Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Westworld season 4, episode 1, “The Auguries”
At this point, it’s starting to feel like even the Westworld creators don’t know where the story is heading, so Lisa Joy has taken it upon himself to give us some general context clues and keep us hooked for the remainder of the fourth run, which kickstarted last night with the first episode, “The Auguries.”
There was a time when Westworld was basically the story of a bunch of robots trying to worm their way to freedom from the tyrannical grasp of their human overlords, with bits of philosophy thrown in for good measure. Now, the show has developed into such a complex and intricate web of narrative threads and character motifs that even its most diehard fans can’t quite predict what the next installment will have in store.
Luckily for us, Joy is here to give the whole thing some sensical structure. Speaking with Deadline, the executive producer explains how the breadcrumbs from season 3 will play into season four and what we can expect from the rest of the latest run from a thematic standpoint.
“It looks like after Dolores died over seven years ago that she kind of bought freedom for the humans from this massive AI, and they’ve kind of taken a mistrust to general AI,” she says. “You can see it with Caleb where he refused to work with a robot, and now he’s working with a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI is gone. The hosts that remain have clearly been up to different things. In the case of Maeve, she’s been having her Eat, Pray, Love moment alone in Alaska, but maybe some of our hosts have teamed up for more nefarious shenanigans. I think the question that will emerge this season is after a period of unrest, once you’ve kind of earned this détente, this peace, can it stay, or are humans and their kind of inheritors in the form of these hosts somehow predestined to always fall in these loops of fractiousness and fighting and division?”
Regardless of where things develop from here, one thing’s been made abundantly clear. These robots don’t seem to be able to catch a break from the rest of the world. But I guess that’s the human struggle for you, especially for these characters who have ever been so keen to break free of their blissful artificial ignorance.
The next episode of Westworld season four, “Well Enough Alone,” will premiere on HBO on July 3.