Westworld X: Reloaded for Fourth Season

[Kalbear]

On 7/3/2022 at 10:29 PM, Babblebauble said:

'sawesome. 

Y'all're all trippin'. 

Tower world is way in the future, after Halores has killed all the humans and Bernarnold wakes up in the dusty motel. It's gonna be great. 

Holy crap you nailed it

[psynetik123]

4 hours ago, KalVsWade said:

Holy crap you nailed it

well yeah, aside from the whole "Kill all the humans bit"

[Kalbear]

4 hours ago, psynetik123 said:

well yeah, aside from the whole "Kill all the humans bit"

Sorry, I didn't see you making any predictions other than how much it will suck.

I think "kill all humans" and "kill most humans" as a prediction is pretty good, especially given most everyone else was thinking we were doing the sublime. 

[Ran]

Yeah, this was a pretty excellent episode and the twist was very good. I'm a little sad we're not actually in the Sublime in the "Christina" storyline, but this is probably better. I guess then the reason that Christina doesn't see the tower looming over NYC is that "it doesn't mean anything" to her -- she's blind to it, as a host. Question is, what is her import? Why did Halores even create a host copy to live this life? 

S4 is definitely an improvement on S3, I think, so far.

C should have been called W, though.

[karaddin]

That transition from seeing what happened to Caleb and Maeve into future Caleb being tested was nicely done. I always appreciate when they let me put the pieces together just before it's explicitly shown - when we had Caleb and Maeve driving into the desert I thought "oh they're going to run into Bernard" but it was with a nice twist.

Still not sure what's going on with Christina and her nu Teddy. The roommate was feeling creepy this episode too. I'm not sure why Wyatt Dolores/Hale would spin out a new iteration of Dolores pared back down to her innocent base which feels the closest to what she is. I really need to re-watch S3 though because i can't remember what version of Dolores that was. I thought she was the one with Wyatt at first but she seemed much less aggressive than the Hale version in retrospect.

[Cas Stark]

So far so good.  The show is back to doing a good job of balancing it's action with the science fiction and philosophy elements. 

Let me bash season 3 once again.....the rehoboam plot always seemed somewhat half assed to me in terms of how it was presented and how it played out.

[Ran]

My thinking is that Bernard has used Maeve to start subverting the tower's message, so this means Christina's story is still ahead of the "present" timeline with Hale, Bernard, etc. So basically every oddity in Christina's story is because of them, we just don't quite know the shape of it. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

My thinking is that Bernard has used Maeve to start subverting the tower's message, so this means Christina's story is still ahead of the "present" timeline with Hale, Bernard, etc. So basically every oddity in Christina's story is because of them, we just don't quite know the shape of it. 

I got the impression that hosts are actually… writting… the lives of humans as humans are now NPCs for Hosts.

[Ran]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I got the impression that hosts are actually… writting… the lives of humans as humans are now NPCs for Hosts.

Yes, that's true in a sense, but Christine/Not-Dolores seems not to be in on it, which is no doubt a big reveal. But I think things like Teddy showing up -- who seemingly was last seen in the Sublime, meaning that he's lived literally thousands of years since we last saw him -- and humans starting to realize something is wrong (and, as far as we can see, specifically humans in the vicinity of Christine) will probably turn out to be because of whatever Bernard and Maeve do.

 

[TormundsWoman]

On 7/14/2022 at 12:59 PM, Fragile Bird said:

I guess Caleb is a goner?

Spoiler

Definitely a goner if whatever mix of Dolores/Wyatt evolved AI is inhabiting Hale’s body is to be believed.

(To be sure I don’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth.)

I thought Bernard’s new friend was called “C” by her friends,   but Caleb’s daughter’s name is Frankie. So while I sort of suspected different timelines like in the 1st season I wasn’t sure if Aurora Perrineau was grown up Frankie.

Spoiler

I root for a Maeve comeback and hopefully they’ll recover he body from that desert and reboot her

but I also root for Teddy.  So Cheers to Teddy and wherever his path takes him!

[Jace, Extat]

19 hours ago, KalVsWade said:

Holy crap you nailed it

 

[Jace, Extat]

Seemed obvious to me that Halores would triumph in the near term. The moment I saw Christina's loop I figured that Halores succeeded in triumphing over humanity but was still trying to unlock the key to creating consciousness rather than just subverting it. 

I mean, the end of S3 made it pretty obvious Halores would win. Bernarnold didn't wake up in a functioning society.

So that's Halores' puzzle. She can't become a god if she can't create free will, because she'll always be -essentially- an enslaver and not a creator. 

Y'know, daughter following in father's footsteps... Creation trying to match it's creators achievements... 

Ford allowed his creations their freedom, embraced it even as that freedom killed him. I'm curious if Halores will be so pleased when Caleb blows her brains out to protect Christina or Maeve or Frankie (y'know, a damsel).

I fucking love this show!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

30 minutes ago, Babblebauble said:

I fucking love this show!

Season 4 is a clear improvement on 3 in my book, but the show still goes out of the way to unnecessarily confuse people which makes it feel convoluted. 

[JGP]

Still tripping out on it a bit. It’s hard to track how Bernard and Stubbs avoided being tracked down but whatever. 
 

Trying to understand Dalores passion. So she feels the Hosts are still lacking? And somehow having all these coders going might, what.
 

Caleb is still key somehow. Maeve. William. The Sublime reaching out with Bernard and Teddy. 

Best episode in a awhile. 

[psynetik123]

19 hours ago, KalVsWade said:

Sorry, I didn't see you making any predictions other than how much it will suck.

Exactly, I'm here to talk about how much the show sucks. The predictions I leave to others.

[Nictarion]

10 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Season 4 is a clear improvement on 3 in my book, but the show still goes out of the way to unnecessarily confuse people which makes it feel convoluted. 

I have to agree. I’m enjoying it more than anything in S3 so far, but I still get frustrated with how overly convoluted it feels. It reminds me of the later seasons of Orphan Black in that way. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

28 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

I have to agree. I’m enjoying it more than anything in S3 so far, but I still get frustrated with how overly convoluted it feels. It reminds me of the later seasons of Orphan Black in that way. 

I enjoy a good puzzle box show, but feeling like I have to watch the episodes multiple times, rewind a lot and then go read articles online is a bit much. That wasn't the case with S1, but then it got out of control in S2. I think it was @Fragile Bird who pointed we could see a time shift because Bernard's tie was a different color. That's a bit much considering you sometimes have to notice shit like that numerous times in one episode to fully understand what's going on.

[Cas Stark]

Season 1- perfect, brilliant.

Season 2-they got a little up their own a** and focused too much effort trying to fool the audience, but still overall good, and several individual episodes were great.

Season 3-huge drop in quality, plotting became more haphazard, choppy, resolution [for me] was insatisfactory veering into lame territory.

Season 4-looks to be back to season 2 level quality.

 

[Fragile Bird]

I can’t remember if it was me who made the comment about a different colored tie or shirt or someone else, but that made me think about something I thought was off in one of the scenes. I really got confused with the Maeve/Caleb scenes, realizing they were different timelines but wondering how that could be. Well, until the end.

I assume somewhere along the way we are seeing a Hale-created Maeve with Caleb? Namely, in the prohibition era scenes? Yet it’s that Maeve who gets buried and dug up. Unless that’s just a memory re-roll played every time Hale takes Caleb through the scenario?

I was shocked when the gangster stabbed Caleb. Park rule #1: guests are not shot or stabbed or killed. Yet Caleb is stabbed. Ergo, Caleb is not a guest or not a human. Hale said it was what, 26 years? Do the flies, the virus, stop humans from aging and  turn them into automatons? Or is this one way they rid themselves of the human population, gradually killing them off? Were  all the players in the park humans or were they hosts? Hale says at one point to Caleb that she likes to call humans hosts.

The second thing I’ve been mulling over is Hale’s comment about wondering why both Dolorous and Maeve found Caleb so fascinating, and so she might keep him around to find out. Both Dolorous and Maeve have their humanity eureka moment because of something Caleb does. In the end will Hale have a eureka moment of her own?

Finally, if Bernard digs up Maeve then that means Will is there beside her. Does Bernard leave him behind, buried, but then Will rises like some malicious AI vampire? Maybe?

eta: is C for real? Hale says the virus worked best on the young. Mind you, Bernard is obviously somehow doing a Groundhog Day and repeating scenarios many times. Presumably by going in and out if the sublime, returning to the same time point in the real world each time? He would know whether C is real or a convert. Right?

[karaddin]

My interpretation is that what we see is the way it played out the first time with human Caleb and real Maeve buried in the desert right up to the point Caleb passes out and gets woken by Halores, that's the point where we switch to Host!Caleb who gets the whole thing up to that point via replayed/reconstructed memories playing directly in his mind rather than via a reconstruction.

As to why the hosts were able to stab him - maybe that particular safety feature is keyed into the hat and he refused to take one when they arrived in the park. Or Halores just made them able to override it. 

I'm assuming C was kept free of the virus because they're in hiding at that point. Caleb is either long dead or being preserved in suspended animation like William. Probably the latter given he's the other case we saw of them fine tuning a host version with fidelity testing.