Wonderful New World: Westworld Blog

What's the story of Dolores - Arr, Christina - in the new season of "Westworld"?

Owen Rachel Wood returns in the fourth season of "Westworld" with a new character, ostensibly - Christina.

Is she really someone else, or maybe it's Dolores without even her knowing?

Is she human?

Hostess in the park?

In a simulation?

All their theories and probabilities.

Spoilers up to episode 3 of season 4

Ido Yeshayahu

11/07/2022

Monday, 11 July 2022, 16:29

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Trailer "Westworld" Season 4 (HBO)

Please note, spoilers for "Westworld" Season 4 Episode 3

For the first time in years it is evident that "Westworld" is returning to the sources.

The fourth season is enigmatic and deceptive in a way that does not prevent clues from those who want to collect them.

She again uses familiar and sweeping techniques to drop the rug under our feet, in a good section, and also in the most basic sense - she goes back to the parks and the stories that were such a significant part of her at first.

She may have been absent from the new episode, but perhaps this is an opportunity to talk about one of the most intriguing plots in the new setting: that of Christina, the daughter of Dolores' new brunette character, also played by Owen Rachel Wood.

The original Dolores was deleted at the end of the third season when Sarak (Vincent Kassel) connected it to Rehavam, the artificial intelligence supercomputer, in an attempt to find the key to "The Reactor" - the digital backup of park guests, which Delos had secretly operated for years to gather more and more information .

However, it is not really accurate to say that Dolores is dead.

She has a host of duplicates that share with her the entire history she experienced until she left the park for the real world, but in Dolores' number-one possession was important information that may be the key to what is happening to her at this point.

Now we get to know Christina.

She lives in a beautifully designed apartment with a partner named Maya (recent Oscar winner Ariana Debus, "The Story of the Suburbs," "Megiddon") in futuristic New York.

She works as a writer of sub-characters in video games on behalf of a company called "Olympiad", whose logo is suspiciously similar to that of "Delos".

Maya makes sure to persuade Christina to go out in the evening and meet guys.

Like the original Dolores, when she was in a loop, Christina is a dreamy and optimistic girl.

Like her, she paints the landscapes around her - in this case, of course, an urban landscape.

Like her she wakes up every morning in her bed the same way and tends to wear blue.

Tends to wear blue.

Owen Rachel Wood as Christina, "Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

Not everything is perfect in her life.

Her boss very much does not connect to the romantic stories that Christina tends to embroider and demands that she write more violent things.

In addition, a stranger named Peter follows her.

He claims that one of the stories she wrote described exactly his life and the life of his family.

He was mentally disturbed, lost his job and his wife and then started harassing a girl who blamed her for his misfortune, just like Christina wrote in the computer game.

He finally commits suicide - just like in the story - and does so in front of the horror-muted writer.

In interviews with Lisa Joy, the producers of the series, and with Wood herself, the two insist that Christina is not Dolores but a brand new character, and that the original Dolores is indeed dead.

But as we well know, creators and actors tend to lie about the fake death of characters, and suffice it to mention one of the "Game of Thrones" heroes who inflated his soul even though it was clear to everyone that he would surely return, and he did return even though all the craftsmen insisted he died.

So what's Christina's story?

Will her plot take place in the distant future?

Does her plot take place at all in the past, before all the events we have seen so far?

Is she in the park again or in some kind of digital simulation?

Here are some theories circulating on the net about this, and how likely they are to be true.

Westworld - Season 4 (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

Christina is a human daughter on whom Dolores was based

We already know the history of Dolores.

She was the first successful host that Robert Ford and Arnold Weber created, and her programming was the one that was replicated to create all those who came after her as well.

Could it be that Dolores was actually based on a real maiden, Christina, and that's actually what we see?

This will explain how it is that Peter scratches her with a knife and the wound remains the next day as well.

The answer is probably no.

Beyond the fact that we know that the work of the young Ford and Arnold was done around the second decade of the current millennium, i.e. in our day, what does not reconcile with the futuristic world outside Christina's window, what is happening here is clearly a continuation of things we have already seen.

First, Teddy (James Marsden) here, or someone in his character, so if you stick to this theory, it means that Teddy was also created in the image of a real person.

Second, someone left the maze on the porch of Dolores' house, which places the event after its original story with him, at the earliest (i.e. about forty years before the events of the previous season).

Third, it all happens for sure after humanity's revolt against machines.

Both the beggar on the street and Peter mention "The Tower" - the same tower that stars in the posters and trailers of the season, appears in the new opening and his paintings hang on the wall in a mental institution where Christina arrives as she tries to decipher Peter's story.

The streetlights where Christina lives are even designed similarly to it.

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The Mysterious Tower.

"Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

Tower-shaped lanterns.

"Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

Paintings of the tower in a mental institution.

"Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

Christina is a new character in a new park that looks like Dolores

Christina may not know it and is sure she's human, but she's a new park host.

Although not Dolores when it comes to memories, Christina was created in her naive character, because why not, she exists in the database.

Already in the second episode of the season it became clear that the parks had been revived with new ideas, like Chicago of the Dry Years, the place where Maeve (Tandiva Newton) and Caleb (Arun Paul) came from.

There are probably others like it, and Christina is a host in one of them - a park whose roots are already rooted in the original ideas of the films from the 70s on which the series was based: Futurwald.

The rest of Westworld's new season plot seems to hint at this direction as well, as it uses the central idea of ​​the 1976 sequel - cloning important world leaders and replacing them with robots to take over power centers.

The reality in this park may seem like a sequel to the aesthetics of the third season, but on closer inspection it can be seen that it is different from what happens in the rest of the new plots.

Christina's world has hovercraft and white automatic cars, the ones we saw in abundance last season, but in the experiences of Maeve, Caleb, William (Ed Harris) and Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), these cars seem unused - probably part of humanity's uprising against machines.

Christina's sophisticated cell phone is also different, for example, from the device that Caleb is asked to deposit before entering the park.

The technologies are not uniform.

Just as Dry Park is based on the familiar plots of Westworld, including by the way a new version of Dolores, so too the character of Christina in her world draws "inspiration" from the familiar stories.

That's why her character resonates with Dolores even beyond the same look - it's simply the old-fashioned scripted laziness of the park creators.

Just as in the past "Shogun World" and "The Raj" were duplicates of adventure "

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Is she hanging?

Ariana Debus as Maya, alongside Wood, "Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

To reflect on more old memories for us, in the first episode Maya consults with Christina about which shoes to choose - white or black.

While this is something that the hosts have nothing to do with, the choice of hat color is something that is reserved for park guests, but its use also implies to us that the likelihood that it is a park is high.

Christina's own footsteps also resonate with the Westworld meta, to the stories Ford has always sought to install, while Christina's boss, who demands much gloomier and more bloody stories from her, recalls his penchant for lead screenwriter Lee Seizmore.

The streetlights that only come on when someone passes by them - what a terrible usefulness - are an echo of "Mass," the park offices, where the neon lights come on automatically when someone passes by them.

On that occasion, Peter picks up and hands Christina the phone she dropped - a reminder of the Dolores Loop can.

Unlike Dolores, Christina seems to be a secondary character, just like the ones she writes about for the Olympics.

It has to be secondary because it is also an artificial intelligence that writes the stories that the park itself uses.

This also explains Peter - Christina has written a character of another host, full of conspiracies and crazy, and this is expressed in the fact that he, well, doubts the nature of his reality.

Accordingly, the scratch he leaves on her does not go away because Christina is a less important figure in the park and therefore not treated regularly.

Another possibility is that its loop is longer than Dolores' regular and terrifying daily adventure.

The idea that Christina is a host in the park makes a lot of sense, and yet expect a big question about it: the tower.

In the first episode Peter tells Christina that at first he thought the tower was the one that made him do the things he does, but then he realized it was her.

In the second episode the beggar on the street where she walks asked the passers-by: "Do you hear it? The song without the sound. It kills them! The noise! ​​Do you hear it? The tower, it comes from the tower!".

"No one can hear his music except me," he adds.

"From me and the birds."

Moments later, as she arrives at the building where she works, Christina sees on the ground the bodies of a host of birds.

This "song without sound" that forces people to do things, is very reminiscent of what Caleb and Maeve encounter in the new episode, the third of the season.

Hosts are able to hear the sound, humans are not.

Flies-resistant hosts and the attempt to control their minds, humans do not.

Although they are probably hosts, Peter and the beggar's description as crazy allows them to see the seams in their world and understand that there is an attempt at brain control here.

But the question remains: why would real-world mind control be part of the story in the park?

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Ignites old memories.

"Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

Christina is a new character in the simulation

This explanation is similar to the previous one, only that it is not a real space but a digital universe.

Similar to "Cradle", the computer backup of all the hosts and the park's plot lines (blown up in the second season by Dolores' gang), or like "The Sublime" / "Valley Beyond", the paradise that Ford installed for the hosts.

And also like that "reactor" that includes the information about the guests and contains their characters.

This is also a less plausible theory, for several reasons.

For starters, "Westworld" is careful to signal to us when we are in digital simulation - the screen resolution is more rectangular and includes black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, just as is happening now in Bernard's scenes, at the beginning of the third episode of the season.

Ostensibly this is not what is happening here, although we have seen before that it can change.

Since we are experiencing the events from the unreliable eyes of the hosts, it is possible that sometime the normal screen will suddenly shrink, the resolution will change and we will find that all this time we were surrounded by 1 and 0.

But even so, there are moments that make this propaganda less logical.

Leading them is the scene in the first episode where Christina encounters on her way down the street three men talking about their experience.

"It was crazy, this place is wild," and his friend tells him, "I can not believe this is your first time."

This is a conversation almost identical to the one we saw in the original Westworld in the past, in the first episodes of the series, and seemingly there is no reason for it to appear in a simulation.

Nevertheless, it is not inconceivable that this is indeed a digital space, in which even moments like these have been deliberately implanted, because the overarching goal is to make Christina wake up.

Which brings us to the next theory.

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Olded herself in Rehavam?

Dolores dying and hooked up to the machine, end of the third season of "Westworld" (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

Christina is Dolores, and she was placed in the park by Hale in an attempt to recover the information in her head

It's hard to believe that Christina is indeed a new character and not some incarnation of Dolores.

As mentioned, although the original has been deleted, there are four duplicates that share most of the memories with her: the one in the character of Hale, who has already abandoned Dolores' goal after the death of her husband and son (from Sarak's hands, and yet she also blames Dolores), and Conles, Musashi and Lawrence.

It seems that the person who runs it is interested in taking her on a path similar to Dolores's in an attempt to stimulate her, and he does so through things that will ignite her memory.

The maze, Teddy (James Marsden), the use of the name Peter, the name of Dolores' father, as the unsettled man, the choice she is asked to make between black and white (something Dolores is well aware of, since she visited "Koor" and gathered information about the guests to get them Advantage before you go out into the real world).

In William's words at the end of the second chapter, at the launch of the Gangsters Park: "We are not visiting again in the past. We are recreating it. Welcome to the Golden Age."

What Christina experiences is not only reminiscent of the wide-eyed and kind-hearted Dolores of the first season, but also of the journey she experienced on the path to enlightenment and understanding of who she is.

It was Arnold who originally sent her to find herself, an adventure she embarked on again in confusion several years later with the young William (Jimmy Simpson), and then again decades later alone, led by Ford.

And since the memory of the hosts is tangible just as if the events were happening now, so Dolores experienced them.

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Pulling strings?

Charlotte Hale (with Dolores in it), "Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

Christina's attempt to trace Peter's story is somewhat reminiscent of what happened to Dolores at the time.

Maya reveals to Christina the obituary for Peter (one of the signs that raises suspicion that Maya is hanged on behalf of someone trying to run Dolores), who says he left all his money to the Mental Rehabilitation Center.

When Christina arrives at the place, she discovers that the place closed years ago, and Peter's contribution did happen but years ago.

It's really reminiscent of the moment Dolores arrived with William at her destination, Escalante, the town with the White Church, only to find that she's all buried in the sand.

If one has to guess who is pulling the strings, it would not be unreasonable to assume that it is Hale and William, the robotic right hand man.

In the opening scene of the season William arrives at the dam where the information is backed up, and tells the cartel man that what he is looking for is there and stolen from him by someone who is already dead, which means he cannot decipher it.

This is probably the key to "Koor" / "The Sublime".

Throughout the third season everyone was sure he was in Dolores' mind, but while Sarak searched for him in her mind and deleted her by the way, he found out he was wrong.

We already know that the person with the key is Bernard, and if the theory is correct, it's probably the information Hale William is trying to get from Christina / Dolores.

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Looking for information from someone who is already dead.

William, "Westworld" Season 4 (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

Christina is the lost Dolores who is in Rehavam's digital space

At the end of the third season, Dolores was connected by cable to Rehavam and slowly deleted.

Shortly afterwards, Caleb ordered Rehavam to delete himself - but was it possible that Dolores managed to elevate herself to him before being erased and then, beaten, bruised and with a perforated memory, moved herself to another place?

Now she's on some kind of computer network, Wyatt's memory has been erased from her so she's once again as puzzling and cute as she was originally defined, and she does not know who she is.

Her subconscious created for her a world that looked quite similar to the one she left, before the machines and vending machines were scrapped, and something in herself tries to wake her up by repeating familiar patterns, ones that have proven themselves in the past.

As well as through the man she loved and recreated - Teddy.

We do know that the original Teddy is in "sublime", so if this scenario is true, he may not be with Christina in the park, protecting her from dangerous stalks and maybe even leaving the maze in front of her to wake up.

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Wakes up and looks in the mirror (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

A peek in the mirror on the way out (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

An entire scene transmitted through a mirror reflection (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

Another short moment that is conveyed through a mirror (Photo: Screenshot, HBO)

Even in the middle of the date, she goes to the bathroom and looks in the mirror (Photo: screenshot, HBO)

Another peek at the reflection (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

Through the Mirror (Photo: John Johnson / HBO)

There is another logic to this supposition, because the whole purpose of Rehavam was to predict what people would do before they did it - and that is exactly what Christina does with Peter.

It is possible that something of his artificial intelligence stuck with her when she came up to him.

Meanwhile, the network in which Dolores is located is nevertheless connected to the real world, so that despite the cleanliness and clean aesthetics in the universe in which it is located, realistic elements like the tower (assuming it is indeed realistic) still find their way inside.

All of this makes her space a kind of unrepresentative reflection of the real world, which is perhaps also why many of Christina's scenes are filmed using mirrors, instilling in us the idea that we are watching a parallel universe, through a mirror.

This is an interesting theory that ends up being a question: if Dolores is indeed alone in a digital space without anyone knowing about it, how will she be rescued and move into a physical body?

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