Westworld has long struggled to stick the landing. More often than not, the show has gotten lost in its own mythology, trying to one-up reveals in a battle with its very own fans that results in the season feeling disjointed, if not altogether a waste of time (looking at you Season 3). The fourth season of the HBO sci-fi series isn’t immune to the mistakes of its past seasons, but the series is inarguably the strongest Westworld season since its debut. With Season 4’s finale officially out, we have much to dive into from the Armageddon that was Season 4, Episode 8 to Dolores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) new world.
When Season 4 kicked off, we were quickly made aware that the end is near for all human life thanks to Bernard's (Jeffrey Wright) journey into the Sublime. For those who may not know, the Sublime is essentially a digital heaven for all the hosts created by Ford (Anthony Hopkins) where many hosts escaped to during the events of Season 2. It’s also important to remember that halfway through Season 4, we learned that Hale (Tessa Thompson) had succeeded in controlling humans through the Olympiad Tower.
The finale sees host William essentially become the Man in Black again, internally becoming the very man he was fashioned in the image of. His ideology, as we learn towards the end of the season, is just as nihilistic as the human he replaced. Except perhaps with even less regard for human life. William uses the tower to transmit signals that turn the humans against each other, resulting in a bloody brawl that seeks to end all human life once and for all. This is William’s playground, just as Westworld once was, with the carnage and violence making him feel whole.
However, his triumph over humanity’s imminent end is cut short by an upgraded Hale’s attack on him. Hale was rescued by some of her worker hosts, who rebuild her into a stronger body. When Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Bernard visited the reservoir where the gate to The Sublime exists, we saw him hide a gun in the pipes. Bernard’s omnipotence has not been vital to the season so far, but this is a great way to highlight how ahead he is of everyone else and how aware he is of the end. It is he, who gets to Hale (through prerecorded videos) and manages to break through to her and help her end William’s reign of terror. However, after killing William, Hale also decides to terminate herself and brings Dolores’ pearl to the dam where she uploads her to the Sublime, leaving Dolores’ world as the only sustainable one left.
Caleb (Aaron Paul) finally gets to be with his daughter, even if their time is cut short by the world ending and Frankie (Aurora Perrineau) soon leaves her father to die while she goes to try and survive with the last remaining humans. The season finale also sees the end of the road for Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) who gets killed by Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) on her own quest for freedom. But it’s not exactly clear why the showrunners made this decision given that it's made explicitly clear that all the hosts and humans left alive by the end of Season 4 are all running on borrowed time and unlikely to survive.
Christina realizes that the world she lived in, was completely of her own creation and a simulation to make her realize who she was and that Teddy (James Marsden) and Maya (Ariana DeBose) both served to wake her up to her identity as Dolores. This explains why there was so much imagery present in the simulation that was reminiscent of Sweetwater, such as her purse having the same pattern as the player piano scroll from Season 1, or the Tower being surrounded by objects that made it look like it was the maze. The reason Christina was able to control everyone in her world and was in charge of their fates was because she was attached to Dolores’ pearl where there was endless data on humans and hosts.
In the end, Hale sends Dolores through the Sublime to test if humanity and hosts can truly live, one last time. Dolores, with her knowledge of humans, thanks to being plugged into the all-knowing supercomputer Rehoboam, as well as having retrieved all the host data from Delos, returns to restart life as we know it. This is where we end the season, with Dolores walking off the train and back to Sweetwater where everything started. It is thus possible that we will once again see characters like Teddy and Maeve return to the fold since the series has essentially done a soft reboot.
There’s no telling how much of the real world will be incorporated into the real world and what role if any, the humans will play in this. With Frankie and the remaining human survivors (dubbed The Outliers) set to only live a few years, their existence in the larger narrative of the show feels pointless. But Clementine’s abrupt end in the series makes it unlikely that the show will just do away with its final humans. As for what we’ll see in the park, the series has opened a door for itself to just about bring anyone Dolores has interacted with back, from her father to Ford himself. The stakes, that Dolores mentions in the finale, are survival or extinction but how exactly the final stage of the host's journey (and the series itself) will play out remains a mystery. We also don’t have any clear idea of what the Sublime is like other than it being an idyllic location for hosts to migrate to, and just what Dolores decides to do with the sentient life she is in charge of, will become clear next season.
That said, a Season 5 announcement is still pending. The ending, with Dolores now in charge of the hosts she rebelled with and the humans who once controlled her, feels fitting and could very well serve as a series end if the HBO show doesn’t get picked up for a fifth season.