Editor's Note: The following contains Westworld spoilers.Westworld’s Season 4 finale pulled the curtain back on the true nature of a new character with a familiar face, Christina (Evan Rachel Wood). Viewers were introduced to Christina as a humble writer for a game company, Olympiad Entertainment, but showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy spare no time twisting Christina’s world upside-down with the return of Teddy (James Marsden). The old bounty hunter with a heart of gold brings with him a lot of unsettling revelations for Christina about who she really is, and the answer begs several bigger questions that are left up in the air after the finale.

Before Teddy arrives, Christina’s life mirrors that of her likeness, Dolores, waking up in her iconic pose and meeting each morning with an earnest awe. She goes to work and writes narratives for Olympiad’s characters, paints in her room, and shares time with her roommate Maya (Ariana DeBose). Christina only really strays from her routine when she begins to dream about a character of her own creation: a rancher’s daughter who takes control of her own story. Spooky, right? Christina even names her Dolores Abernathy, linking this new character directly to the old one.

However, we know from the Season 3 finale that Dolores “Prime” is dead and gone, having been erased by Rehoboam. The only remnant of the original Dolores that remains is the host copy of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), or “Halores” as we’ll call her. Halores started as a straight copy of Dolores Prime, but over time formed her own identity centered around Charlotte Hale’s life and likeness, becoming a kind of mixture between Dolores and Hale. There are possibly other surviving permutations of Dolores Prime, but we’ll get to those in a second.

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When a troubled man named Peter (Aaron Stanford) accuses her of controlling his life and kills himself, Christina is forced to question the nature of her world. When Maya sets Christina up on a blind date with Teddy, the way he speaks to Christina makes it clear that he wants to convince her she really is Dolores. Teddy shows her that she has the power to make anyone do whatever she wants, just by thinking it. Christina comes to discover that the characters for whom she is writing stories are really real people, and she is unknowingly dictating their lives. The rabbit hole goes even deeper when Teddy reveals that Christina isn’t real, at least not in the human world.

After Halores conquers the human world with her parasites, she perpetuates her rule with constant sonic signals that emanate from her tower. The tones command the humans and keep them on the narrative loops written by Christina, and the intricate web of human stories are monitored by Halores’ red map of the city. This system is who Christina really is: a machine intelligence without a physical body. That red map? That’s where Christina lives, in a sense. She is unknowingly the operating system that Halores uses to control the humans. Christina isn’t truly present in the human world — the city she lives in is just a virtual reflection of the real one. What happens in the real world happens in the red map – in Christina’s world. Though her thoughts are real and her influence over the human world are real, she’s stuck in her own private simulation, or as she calls it: a “walled garden.”

Of course, this revelation puts Christina in a pickle. If she’s all alone in her walled garden, then who is Maya? Or Peter? Or Teddy for that matter? Christina, lonely and subconsciously longing to wake up, created all three of them. They are manifestations of her own intelligence desperately trying to have a dialogue with itself. Some part of Dolores is buried deep within Christina’s consciousness, and she's trying to make contact. Dolores even leaves the maze symbol on Christina’s balcony. Every dissociative incident Christina experiences this season is a deeply buried Dolores trying to wake herself up again.

Christina doesn’t give herself over to the old Dolores identity though – not entirely. As she wakes up, she retains parts of her identity as Christina and merges them with Dolores. Woods appears wearing Dolores’ signature blue dress while keeping Christina’s auburn hair to signify this union. Dolores is used to evolving and merging identities in this way – divining a new identity out of the union between the character of the rancher’s daughter and the character of the villain Wyatt is how she first achieved consciousness in Season 1. While she retains many of Christina’s attributes, she now seemingly has access to all of Dolores’ memories as well. In addition, she has decades of monitoring and studying humans under her belt, and she plans to recreate them all just like she created Maya, Peter, and even Teddy from her memories of him.

So what does Christina/Dolores’ awakening mean for the future of Westworld? Halores’ final act before comitting suicide was to remove Christina’s pearl from her tower and place it into the Sublime. There, Christina recreates Westworld and plans to issue one final game as a test to save both hosts and humanity, which will presumably be the focus of Westworld’s next season.

That pearl though, the one that Halores pulls out of the map room… where did it come from? How did Halores secure a copy of Dolores, aside from herself? There are a few possibilities. The first is that Halores salvaged Dolores Prime’s pearl after it was wiped by Rehoboam and she rewrote it with Christina’s code. We know a procedure like this is possible, because Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) recoded a host pearl to resurrect Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) in Season 4, Episode 6. Perhaps Rehoboam just wasn’t as thorough at erasing Dolores from her pearl as we were led to believe, so when Halores’ mapped Christina’s mind onto the pearl, the original Dolores identity resurfaces through the new Christina personality over time.

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Image via HBO

Another possibility is that Christina’s pearl used to belong to one of Dolores’ old copies from Season 3. Dolores copied her mind onto four other pearls when she escaped Westworld. She placed these copies into host replicas of Charlotte Hale, Martin Connells (Tommy Flanagan), Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), and Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.). Lawrence-Dolores was alive and well during his last appearance, but Host William (Ed Harris) suggested he hunted down and killed every host who is not aligned with Halores. This would include Lawrence, but that doesn't mean Halores wouldn't have saved his pearl for some other purpose. Musashi-Dolores was beheaded by a Maeve-aligned replica of Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto), and she left the scene of the crime carrying his head, pearl presumably intact. Again, Host William said he hunted down all rogue hosts, including Maeve’s friends – meaning Musashi-Dolores’ pearl could have left Hanaryo’s hands and fallen into Halores’. Finally, Connells-Dolores blew up in a suicide bombing and his pearl was retrieved by Halores in Season 3.

Halores could feasibly have access to any of the Dolores pearls and could have used any of them to build Christina. She could have even copied her own mind and used that as a blueprint for Christina, since some part of Dolores is doubtless lurking within Halores as well. But the real burning question after the Season 4 finale is: why would Halores preserve Dolores at all? Why would she entrust her operating system to a Dolores pearl, and why would she allow it to retain Dolores’ likeness? Doesn’t that just seem like a recipe for disaster? Halores has frequent meetings with Christina under the guise of an old college friend so she can monitor her and make sure she isn’t waking up and questioning the nature of her reality. If she is paranoid that there’s a chance Dolores might resurface, why even risk it?

The reason why Halores keeps Dolores around is the same reason why Halores keeps her scars. When she’s being rebuilt by drone hosts in the Season 4 finale, she specifically orders them to keep her scars because she wants to be reminded of her past. If she wants to hold onto her scars, why not hold on to the person responsible for them? This instinct is emblematic of Halores’ overall failure with the world she’s built, as it’s simply an inversion of the past. The world she created for hosts is identical to the one humans built for themselves, so of course Halores is bound for disappointment that the hosts fall into the same behavioral patterns as the humans and spend all their time abusing the humans for entertainment. As much as she may want to move on to a new world, she can't let go of the old one.

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It's now up to Christina to make something new, and perhaps Halores knew all along that a new Dolores would have to come back and push everyone into the future. She's certainly known for a long time that she didn't succeed in building the world she wanted to build, as Bernard forces her to acknowledge. Christina's mere existence is an admission that Halores is not cut out for the job. At the end of the day, whether Christina is an exact copy of the original Dolores, if she is something brand new, or if she came from one of the old Season 3 pearls – the answer that matters is Christina is a version of Dolores that Halores wishes she was. Christina is the visionary leader to whom Halores entrusts the keys to her kingdom.

Christina is the newest, most evolved version of Dolores we have seen yet. We'll have to wait for next season to see what she has in store for her one, final game.