Westworld review: “Zhuangzi” introduces the terrifying new world order

It’s a whole new world in need of another weekly Westworld review. Last week’s shocking twists and turns left us with a cold new reality, pulling a timeline fast one on audiences to reveal that the hosts had all but conquered the world and reduced humans to helpless playthings. Now we get to see what that world actually looks like in “Zhuangzi.” Let’s discuss.

As always, there will be SPOILERS for this week’s episode of Westworld below.

Westworld Episode 405 review

Considering the jaw-dropping twists of “Generation Loss,” it feels safe to say that my excitement for the series is higher than it’s been in quite some time. Finding out that Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) was successful in her bid to take over the world, that 23 years had passed since Caleb and Maeve tried to fight back in the 1920’s park, that Bernard is hanging out with Caleb’s adult daughter…it was a lot.

It’s fitting then that “Zhuangzi” is something of a breather. Now that we know how things went down 23 years ago, it’s time to see what the new world created by Hale actually looks like. And the answer is: pretty terrifying.

“Zhuangzi” revolves around a few different characters in a futuristic New York City, which we learn has been converted into a new type of park: one where the hosts rule, and humans are mere puppets under the mind-controlling influence of the disease that the flies from the 1920’s park spread across the globe.

Some of those who are mentally struggling the most this episode, ironically, are the very hosts whom the “park” is meant to cater to. Hale explains that turning New York City into the equivalent of a park is a “stop-gap,” meant to allow the newly free hosts to stretch their proverbial legs before they move on to whatever’s next. But some humans are slipping out of their loops, becoming “outliers”…and when a host interacts with one of these outliers, they shortly end up killing themselves for reasons unknown. Hale believes the humans are infecting the hosts somehow, but it’s pretty clear she’s missing a piece of the puzzle.

William (Ed Harris) is at the center of that conflict of faith, and the parallels to the existential crisis that the actual human William went through are fascinating. Both he and Charlotte have some excellent scenes where they “question the nature of their reality,” as the old Westworld adage goes. The climax comes when William wakes up his human predecessor, who is still in a type of cryogenic stasis. Watching Ed Harris debate existential questions with himself is just awesome, especially because the human version of William still has his old snark that always made him so fun to watch.

Intersecting with William and Charlotte’s plotline, we get a little bit more of Daniel Wu’s rebels. We still don’t know the name of Wu’s character, and don’t find out a whole lot more about him in this episode. But the mission to save one of the outliers before William can execute her is a needed dose of action in this otherwise very introspective episode. Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) is with the rebels, and they have no compulsions about putting him into dangerous situations since he’s a host.

There’s one scene where the tower freezes all the humans and then forces them to turn on the rebel party that is absolutely terrifying, reminiscent of zombie films. Those kind of scenes, combined with a tense score from Ramin Djawadi that has driving percussion almost reminiscent of Predator makes the rescue mission a brief but exciting watch. Ultimately it’s a success, and the small party escapes with the newly freed outlier.

The world is a story, and Christina is the storyteller

The rest of the episode is dedicated to Christina (Evan Rachel Wood), which feels like the right choice considering how much mystery there still is surrounding her character. Finally, the big picture begins to come into better focus, thanks to Teddy (James Marsden) helping her see more deeply into the world around her.

As with William’s chunk of the episode, there are lots of parallels in Christina’s story to Dolores’ journey from the first season. With Teddy’s help, she comes to realize that she can actually control the humans in the city. That crazy guy who claimed Christina’s story was ruining his life? Turns out he was right. Christina has been scripting plotlines for the human “characters” of New York City. We had already figured out some of this based on clues from previous episodes, but seeing the dawning horror as Christina peels back layer after layer of what’s really happening is still really engaging.

One of the biggest revelations is that Charlotte is Christina’s “college roommate”; we can almost certainly guess that Hale is responsible for making Christina and did it for some very specific purpose. It seems like Hale is in the habit of checking in on her, and is more than a little suspicious at Christina’s newfound romance (she doesn’t reveal Teddy’s identity). Given that Christina and Hale seem to represent the most innocent and most horrifically cynical versions of Dolores respectively, some clash of ideals between these two characters feels like it’s on the horizon.

There’s also a point where Christina tries to search for Dolores Abernathy in the Olympiad database and it flags the search as an illegal request. When her boss grills her about the situation, Christina realizes she can control him. This is a really intriguing turn…because if her boss is a human, why does he know all these things about the tower’s control system? Why is he afraid of Hale finding out about Christina’s irregular behavior?

Questions, questions, and more questions. When the dust settles, Christina is able to see the tower and tells Teddy she believes his seemingly outrageous claims about the nature of her reality. Where they’ll go from here, we’ll see.

Westworld Bullet Points

• I love when William tells the renegade host that humans are not so easily replaced, that they take a lot of effort to nurture. It’s a really cool reversal on how disposable the hosts were back in Westworld, which makes total sense; you can’t just rebuild human beings, after all.
• Charlotte controlling an avenue full of humans like some out-of-control theater director was a highlight. Tessa Thompson just commands the screen.
• Hale dressing down the host version of William was…kind of awful? I don’t think I’ve ever felt as bad for William on this show as I did in that moment, when Charlotte blames him for everything that’s going wrong even though pretty much none of it is his fault.
• Who rebuilt Teddy? The last we saw him before this season was when he killed himself back in the park during season 2. While hosts come back all the time, the fact that Teddy seems to remember everything that happened in Westworld raises a lot of questions about who could have rebuilt him. Presumably it wasn’t Hale, since he’s trying to help Christina see through the illusion she set up. Was it Bernard? Maeve before she was killed? Someone else entirely who had access to the park’s files? This is a big question season 4 needs to answer before the end.
• Charlotte talks a bit about how the hosts are meant to “transcend” and leave behind their physical forms. We did see William take over a power plant at the beginning of the season that had enormous server capacity, and he hinted that there was something hidden in them that he and his associates wanted. So does Hale now have access to the Sublime, or are these “transcending” hosts going somewhere else?

Verdict

“Zhuangzi” is a quieter of episode of Westworld meant to illustrate what the new world created by Charlotte Hale actually looks like. In that respect, it is pretty successful, even if some of the more entertaining characters like Maeve and Caleb weren’t around. We’re finally starting to see the bigger picture for Christina, and the parallels between the hosts’ existential questions in New York City and the old quandaries of Westworld are a lot of fun.

Episode Grade: B+

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