Westworld season 4 finale is a bleak reset for the series

After a weird and wild ride that spanned decades and introduced us to a whole new world, season 4 of Westworld has drawn to a close. HBO’s heady science fiction drama had a resurgence this season, harkening back to the show’s much stronger early days before plunging us headfirst into a dystopian future where the hosts rule and humans have become mere play things. Episode 7 of Westworld stumbled a bit, and while the finale — “Que Será, Será” — is a slight improvement, it still doesn’t quite stick the landing. Which is a shame, considering how good the setup was.

Let’s get to reviewing. As always, there will be SPOILERS for season 4 of Westworld below.

Westworld Episode 408 review

As the curtain draws to a close over the fourth season of Westworld, I’m finding myself both grateful for the journey and a little confused about how it went wrong. Like the second season of the show, season 4 had some real highs and lows. Episode 4, “Generation Loss,” is one of the strongest episodes we’ve gotten since the series left the original Westworld park. We learned that despite Caleb (Aaron Paul) and Maeve’s (Thandiwe Newton) efforts, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) succeeded in conquering the human race. And the hosts weren’t just victorious; as William (Ed Harris) put it, they defeated humanity to “an almost biblical degree,” totally subjugating free will through the use of a deteriorative mental disease spread by flies and controlled by ominous tones emitted from a spiffy-looking tower.

On the surface, that is a really intriguing premise. I wish we had gotten to explore it in detail before it all came crashing down in the finale.

There are a lot of things that “Que Será, Será” does really well. At the end of the previous episode, William sabotaged the tower so that all the humans went wild and started murdering everything in sight. We see the effects of that immediately in the finale, as we’re treated to a long sequence of various humans and hosts killing each other that pulls in some familiar faces, like Rebus (Steven Ogg), who was a homicidal host bandit back in the original Westworld park. Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.) crops up as well. Westworld was destroyed by hosts going homicidal on the human guests, and now the “park” that is Earth is getting destroyed by humans going off the rails. There’s a nice symmetry to it.

On the thematic level, the Westworld finale is pretty solid. Ultimately, all the hosts and humans go extinct after one large explosion of murder and mayhem. When the dust settles, viewers are left with the impression that even if characters like Frankie (Aurora Perrineau) escape the massacre in New York City, eventually, all that will be left of Earth is a desolate husk. Here’s hoping that whatever the “next world” looks like, it’s a bit better.

Forget being in The Matrix, Christina IS the Matrix

Now we need to talk about Christina (Evan Rachel Wood). In many ways, the finale is about her; everyone else basically exists to either die in the struggle or help her reach her final destination. Episode 7 ended with the reveal that Christina wasn’t really in the real world…but didn’t exactly explain what that meant.

“Que Será, Será” does explain what the deal is with Christina. To put it in the simplest of terms, Christina is another copy of Dolores, except she resides entirely in a control unit; she has no body. Christina is basically the program that kept all of the NYC “park” running by writing narratives for the humans. We finally see her true form (a small gray sphere) when Charlotte destroys the red map of the city at the top of the tower, revealing that Christina’s control unit was laid into its foundation. As this happens, Christina’s reality fades.

All the people surrounding Christina, like Teddy (James Marsden) and her roommate Maya (Ariana DeBose), are simulated beings created by Christina’s subconscious to help her make sense of her reality. So all those things we saw happen in Christina’s plotline were happening in her simulated digital space; however, the people represented there did exist in the real world, like the homeless human we saw ranting about the tower back in the second episode and who then cropped up in Episode 5 during William and Charlotte’s plot.

It all leads to Charlotte transferring Christina’s consciousness into the Sublime, to give her the chance to make one final simulation which could hold the salvation for whatever world rises from the ashes of the one destroyed by the hosts and the humans.

In a great final twist, Christina digitally recreates Westworld. We’re back to black hats and white hats, gunslinging and horseback rides through the desert. Or at least we will be, if Westworld is renewed for a fifth season. As it stands, Christina states that this “dangerous game” might allow for a brighter future. The actual logistics of how that might work are murky, but it does leave us with a bit of sci-fi hope at the end.

Westworld focuses on the big picture and forgets the little details

If it feels like I’ve glossed over what happened with a lot of the other characters in the finale, that’s because that’s more or less what the show does as well. “Que Será, Será” focuses on the macro story, which is where it’s strongest. Most of its character-focused stuff fell totally by the wayside, or left me scratching my head.

Despite great performances from Aurora Perrineau, Aaron Paul, and Luke Hemsworth (Stubbs), the rescue mission to get Caleb out of New York felt really forced in this final stretch. On the surface it’s a cool idea, and it felt like it should have led to some great material. Instead, the show uses it as a way to give Caleb one last send-off where he gets to play poppa to Frankie as an adult, which hit emotionally but doesn’t deliver like it should given the great set-up. It also felt like it didn’t quite line up with the character development both Caleb and Frankie got prior to Episode 7.

Speaking of characters being underutilized, what was the point of bringing back Maeve? Bernard claimed he was repairing her because she was a “weapon” that could be used in the fight against Charlotte Hale. We assumed that had something to do with Maeve’s unique powers; the show even emphasized that she is unique among the hosts. Instead, she came back to fistfight Charlotte Hale before promptly dying, and doesn’t appear in the finale at all. What made her any more of a weapon than Stubbs or anyone else, under those circumstances? Maeve has always been a fierce fighter on the show, but martial prowess wasn’t what made her dangerous. It felt like the show brought her back and did nothing with her.

It’s even more frustrating because one of the more intriguing emotional beats the season set up was that Maeve had some kind of feelings for Caleb; the inciting incident of the whole season was that, after seven years of isolation, Maeve was still too curious about Caleb’s wellbeing to resist checking on him with her powers. She had a unique view on mortality largely because she sat by Caleb’s bedside for weeks waiting to see if he would recover after the war to free humanity from Rehoboam. To not even get a nod to their relationship in the final two episodes is a weird choice.

These kinds of character inconsistencies cropped up quite a bit in the final two episodes of Westworld, where the writing seemed at odds with previous episodes of this very same season. It wasn’t bad, but it was disappointing that the show focused on its apocalyptic stakes and forgot to spend time on the character drama. “Que Será, Será” drives that home, because we see a ton of characters we’ve been following for years die, but their deaths don’t hit as hard as they should.

All in all, it was a decent finale. Not Westworld’s strongest, not its weakest. I hope that if the show comes back for a fifth and final season, it will stay the course all the way throughout. Season 4 was a great return to form for the series, but it tripped over itself at the finish line.

Westworld Bullet Points

• Stubbs’ death might have been the most brutal of the episode, as Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) comes up behind him and rams his head into a piece of metal that spears him through the eye. Both Hemsworth and Sarafyan have really grown on this show. It’s a testament to their talent that they started as minor characters and became scene-stealers.
• Ed Harris’ performance as the host version of William was great fun. Of everyone this season, I think host William had one of the most consistent journeys. By the end, he’s even more ruthless and powerful than the original William, and makes a great villain.
• It’s also a nice bit of symmetry that host William brought about the downfall of the human “parks” and world, while back in the day the original William had a pretty substantial role in bringing about the massacre at Westworld.
• There was a bit of a fast travel issue here, as William somehow rode a horse all the way from New York City to the power plant housing the Sublime in the southwestern United States and managed to get there around the same time as Charlotte Hale, who flew in a futuristic aircraft. I wish the show had given us a better sense of the geography.
• Tessa Thompson’s run as Charlotte Hale was pretty compelling. That final shot of her sitting by the riverside with a metal body and human face as she crushers her own control unit is haunting.
• This season began with such a huge cast of beloved characters, like Maeve, Caleb, William, Bernard and more, but by the end of the season viewers are supposed to believe that not a single one of them is left alive. It’s kind of weird that the emotional stakes don’t feel higher, considering.
• The visuals in this episode were pretty stunning. Charlotte walking through a ruined New York City was a highlight.
• Ramin Djawadi’s score also did a lot of heavy lifting. I got late Game of Thrones vibes from how sweeping and huge some of the tracks were.
• My biggest issue with season 4 of Westworld is that I wish we had gotten to see a bit more of the wider world. We’re led to believe that William triggered the apocalypse, but since we never see anything beyond the one host-controlled city, it feels isolated.

Verdict

The Westworld season 4 finale had a lot going for it. The setup was great and the stakes were high…but because the show put so much focus on those world-ending events, it lost some of the grounded drama that would have helped viewers feel it more. It wasn’t a flop, but it definitely didn’t knock it out of the park the way I’d hoped after how strong the first six episodes of the season were. It reminded me more of the convoluted plotlines of seasons 2 and 3, and not in a good way.

Episode grade: C+

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