someone else will lose, and she wants to enjoy every minute of William realizing he’s losing. The karmic justice of it all feels really fitting, considering how insanely cruel William was to the hosts.
• The music this episode was also pretty great. Ramin Djawadi brought in the classic Westworld theme, as well as a ’20s swing-style variation on it.
• The biggest question I walked away from this episode with is why in the world William or Charlotte would want to build another park with hosts. But the fact that the show found a way to incorporate that instead of doing a fake-out like last year’s Warworld is a good sign in my book.
• There was also a scene in this episode where Charlotte busted out the fly swarm again on a pesky government official. Still waiting to find out what the deal is with those. It went into his eyeball, which can only be bad, right?

Verdict

In many ways, “Well Enough Alone” sets up the kind of Westworld I always hoped we’d see once the hosts made out into the wider world. There’s a conspiracy to replace government officials with hosts and a new park made under mysterious circumstances, and it’s all being slowly unraveled for the viewer in a way that doesn’t feel anywhere near as overwhelming as it did in season 3. For the first time in a while, it feels like Westworld is on the upswing.

Episode grade: B+

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