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"Westworld" season 4 episode 8: As long as the last person who remembers you lives

The fourth season of "Westworld" was the absolute embodiment of the dichotomy between grotesque violence and awkward villains, and emotion and beauty.

Plus: What was Bernard's plan?

And what exactly is the story with Dolores?

Everything you need to understand in the last episode of the season

Ido Isaiah

08/15/2022

Monday, August 15, 2022, 19:33 Updated: 19:45

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Promo "Westworld" season 4 episode 8 - the end of the fourth season (HBO)

"Westworld" is a series of reactions.

The first season is still one of the most perfect creations made on television in the last decade, and since it stands on its own, it is something that even the deterioration that followed cannot detract from it.

The problem started already in the second season.

The creators of the series, the couple Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, did not like that the Internet mobilized and guessed all the twists already after the second episode.

Therefore, that season simply avoided providing viewers with clues to help them decipher what was going on.

The plot was fragmented, holed, unnecessarily convoluted, devoid of momentum and logic, one that consciously disrupts itself just like Bernard did when he decided to scramble his memories.

The reviews - both from fans of the series and critics - did not fall on deaf ears.

Nolan and Joy promised a much straight third season, without trying to sway the viewers.

They did do this, but in doing so they also removed an essential component of the DNA of "Westworld". Not only that for the first time we left the familiar and western scenes of the park into the real world, but also the unique layers of the series did not continue, turning it into something else. This season was very lacking in common sense and was endowed with bad writing of unreasonable behavior, which reached a low point in its last episodes.

Accordingly, fans and critics again did not spare their displeasure.

I myself decided after the third season to stop with the weekly column dedicated to "Westworld".

The series has proven time and time again that there is no real justification for delving into it, and that the first season was lightning in a bottle that its creators will probably never recreate again.

This will also be evidenced by the abandonment of the viewers - its ratings fade from season to season.

It would have been perfect if she had strived for an ending, but the fact that the creators were talking at the time about ideas for six seasons took all the wind out of the sails.

Put it down already.

The Man in Black, the end of the fourth season of "Westworld" (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

Even in this case it seems that the creators of the series listened to the grievances, and the result was the best season since the first.

: Christina's story was enigmatic and exciting and provided some subtle and clever climaxes, including in the last episode, when Teddy was revealed to be a figment of Christina's imagination/memory, a cover for the original Dolores.

The intersecting journeys of Bernard, Maeve, Caleb and Frankie were very grounded and human, such essential elements in a futuristic and sometimes crude series like this one.

But even so, at this point the legacy of "Westworld" is filled with so many problematic decisions that they cling to the plot and tarnish it even as it improves.

The series is riddled with illogical behaviors and moves, digs into so many exhausting entanglements, and the fact that almost no one actually dies erodes a lot of its emotional power.

She also likes a lot, way too much, grotesque violence.

If humanity had to go to hell to advance the plot, there are so many interesting ways to do it, ones that might say something about the world we live in, but "Westworld" chooses the path with the least rest of spirit.

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An invention of Dolores.

Maya, the end of the fourth season of "Westworld" (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

William's last move, to turn the humans - and also the hosts, as it becomes clear in the last episode with the guest appearance of Rebus, who we haven't seen since the beginning of the second season - against each other for a fight to the death, is the infantile clinging of the creators of the series to shock for the sake of shock.

Sickening and stupid murderous spectacles are not a new thing in "Westworld", beyond the violence rooted in its basic idea.

In the second season, for example, the Indians in the park diverted the park's railroad to the west, towards "the valley beyond", and did so while nailing the bodies of hosts to the track.

Pointlessness and stupid logic of a child who abuses insects for his pleasure.

That's why even in its good, smart and exciting moments, there is always - that is, from the second season onward - in "Westworld" a side that is not just unsuccessful but downright embarrassing.

The fourth season was the absolute embodiment of this dichotomy - on one side Hale, William and their doers, and on the other side everything else.

As mentioned, the latter are the ones who saved and continue to save the fourth season even at the end;

Even if in the end they all inflated their digital souls except Christina, who finally turns out, as one might expect, to be the heroine we knew in the blue dress.

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All in the name of the mission.

Bernard, "Westworld" season 4 (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

What was Bernard's plan?

At the beginning of the third episode of the season, we saw what began at the end of the previous season: Bernard entered the "Sublime" to figure out how to save humanity and the hosts.

As Akichita, the Indian chief we last saw at the end of the second season, explained to him, in "Sublime" each of the hosts can create his own paradise, and each year there is like a thousand years in the outside world.

They can also build for themselves a replica of the world in all its glory as they remember it - and as robots with a computer as a brain they of course remember a lot.

That's what Bernard did.

In "Neshgav" he created a replica of the outside world and used it to run simulations that would allow him to save the existence of his own kind and of humans.

Counting the world outside, while Stubbs is waiting for him, Bernard did this for 23 years, i.e.: he spent 23 thousand years on the subject until he finally managed to find one possibility by which he would be able to save the total existence.

Everything we've seen him do this season, marginal as it may have been, was done as part of this mission.

That's why he's friends with Frankie and her colleagues, duplicating them (in the sixth episode he showed Frankie how the mirrors in the park scan the minds of the guests and thus allow them to create duplicates, which the Hats did decades before. Shortly after that she told her friends that Bernard duplicated them and he didn't deny it) , dug Maeve out of her grave for her help, which despite her short lifespan was critical to his plan.

Finally he also sacrificed her, Stubbs - who does find his death, for the first time in four seasons - and himself.

As Bernard was the only one with the key to the Sublime, before his death he also opened it so that Hale could move there Dolores' control unit (the gem in the head of every host), which until now had been housed in the tower that controlled the humans in the city - and probably beyond it as well.

Christina, a variation on the name of the Christian Messiah, is the one who will redeem humanity and robots alike.

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On the way to the heart of the labyrinth.

Christina and Teddy, the end of the fourth season of "Westworld" (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

What happened to Dolores?

At the end of the third season, the original Dolores was wiped out by Sarak, which effectively killed her.

Allegedly, because almost every death in this series is alleged.

Hale, who was herself a clone of Dolores made after she left the park at the end of season two, took Dolores' gem and buried it in a tower with which she controlled the hordes of humans.

Dolores has become Cristina, the spirit in the machine, the one who outlines the actions of all humans and is not actually there with them in her body.

Since Hale knows Dolores and her quirk well - again, they're the same entity in the original - she checked on her from time to time, posing as her college friend to make sure everything was in order.

Everything was not right.

Unbeknownst to you, Christina somehow managed to restore Dolores's erased memories, and even resurrect her old love - Teddy.

She created a character environment for various reasons with one goal: to arouse herself.

Some of them are significant to her life while others are secondary or even extraneous (one can assume that these were the three men from the first episode of the season who sounded like they were in Westworld).

Maya, her roommate and friend, presented her with familiar ideas and dilemmas - black or white shoes?

- and planted hints about what Christina is involved in, like the dream she told about the flies and her dead family.

Peter, the man who followed Christina and attacked her on the pretext that she ruined his life, was a critical step in uncovering the truth about her actions.

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The most exciting.

Christina/Dolores, the end of the fourth season of "Westworld" (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

As I recall, the story Christina came up with for her "game" applies exactly to Peter.

His wife left him, he was fired from his job and eventually committed suicide.

Unlike Maya, Peter was a real person, except that he existed long before that.

We know this because Maya read Christina the obituary for him and told her that she donated money after his death to a center for the mentally challenged.

In her attempts to find answers, Christina drove to the place only to find out that the institution is no longer active, and that the plaque honoring Peter's contribution is at least a few years old.

I mean, Peter was a real person in the past, Christina did map out his life in her stories just like she did the rest of the humans, but now she resurrected him from her memory to confront herself and wake up.

And she succeeded.

Dolores regains herself to the sounds of another adaptation by series composer Ramin Javadi of a Radiohead song, this time "Pyramid Song", in which the narrator takes his life and washes away peacefully, all his loved ones are there with him, all his past and future, and there is no fear or doubt.

We know Dolores is weak on all of New York, but Hale was talking about cities, not just one city, that are under the Tower's control.

This implies that Dolores's intimate acquaintance with humanity also extends to other places in the world, and it's a shame they didn't expand a little on this topic, perhaps because it's too difficult to explain.

What does Dolores' presence look like outside the United States?

Will everyone live in cities in the future?

Are there no more remote settlements where electricity and the Internet, and therefore also the influence of the tower, do not reach them?

Either way, William's last act applies to all enslaved humans worldwide, so the tower's influence certainly applies to all but those unusual enclaves that Frankie is a part of.

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Essential humanity.

Caleb and Frankie, the end of the fourth season of "Westworld" (Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO)

What next?

HBO has not yet ordered a fifth season of "Westworld", but the creators are clearly building on one, and perhaps - hopefully - also planning it as a sequel.

As Dolores says this time: "one last game".

A phrase that was already said by Robert Ford in the second season, then also by William and Bernard in the previous episode, but this time sounds like a general statement of intentions.

Despite the exceptions, Dolores points out that intelligent life on Earth is expected to become extinct soon, a matter of years.

Just like Rehoboam predicted in the previous season.

No more humans, no more hosts.

Maeve and Bernard already died in the previous episode, this time it was Stubbs, Clementine, William and Hale's turn.

Although they are all computers at the core, none of them bothers to take care of backup.

But one is not required, not really.

The last chapter clearly reminds us: hosts can create other hosts by duplicating their own code.

Hale tells William that she created him from her own programming, and as mentioned she herself was created as Dolores posing as the human Hale.

Bernard was also created with the help of Dolores as a kind of duplicate of Arnold, Ford's partner in establishing Westworld and the hosts.

She did it in simulation, sanding it down and making it precise using her memories of the real man.

This is exactly what she plans to do this time as well, only on a scale of millions.

You only live as long as the last person who remembers you, as Akichita once said, as Dolores once said when she brought Bernard back at the end of season two, and as she says now again.

And thank God, she remembers even when all her memory is erased.

In "Neshgav" she creates her own world, similar to the artificial park where she was born, and she can bring back every person and every robot she has ever known, start the story from the beginning.

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What are the chances that Dolores will remember him too?

Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Robert Ford, "Westworld" (Photo: Public Relations)

Does this mean that we will get to see again a bunch of characters that were once and are no longer, such as those played by Anthony Hopkins (Ford) and Jimmy Simpson (Young William)?

Is Bernard's dramatic death, which was so final in appearance, actually neither dramatic nor final at all?

This is the acute problem with the idea at the end of the fourth season, and in "Westworld" in general: if everyone comes back then all the meaning of their departure is emptied.

And if they don't come back - why don't they come back?

In any case, when the time comes, after you finish the job, Dolores and the rest of her creatures will be able to exit the Sublime - a possibility that Hale had hinted at this time in her conversation with William - and somehow create new bodies for them to move into.

In this case it will not be about human consciousnesses that will reject the artificial body - as happened in the past with James Delos and in the current season with Caleb - but in copied versions, like Bernard who was largely Arnold and like William the host created to step into the real William's shoes.

As such, the question arises: how does Dolores actually save humanity?

What makes her creatures human?

How are they different from the above two or from the many copies presented this season?

The real William is still expected to somehow gain a resurrection.

As you remember, the second season ended with a scene that takes place in the distant future, and showed William arriving at the desolate and dusty "reactor", at the end of his journey through the park during which he murdered his daughter, Emily.

While there, he meets her character and discovers that she is trying to find "loyalty" in him - that is, to transfer his human consciousness to a host body, exactly what Hale tried to do with Caleb throughout the current season.

So that despite the death of the human, and despite the death of his robotic counterpart, the man in black has not yet said the last word, and it is such a shame that it is so.

At the same time, in case there is a fifth season, it will be intriguing to see Dolores' plan.

In a series that deals with so many bluffs, Return to Westworld is another one, a particularly big one.

This time, when Dolores is more mature and experienced, and more importantly - knows a greater variety of people besides the rich bastards who would come to the park to abuse her and her friends - everything could be different.

There is something very comforting in her words from the first episode last season, when she asked to write a story about a girl looking for meaning: "And when she finds the thing she's looking for, everything will make sense. I want a story with a happy ending."

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