Westworld continues to pull us back in

We’re going back! We’re going back!

Yes, I’m starting at the end, but also, how can you not? The park that clearly won’t die (what is this, a Jurassic one?) returns, retooled and revamped for a whole new wild season.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. First things first: I wholly enjoyed the first episode of Westworld’s fourth season and rightly praised it for shedding the series’ most alienating aspects of its storytelling and deciding to go back to basics. (Seasons two and three felt more like puzzles to be solved than stories to be followed; did you get through them without color-coded timeline diagrams and endless visits to Reddit threads and wikis?)

The episode may well have spent time reintroducing us to old friends, but it also did a solid job of laying the groundwork for what promises to be—and here we may borrow William’s own words—not so much a revisiting of season one as much as a reinvention of it. Which, honestly, sounds pretty great. I don’t think I’ve been this excited about Nolan and Joy’s dystopian gambit since the show’s first few episodes, which managed to string you along into a sci-fi parable about free will in the guise of a humans vs A.I. battle taking place in an amusement park where earthly delights came with deadly consequences. And who needs anything more than that, really?

So, in this episode we kick off with a Western-inspired face-off between William (Ed Harris) and Clementine (Angela Sarafyan); the Man in Black is keen on finding Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and he’ll stop at nothing. Killing is now the name of the game. But it soon becomes clear(er) what he’s up to: He’s trying to rekindle the ashes of what was once Delos, yes, but also Westworld, the park. Sure, the U.S. government is adamantly against it. But, as in our own real world, it seems corporate interests have no way of being curtailed. Especially when said interests have a legion of hosts and human/host hybrids (is that what we should be calling these humans infested with fly hosts?) who will do their bloody bidding and stop at nothing to make William and (twist!) Charlotte Hale’s plans a reality. Yes, our beloved Tessa Thompson is back. A little worse for wear (she did survive a fiery accident last season, remember?) but her Dolores-consciousness (lovingly dubbed “Halores” by fans) is just as ruthless as before.

It’s she who’s running the game here, having built herself a William to be the front of her plan while she seeks to, as Dolores herself once did, create a world fit for hosts. All she has to do first is declaw those jackals, lest they run amok and hurt those who she wishes to let roam free in this new world.

What may stand in their way? Well, Maeve and Caleb (Aaron Paul), of course. The jury is still out for me on Caleb, who I still believe is the weakest link in the core ensemble of the season so far. Thankfully, he’s helped in that department by sharing every scene he’s in with the always magnetic and always delightful Maeve. Honestly, can we talk a little bit about how Newton’s wry sense of humor injects every scene she’s in with an energy that’s so often lacking elsewhere? Scenes often skirt the line right over into self-serious territory (see: that final Hale/William moment). I stopped counting the number of times Maeve’s caustic asides had me openly cackling (exhibit A: telling Caleb, “You don’t look entirely awful,” while he dons a tux; exhibit B: “It was certainly…eye-opening,” when talking about her past visits to Westworld).

Speaking of Maeve and Caleb: As they slowly find out about William’s (and Charlotte’s) plan, they end up…well, you know where they end up: in the train to Westworld. Although it can’t possibly be Westworld. For we’ve left the Western genre behind and we find ourselves faced with “the Golden Age,” a.k.a. the roaring twenties, a.k.a. “Welcome To Temperance,” as the sign at this new (and improved?) park informs us. Our wry host and our handy human are now guests at William’s revamped amusement park, and it’s clear that, just as it was last time, this is but a ruse, a front for more nefarious things to come.

But that’s for next week. For now, we can just enjoy the prospect of having Maeve back at the park where, in a way, it all began. And where, sure enough, it is all bound to end.

Stray observations

• Will every episode feature William killing someone in its opening moments? Will we find Maeve impaling someone every chance she gets? Will Christina wake up looking like a modern-day Dolores? Repetition has always been the name of the game at Westworld (and, at Westworld, obviously) so I am very much here for these recurring gags.
• “I’ve always wondered why they call you the secret service. Aren’t you, kind of…obvious?” Line of the evening? Possibly.
• I want to single out the direction in this episode (courtesy of Craig William MacNeill), mostly because the tense moment at the golf course (how brilliant to have it punctuated by William scoring a hole in one perfectly three different times?) and the set-piece at the opera house-cum-speakeasy-turned-train were two moments where the show’s rhythm slowed down and allowed us to simply sit with these characters. In a show that often enjoys playing with juxtaposition and gets a lot of mileage out of cutting back and forth between different spaces and timelines, those two scenes struck me for their spare direction—which just made them feel all the more powerful, really drawing you in before, obviously, punching you in the gut.
• I guess we should talk a bit about Christina and her findings about Peter Myers (there was going to be some sort of time warp; we all knew this). Did Peter really die years ago? Is Christina tied in some other kind of looped reality? In an Olympiad game of her own making? In her own mind? Is Ariana DeBose gonna Alias/Francie us and turn out to be someone keeping a watch on our favorite tabula rasa of a character?
• Let us pause for a second and praise Peter Flinkenberg’s cinematography in this episode. Not only did the show’s color palette (so much lush greenery!) arguably shake up what’s normally such a severe-looking show (with all those milky blacks and harsh lights) but I thoroughly enjoyed the way the Flinkenberg kept framing Christina in ways that fragmented her visually for us. So many mirrors and windows and revolving glass doors continually refract her image in our eyes, as if reminding us that she is not yet whole, that she’s lost, perhaps, within herself. (But also, Westworld always looks so pristinely shot that I figured we’d get this shoutout out of the way since I will probably keep lauding the visual grammar of the show for the remainder of the season).
• Through seasons two and three, it seems Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and their crew were intent on spiraling the story of Westworld outward, building out increasingly complex worlds and narratives that rippled out from the inside of the park where we’d spent much of the show’s first ten episodes. Wisely, they’ve opted to go the opposite direction this season, carving out stories that burrow us further into said park, taking us back and in. It’s a smart gamble—one I hope pays off in the long run and helps further tighten what at times last season felt like a very baggy if rightfully ambitious epic kind of storytelling.