Westworld: The shocking twists of “Generation Loss,” reviewed and explained

It’s time for another weekly review of Westworld season 4! In this latest episode, Maeve and Caleb’s dangerous journey into the bowels of the roaring ’20s park takes a dark turn, Bernard makes good on his promises to the resistance fighters, and Christina catches up with an old friend. This episode is absolutely packed and ends with a bunch of insane twists that reframed the entire season.

There will be MAJOR SPOILERS for this week’s episode of Westworld below. Yes, I had to add “major” in there. This episode was nuts, and it warrants a super-sized review to explain it all.

Westworld Episode 404 review

It’s hard to believe, but we’re officially halfway through season 4 of Westworld. “Generation Loss” was classic Westworld, hitting on the themes and ideas that worked so well in previous seasons while pummeling viewers with a series of twists that rivaled anything we’ve gotten since season 1. This was the episode that finally put the season’s disparate plotlines into much needed perspective, showing how they actually relate to one another.

The lion’s share of the episode revolves once more around Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul), which is never the wrong decision. Newton’s raw charisma elevates this show whenever she’s on screen, and Paul excels at tortured, difficult character work…which this episode gave him in spades.

After being infected by one of Charlotte Hale’s (Tessa Thompson) flies at the end of last week’s episode, Caleb wakes to find himself captive. Hale spills the beans about her master plan: those flies carry a pathogen that lets her control the minds of humans via that sonic device we saw in the depths of the park. The entire purpose of this new park is to infect humans with this disease, creating the “first superspreader event” so that she can eventually gain control of the human race. Since Caleb is now infected, he spends much of the episode fighting against this burgeoning mind-control.

Maeve, on the other hand, comes to terms with the fact that William is a host — and one who’s gotten several upgrades. She can’t use her AI superpowers on him, but she does manage to overload the sound device temporarily in a way that harms other hosts, allowing her and Caleb to escape with Charlotte as their captive.

Their race through the park provides us with a bit more time to appreciate the fun of the roaring ’20s-themed version of Westworld (and its accompanying score by Ramin Djawadi), before the mind-control device comes back online and all the park’s human guests start coming after them. Maeve has a great moment where she effortlessly guides the group to safety by utilizing the park’s loops, since she’s got more Westworld experience than literally anyone else.

But the good luck doesn’t last. Caleb nearly succumbs to the mind control, picking up a gun and aiming it at Maeve before he’s shanked by another guest. They manage to get away by the skin of their teeth.

It’s here we get one of the first big info drops of the episode. “Generation Loss” features multiple flashbacks to a place Caleb and Maeve referred to in previous episodes as “the lighthouse.” Whatever happened here happened right at the end of the war to liberate humanity from Rehoboam; it has been suggested in previous episodes that Caleb was injured there and that it was the last time he and Maeve saw one another. Now, we find out what happened.

The lighthouse was a facility that harbored the last back-up of Rehoboam, the AI supercomputer that controlled humanity. After destroying it, Caleb is shot by one of the guards. Maeve carries him away from the facility, and we get some heartbreaking dialogue where Caleb reflects on how he’ll never find out what a normal life might have been like. Rather than let him die, Maeve hacks into the implant in the roof of his mouth that injects various perception-altering drugs into his system, and uses it to anesthetize him so that she can get him to a hospital.

It’s at this hospital that Maeve first confronts the idea of human mortality, as she waits weeks by Caleb’s bedside for him to recover. Eventually, she notices that he’s beginning to awaken and sees him talking with his future wife, who works at the hospital. We find out that Maeve left him then so that he could have a normal life and a family, and went into self-imposed exile so that he wouldn’t be drawn back into the conflict with the hosts…but after years by herself, she got curious. That scene in the first episode where Maeve caused a power outage and drew the attention of William happened because she was using her powers to check on Caleb for the first time in seven years.

Everything about this reveal is beautiful. The cinematography during the lighthouse sequence is gorgeous, and the idea of Maeve contemplating mortality and showing how much she cared for Caleb fits well, as she was the first host to really develop attachments on her journey to self-awareness.

The reckoning

Unfortunately, this emotional moment is short-lived. Maeve, Caleb and Charlotte arrive at a construction station deep in the park where they hope to get extracted by Caleb’s resistance buddies. But William shows up, forcing Maeve into a fight while Caleb calls for help. The mind-control device (which is hooked up to all the lights in the park) begins working its magic on him again, and Charlotte commands him to shoot Maeve. At the last second, Caleb resists and shoots William instead (which we’ll talk about in a sec), but is too late to stop him from mortally wounding Maeve. As a last resort, she uses her powers to hack all the explosive mining charges next to the site, catching both her and William in the explosion and burying them beneath a mountain of debris.

Caleb, meanwhile, gets hit with the twist of all twists: as his comrades close in and the light of their helicopter gets brighter, Charlotte starts speaking more and more cryptically. Caleb suddenly can’t remember where he is or how he got there….and he only gets more confused when Charlotte tells him that the resistance fighters who came (past tense) to rescue him weren’t his friends, they were hers. She had already replaced them all with hosts. Caleb was shot and killed. He died on that day…which means the Caleb Charlotte is speaking to is something else entirely.

Remember back in season 2 when young William was meeting with a copied version of his father-in-law James Delos, testing him for “fidelity?” The idea was that Delos had a terminal disease and wanted to implant his consciousness into a host. But the project never quite worked out; the human consciousness rejected the host body. Delos had 148 trials before the project was torched during the Westworld massacre.

Caleb, we find out, is undergoing the exact same thing. He did die in the ’20s park, but Charlotte copied his consciousness and spent years trying to get it to work in another body. She tells him that this is attempt 278. He’s been reliving that moment when he died, just like Delos relived his meeting with William in Westworld.

Charlotte then drops a slew of insane reveals. Those events with Caleb and Maeve in the park happened 23 years ago. The pathogen she made to control humans didn’t quite work on adults; their brains had already developed to a certain level that made them resistant to it, which is why Caleb was able to fight its influence. Instead, Charlotte infected human children. It took a generation, but she managed to gain complete control over the world.

Caleb understandably freaks out and runs outside. The building he leaves is Olympiad Entertainment, the very same one where Christina (Evan Rachel Wood) works. Caleb runs through the streets and sees an enormous tower in the distance. The tower pulses with that same eerie noise he heard from the machine in the ’20s park, and every single person around him freezes.

Charlotte comes out to gloat, illustrating just how total her control over the human race has become. Tessa Thompson’s performance is nothing short of chilling. The episode ends with Caleb being taken back into her custody and the tower off the coast of New York City pulsing once again, letting all the humans go back to their predetermined tasks.

So that was a lot, but those aren’t the only things that happened in this week’s episode of Westworld. Now that we’ve discussed how everything with Caleb and Maeve shook out, we can talk about what it meant for the rest of our characters.