Who does Nicole Pacent play in Westworld?

Season 4 of Westworld has introduced us to a whole new world where the androids known as hosts rule and humans have been reduced to mere play things. The show has always had a habit of asking complex questions about the nature of existence, and the latest season keeps that trend going strong.

However, all is not as utopian as it seems for the hosts. Though humans can be controlled at will, the season’s fifth episode, “Zhuangzi,” introduced the idea that some hosts were beginning to become so resistant to the illusion of their new world that they were killing themselves after coming into contact with “outliers,” aka humans who had realized they were caught in this web of mind-control. One host we see exhibit this behavior is Hope, played by CSI: Vegas veteran Nicole Pacent.

Nicole Pacent Westworld

Pacent plays a “young” host named Hope who is getting a feel for the world created by Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) and her allies. Though Hope is only two years old, she looks like a fully grown human, since hosts don’t physically age but are simply created with whatever age/size body their maker deems fit. In “Zhuangzi,” we first see Hope in a home surrounded by butchered humans, where she seems to be having a breakdown because she “won the game” but is still dissatisfied.

Later on in the episode we learn more about this game, which is basically a bounty that Hale puts out whenever a human manages to break out of their mental loop and realize that the world they’re living in is an illusion. Hope successfully killed the last human outlier, but not before they talked to her. This sowed seeds of doubt. Hale believes that communication with outliers infects hosts with a virus.

After going off the deep end and being scolded for it by the Man in Black (Ed Harris), Hope eventually kills herself. As such, we don’t know whether Nicole Pacent will be returning in future episodes of Westworld or not. With hosts, anything is possible.

Westworld season 4 is airing now on HBO and HBO Max. New episodes drop every Sunday.

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