Westworld

"Westworld" returns, featuring several familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, while extending aspects of a third season that creatively sailed off the rails.

As for how the producers will bring it all crashing together, whatever goodwill and trust they generated in the past has mostly evaporated, creating less faith that they're playing six-dimensional chess and more suspicion that they're spending a whole lot of HBO's money on an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. and Jeffrey Wright are also back on board, but through four episodes it's hard to make much of their storylines, which only feeds the sense that "Westworld" is constructed as roughly three programs in one. Their path intersects with the villainous and ruthless William (Ed Harris) as he pursues his own shadowy scheme, a character originally elevated by first-season mystery who is perhaps most symbolic of the show's decline, having become progressively less interesting ever since.

Westworld is a show about storytelling. Throughout its first three seasons, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have made clear they are fascinated by the ...

William, Christina, Caleb, and Maeve may all be scattered but it seems we’re all in the same timeline (give or take Christina? Okay…maybe there may be some red-yarn-wall conspiracy artwork in our futures to help us figure all of it out). How Nathan Crowley (season one) and Howard Cummings (seasons two and three) lost their respective Emmys for their work on the show is beyond me. Westworld has probably spoiled us in thinking each and every one of its narratives is a Rubiks cube of a puzzle, often encouraging us to discern (or get lost) in various competing timelines. But once that prologue was done with, I was back in the kind of Westworld world I most enjoy: namely, following Evan Rachel Wood as she tried to decipher what it is her character (this time: Christina—unclear where Dolores is nowadays) wants from her life as she ponders the pleasures and perils of writing and living in certain stories. (Trust the show to keep its meta-ness going; not only are we in the realm of storytelling but in the realm of broadcasting. Sure, I wouldn’t have pegged Westworld to flash-forward seven years since “the riots” that closed out its most recent season finale—or even imagine that it would open with a bilingual set-piece where William (yes, Ed Harris, back again as the man formerly known as the Man in Black) brings a cartel to its knees with the help of…I want to say fly-hosts?

HBO's "Westworld" returned on Sunday night after more than two years off the air -- read our recap, grade the sci-fi drama's return!

As she turns in for the night, Teddy (James Marsden) looks up at her from the street below. This is shaping up to be one of the biggest mysteries of her arc. After a night out with Maya, Christina encounters the stalker in person, and he attacks her before disappearing. She heads to a nearby town for supplies and learns that people are looking for her. Built over and around a massive lake, this place and its contents are immensely valuable to William. He claims that its contents were stolen from him and that he wants all of it back. The Biblically-named supercomputer and its co-creator, Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), are no longer in the picture.

While we never see Charlotte in the season 4 premiere, William is clearly hard at work on her behalf. He's also sending Hosts out to find Caleb (Aaron Paul) and ...

“The Auguries” is a promising start to the season. How will things be different now that she’s out in the real world, when she discovers she’s really a Host? And how did she come to be where she is? We don’t know if this is some other Teddy or if it’s the original character repurposed, but the reveal that he’s the one watching over Christina while she ruminates over wishing she could have a happy ending for herself was a really nice touch. The character who gets the most focus in the premiere is a new one…kind of. The next day, the man once again calls Christina right before jumping off the roof of a nearby building to his death, which he insists is how she wrote his story ending. Despite his lingering feelings of unease, there is a pervading sense that the workings of the world have changed somewhat in these past seven years, even if people are still stuck in loops, so to speak. She reveals that she made a Host version of William to serve as the general of that army; Host William quickly kills off his human counterpart. There’s some really interesting commentary in Caleb’s plotline about how even though the AI system that was deciding people’s fates is gone, life hasn’t changed all that much for a lot of people. The time jump is kind of mind-blowing, but the show does a great job of handling it. Maeve is still experimenting with her powers here, which is nice to see even though all it does this episode is draw the attention of William’s flunkies. Westworld is one of those shows that reinvents itself with each season, and from the start of season 4 it’s clear that this will once again be the case. All this is to say that if you’ve enjoyed Westworld so far, you’ll almost certainly enjoy the premiere of season 4.

It's several years into the new world and everyone has made news lives for themselves — but nothing good lasts long in Westworld. A recap of 'The Auguries', ...

At the end of the episode, Christina opens a new pitch about a girl searching to fill the emptiness in her life, tying the women we’re following (Maeve, Frankie, and Christine) together. We’re programmed, forgive the pun, to believe that stories about women just aren’t interesting or important.) Now, does this hint at where the story is going, given we don’t even know if this version of Dolores is a hero or a villain? It is about a young boy named Elmer who runs away to rescue a captive dragon and uses ordinary household items like lollipops and hair ribbons to trick and cajole the creatures of Wild Island, keeping the baby dragon chained up. Finally, a man named Peter stops her on the street, accuses her of controlling people in the world, and asks to be set free. As the title suggests, it is also narrated from the future by the protagonist’s child. Given that we don’t know what William and “Christina” are up to in their respective storylines, it’s nice that Maeve and Caleb have a crisp and clear call to action. (This hits unexpectedly hard as a woman in the world and as a former screenwriting student who wanted to write female protagonists! The season opens with a shot of what appears to be the Seattle skyline. She beheads one of them with a hatchet (!) and determines that William sent them. Maeve then goes directly to Caleb, who we learn throughout the episode is back working construction in Los Angeles. He has a wife named Uwade (Nozipho Mclean) and a daughter named Frankie (Celeste Clark). Caleb’s wife and coworker allude to the end of a war, seemingly the one started by Dolores when she leaked Rehoboam’s data seven years ago. Seven years have passed since the Westworld season-three finale, both in the show and in the real world. That’s all we see from William in the episode, living out his seemingly dead human counterpart’s Western outlaw dreams in the real world, so let’s focus on the other storylines one by one.

Teddy is back. In the last few moments of the season 4 premiere of Westworld, the beloved character turned tragic killer, who died in Season 2, ...

Although the premiere did dash predictions that Teddy was the mystery man Christina was seen going on a date with in an early season 4 teaser; that was just some jerk Christina’s cheery roommate, played by Ariana DeBose, set her up with as a ploy to make Christina more social. Considering Dolores uploaded Teddy’s pearl (a.k.a. robot brain) to the Valley Beyond, Teddy’s return was a major possibility at any point in the series. After a while, Teddy couldn’t take it anymore, killing himself to escape the violence. The episode—a sleek, entertaining slow-burn set seven years after the events of season 3—ends on that thrilling note, without answering any real questions about Teddy’s return. (It’s a string cover of “Video Games” by Lana Del Rey, a choice so-on-the-nose that it’s funny before it turns poignant). Christina is only certain of one thing: “I want a story with a happy ending.”

LISA JOY: It is the Hoover Dam, starring itself. JONATHAN NOLAN: They were lovely to work with. It was kinda like, "Do you think they would let us?" "Yeah, sure ...

We've seen in the last season that we were controlling ourselves, and now you add the hosts to the mix here. Even the facts are now in question, and that's a very worrisome trend, that idea that there may be levels of mechanisms of control here, even inadvertent ones. NOLAN: One of the fun things about our show is the way we're asking the audience to find their own way through it in that game-like way. Now that finally our timeline is so much more contemporary, it's really great to explore everything about that culture, and in that way also create a character that's very relatable to me and a way to reflect upon the act of being a writer itself. The intention here is for the audience to feel the reality of New York. I shot on my first series [Person of Interest] in New York for five years. Dolores — dearly departed Dolores — used to want to be the author of her own story, and now we find this new character, Christina, who very much is an author of the stories. NOLAN: We just love this idea of the subtle things in our environment that shift and change, and the tectonic changes and control that might indicate. The flies are like the last real thing in that park, and taking that and flipping it on its head so that something that was a symbol of chaos inside this very curated world becomes a symbol of control inside a chaotic world. "It's a veiled reference to something that we have seen already stolen from him at the end of season 2," he teases. In the original park, the flies were the only classic symbol of the things you can't control. Flies have obviously been a visual motif that you guys have been playing with since the very first season, but now it seems like flies are becoming a much more active role in the narrative moving forward. We had so many questions — including what's going on with Evan Rachel Wood's Christina and the return of James Marsden at the end of the episode — so we went to the source for answers: Nolan and Joy.

'Westworld' Season 4 Episode 1 on HBO ends with James Marsden returning to watch over Evan Rachel Wood's Christina while a Lana Del Rey song plays.

Dolores had reprogrammed her beloved to be a vicious attack dog for her violent cause and the Teddy trapped beneath her tweaks was horrified by what they had become. As you’ll recall, Dolores Abernathy was not only killed, but her consciousness was totally deleted at the end of Westworld Season 3. While Christina would rather script cozy stories about young women with loving fathers and happy endings, her boss wants her to veer into the darker side of life. Both Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden return to the Westworld cast in spite of their characters’ deaths. Westworld Season 4 Episode 1 gives former star James Marsden a swoon-worthy entrance accompanied by an instrumental Lana Del Rey cover. Westworld is a show full of twists, turns, and resurrections.

HBO has made no attempt to hide the fact that Dolores actress Evan Rachel Wood remains a part of the show this year, with her popping up prominently in every ...

She is this kind of nerdy, sort of average woman just trying to make it as a writer in a big city. For the first time since season 2, Westworld introduces Dolores’s old boyfriend, Teddy Flood, the gentleman host played by James Marsden. Perhaps some unknown entity is making use of Dolores’s old host body by placing a new A.I. inside of it for reasons unknown. Wood’s character is indeed quite vulnerable again, as fragile as the “unawakened” Dolores from season 4. Perhaps Christina is, in fact, another personality within Dolores’s programming that arrived as a sort of failsafe after Rehoboam wiped her dry. This woman is named Christina and she’s essentially an anonymous little worker bee in the future version of our own world. “Every season I feel like I pick out a walk for each character’s mannerisms and other little things that people wouldn’t really notice. After all, if a host is just a collection of data, what happens when you permanently take that data away? If the entity we knew as Dolores is gone, however, then how could Wood’s performance continue on? The form that once housed the being we knew as Dolores is now playing host (pardon the pun) to another personality altogether. It’s hard to kill a host that is able to remotely upload its consciousness to seemingly any hard drive. You may not recall, for instance, that Dolores met her untimely end in the final episode of Westworld season 3.

It's a whole new Westworld, and, man, does it seem peaceful since Maeve and Caleb took out the predictive-AI, big-think computer Rehoboam last season. Dolores ...

Her sacrifice was meaningful in that it helped get the world to this place, but it was a sacrifice in that there is no more Dolores. I’m not sure I would call it a version, but you know, there’s this new character, Christina. We’re just along for the ride with her as she experiences the city, dating, being a writer. Lisa Joy: Unfortunately, he’s what you’ve been watching — the thing that William least wanted to be, which is a host. It’s always been a period piece in Westworld. I wanted a really great actor to play this girl, Christina, and I’m hoping people don’t notice because I changed her hair color, but we just cast Evan again. It’s really nice to be able to not speak wholly in metaphor, to be able to do something contemporary and human, to write roommates, banter and bad dates. Caleb is totally up for it, and tells his loved one, who is losing her patience with his shenanigans, “I’m the one who has brought this upon us, and I’m the one who has to end it.” And to me, war is brutish and terrible and devastating for all parties. He then meets MIB on the bridge of the dam, and agrees to sell the structure to him. The hosts that remain have clearly been up to different things. Caleb has a daughter, but he’s teaching her how to shoot a pistol (akin to a BB gun). “Thanks to you, her hobbies are sugar and violence,” Caleb’s spouse says about their daughter. Meanwhile, Christina is receiving disturbing phone calls from a guy who claims her storylines have forced him to lose his job and his wife. Later on, Del Puerto’s character, who refused to sell the dam, is swarmed by flies in his room and knocked out. But, remember, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) killed what seemed like a human version of him in the season 3 finale, and sent a host of the guy out into the world.

Though they may share the same physical attributes and actor, Christina is an entirely different character from Dolores. Here's what's really happening in ...

“Dolores never died.” “Humans find themselves sometimes stuck in a rut, or seemingly unable to change their circumstances or even behaviors that they don’t like about themselves,” Joy says. I do miss aspects of her, even divorced from Season 1.” Christina is “a completely new character,” Wood tells Inverse. “Playing [Christina] required a much more human approach this season. Most importantly, the “narrative loops” that defined the lives of the Hosts in the Westworld theme park. Dolores Abernathy appears to have gone AWOL in the war between humanity and machine.

Evan Rachel Wood and producer Lisa Joy explain the new character Christina in 'Westworld' season 4.

ERW: Absolutely. I think she spends the first half of the season confused and uneasy. But, ironically, sometimes you just feel like a vehicle for that, and it gets to be confusing, like, “Well, who is this entity here?” And I think that’s something that Evan’s new character struggles with. And it was just so exciting to get to write this and see the sea change in Evan’s performance. Lisa Joy: I mean, Dolores had evolved and changed so much already and kind of come to the end of her journey, but I think [finding] a lot of resolution and peace between these oscillations, between victim and perpetrator, and then finding this middle ground. But like Dolores, she notices something is off with the world, and she’s looking for an answer to a question that she doesn’t know yet. And what will happen with her surprise savior, who stepped in at the end of this week’s episode?

If there's any major takeaway from the Season 4 premiere, it's that the insects are back in a big way—a recurring motif in the series and Michael ...

(It should come as no surprise that Dominion is by far the worst film in the series.) But while insects were a bizarre inclusion for a dinosaur movie, they actually don’t feel as out of place on Westworld, especially within the broader context of Crichton’s work. After all, we’ve already seen what they did to the cartel guy, and unless Caleb also has been replaced by a host, these flies are going after humans under the command of Charlotte and host William. What did the flies have to do with it? (If there’s one thing the Westworld fandom loves, it’s speculating on every single detail of the series.) But the interest in flies soon gave way to more pressing reveals, like how Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) was secretly a host modeled after the park’s deceased cofounder, or that young William (Jimmi Simpson) would go on to become the Man in Black (Ed Harris) because Season 1 was taking place across multiple timelines. In the season’s opening sequence, we meet an unnamed cartel member who has been approached by William—or, more accurately, [deep breath] the host who replaced the real William at the end of the third season when Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), who is actually a sophisticated copy of Dolores, had the robotic doppelgänger attack him. It’s a little moment that hints at a major shift in Dolores’s programming, and by the end of the first season, many hosts turn on their human oppressors with violent ends.