Some TV dramas run out of ideas. Others will not stop having them no matter how much you beg. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joys west world (Sky Atlantic) falls firmly into the latter. The towering sci-fi thriller is now in its fourth season, and if you think the show is still about a Wild West theme park where the robot cowboys and brothel ladies have gone homicidal… Well, partner, you’re in the wrong saloon.
Season three took place outside the park, in the real-life Los Angeles in the year 2052, where people were effectively “enslaved” by a supercomputer called Rehoboam, which kept people on predetermined, algorithmically chosen paths. It’s always so smart, you see – humans were no different from the theme park’s robot hosts, held in rigid holding patterns, with nothing but the illusion of freedom, their life stories pre-written.
Except humanity was freed by, from all robots, Dolores, the psychopathic farmer’s daughter played by Evan Rachel Wood, who had escaped from Westworld to take revenge on humanity. She helped destroy Rehoboam, but died in the process. Westworld offers few certainties, even death, but this was one of them. Dolores was dead, her memories erased, her soul erased.
Of course, when season four starts, Dolores is alive. Only now she’s a dripping brunette named Christina who lives in New York. And she turns out to be human. She is a mouse-like recluse who leaves her apartment to go to work, where she writes storylines and dialogues for the non-player characters in video games. Dolores was, of course, a non-player character in Westworld.
We are seven years further from the time mankind was liberated from Rehoboam. Of course nothing has changed, apart from the fact that man has to do even more manual labour. This is especially annoying for manual laborer Caleb (Aaron Paul), whom we met in series three when he gave up his manual labor to help Dolores save the world. Now he’s married, with a cute little girl, but miserable, partly because he’s convinced killer robots are after him, but mostly because he has to work by hand to earn a living.
Fortunately, he gets another excuse to win the 9 to 5 when he is recruited by Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) to help her save humanity (again). The plot of Maeve and Caleb is simple – save humanity, of course – but much more intriguing is Christina’s. The storylines she writes for the video games seem to happen in real life; somehow she inadvertently controls people’s lives.
It’s a classic, more Westworld mystery, one that makes you feel smart and stupid at the same time. That’s the beauty of the show. Maeve and Caleb will shoot some robots and blow things up, while a later installment in the series will be inspired by Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese Taoist text that muses on the essential nature of human freedom. That’s Westworld: it has its cake, it eats it and you might as well enjoy the spectacle