TV Review: Westworld Season 4 Is A Violent, Existential Ride
When you look up human history, often it is written according to wars and revolutions, Years are divided between the times people rose up, for themselves, or decided to fight amongst themselves. The irony is that, after while, it all looks the same. For all the motives, body counts, and heroic or villainous symbols, humanity and its story feels stuck in sameness: never changing up. As Westworld returns for Season 4, it confronts one of the trickiest aspects to human history; do revolutions work?
When one institution falls, another rises, often, being originated in the very one that tore it down. As we find Dolores, now Christina, a mystery begins to brew. Her existentialism is still there, and she echoes our season 1 queen, who has a gnawing sense of emptiness. She is a writer of gaming fantasies to a boss that fails to see her value, and a roommate to an equally frustrated, yet vulnerable powerhouse, Maya (Ariana Debose). Frankly, Dolores’ storyline feels like a “girl moves to the city” sci-fi thriller; when she’s not writing online rom-coms, she’s trying too figure out if, in some ways, she’s the internet. Meanwhile, Maeve (Thandie Newton) is going full Taken.
What I always loved about Maeve and Dolores is that they were the most powerful people to be moved by love and grief, two feelings people have the tendency to see as weakening. For Maeve, it is the loss of all those she loved, from her ex to her daughter, that makes her seek as PTSD Caleb (Aaron Paul) to finish off what they thought was finished: their revolution. Just 7 years after exploding a machine that both defined as the very reason both man and AI have no free will, they find themselves still unfree. Maeve is turning off grids, getting visions of her past life, and slicing governmental agents in half. In essence, this season feels like the most exhausted version of prior ones, which, in a way, makes it more exciting.
Most shows approach war as it is being fought and end just as it is one, but most soldiers understand a war never fully ends. It lingers not only in its effects upon the people who fought it, but the ones that realize you cut the head off one snake and find it grows three others. In this, Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard and Ed Harris’ William/ The Man In Black and Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale become an emblem of how, out of the ashes, new heroes and villains come to replace the old order. Wright keeps Bernard’s sweetness like a sword; showing specks of kindness as he investigates how to “save” the world when salvation might be too big a word. Yet, firmness at becoming an all-knowing AI is dominant on the screen, and juxtaposes William’s and Thompson’s full embracing of madness and power. In a a way, we, finally, get to see every character become who they always were.
Maeve was always a renegade. Bernard was always the observer and guide. William was always a menace, and, as for Dolores, she was always the connector: the one that oddly assured everyone played their parts. Thus, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, everyone falls into their usual place of either fighting the system or becoming it. Hence, once again, Westworld Season 4, premiering Sundays starting June 26, displays the nuance of a living experience, even if programmed.
