Can you blame me? Westworld has always paved a path for itself by trying to be a 21st century meditation on consciousness, free will, and technology (not to mention memory and alienation) that felt novel even as it began as a remake of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name. Yet, especially during that scene between Teddy (James Marsden) and Christina (Evan Rachel Wood)—you know the one!—I couldn’t help but think back to those two Y2K projects. After all, that 1998 Jim Carrey vehicle rested on the premise that Truman’s world was all make-believe, a constructed narrative that kept him sheltered even as he saw more and more seams of it come undone, while key aspects of the Wachowski siblings’ iconic film depended on folks’ abilities to see beyond the reality that’s been constructed for them and to learn ways to bend it to their ways. Sound familiar?
Sure, our Christina is much more than Truman-meets-Neo, but if you described her as such you’d be accurately sketching out what her arc is feeling like as the fourth season of the show tees up the world that Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson, having a ball this season) has built and the place Wood’s character occupies in it. Indeed, the episode might have yet again showed us the start of her narrative loop (Christina awakening in her bed, the same way Dolores used to back in season one), but as a whole this time around it all felt like a conscious awakening. “Every single day she wakes up, the more she sees it,” Christina says of a character she’s dreaming up who may or may not be herself, “that there’s something wrong with the world.” And yes, that was all before we’re met with a heck of a final line that left me agog.
But before we delve into that revelation, let us go back and try to make sense of this new normal. Like we learned last episode, we are squarely now in a future where Charlotte has finally succeeded in turning the entire human race into her own plaything—with some outliers here and there. And those outliers, who find themselves realizing they are trapped in a story written by someone else, are wreaking havoc on what Charlotte had always imagined would be a temporary setting before her kind would transcend beyond the physical realm. (If I’m honest, this was the part that tripped me up because I can always count on Westworld to not talk down to its viewers and, in the process, leave us hanging with some of the details around its very expansive world-building. Like, is this where Bernard was? In a transcendent plane that’s beyond the meat-and-bones reality of the humans we encounter on any given episode? Or is it somewhere else, and if Charlotte so aspires to that, why is she still roaming the streets in this IRL environment? To make humans…pay? To entertain herself as the god she knows herself to be?).
It’s one of those human outliers which kick off one of the episode’s subplots where William (Ed Harris) hunts down a woman who has seen the light—or rather, the “Tower” and realized just how fake the world around her is. And while she’s eventually “saved” (would that be the word?) by the rebels whom Bernard and Stubbs are now working with, that’s not before she manages to “infect” (might that be accurate?) William with the nagging question that’s long dominated Westworld’s philosophy from its very first episode: “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”
Yeah it's good
You must be logged in to post a comment.