‘Westworld’ Delivers an Emotional, Mostly Satisfying Season 4 Finale (RECAP)

Westworld

Que Sera, Sera

Season 4 • Episode 8

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Metanoia

[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Westworld Season 4 Episode 8, “Que Sera, Sera.”]

Well, it wouldn’t be an episode of Westworld if your brain wasn’t sweating by the time the final credits roll.

“Que Sera, Sera” doesn’t answer every question posed by the previous seven episodes, but it does a good enough job to leave viewers satisfied — and hungry for more, should HBO renew the show for a fifth season. (Fingers crossed.) There are gunfights, tears, and deaths aplenty, and a beloved character from earlier seasons makes a welcome reappearance. Here’s how it happens.

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Caleb, Frankie, and Stubbs

After Frankie’s (Aurora Perrineau) shot, Team Caleb takes a pause in an alleyway. As Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) scouts out the area, he notices Caleb (Aaron Paul) twitching and reminds him that the Delos experiments never worked out, so there’s a good chance he’s not going to, either. (Caleb would have no clue about the Delos experiments, Stubbs!) For his part, Caleb doesn’t care about himself—he only cares that Frankie survives.

To treat her wound, they break into a wrecked pharmacy. There, Caleb sterilizes and stitches up his daughter’s leg, while they reminisce and sing a familiar song: “Que Sera, Sera.” While all of this is happening, Stubbs has a fatal run-in with Clementine (Angela Sarafyan), who gained permission from Hale-ores to go off on her own into the desert and live free. I wasn’t even a little bit over Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), but Stubbs is a bridge too far, show.

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Clementine then finds Frankie and Caleb, and she demands to know where the outliers are hiding. Caleb intervenes and fights the host, and eventually, Frankie’s able to shoot her in the head. They go to the docks together, but as they’re about to leave, Caleb tells his daughter he won’t go any farther. Frankie guesses he’s dying.

“Your father died a long time ago,” Caleb tells her. “Whatever I am, I’ve died before. This isn’t so bad.” He tells her he lived every parent’s dream in seeing her grow up, then they hug and say they love each other. She and Odina (Morningstar Angeline) speed away on the boat, while Caleb watches from the docks, his future uncertain at best.

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Hale-ores and The Host in Black

Everyone who guessed the Host in Black (Ed Harris) was after the Sublime was right; he wants to wipe out all of host-kind, and he’ll stop at nothing to do it. Hale-ores (Tessa Thompson), however, has a change of heart spurred by the message Bernard left on the tablet last episode. She discovers it after being brought back from the dead by her drone-hosts. Bernard tells her there’s time for “one final game,” and she decides to go after the Host in Black to stop him from wiping host-heaven clean. She shatters the floor beneath her projection of the city and pulls out a pearl; as we find out, that pearl contains Dolores, who was controlling the narratives. She puts the pearl in her purse and, after meeting Clementine and confirming The Man in Black is dead, she gets on a jet and leaves.

She and the Host in Black meet at the Hoover Dam, where he’s already set a critical failure in motion. He has yet to wipe the servers, though, so Hale-ores is able to engage him and get him to start attacking her instead of host-heaven. The duel winds up in the tunnels, where, if you’ll remember, Bernard stashed a gun last episode. Listening to Bernard’s advice to “reach with [her] left hand,” Hale-ores uses that gun to shoot the Host in Black in the head. She removes his pearl and crushes it.

Then, again listening to Bernard, she stabilizes the Sublime and uploads the “Storyteller” pearl. After that, she goes down to the water, strips off her human skin, removes her own pearl and crushes it between her metal fingers.

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Christina and Teddy

Here’s where things get really weird. So, Christina (Evan Rachel Wood) was in charge of all of the narratives in Hale-ores’ city. The people she directly interacted with, though, were all versions of herself or created by her—she made Maya (a criminally underused Ariana DeBose) because she wanted a friend, and she created Teddy (James Marsden) to help her wake up and realize the nature of her reality. She and Teddy both sense it when she’s “unplugged from the system,” and her entire world glitches and goes dark.

She has a conversation with Maya in the interim between being unplugged from Hale-ores’ world and plugged into the Sublime. Once she’s there, though, she realizes exactly where she is, and that Teddy isn’t real, either. The real Teddy is somewhere in the Sublime, but the version of him she was talking to was just another one of her constructions. They have some sweet, romantic dialogue about being each other’s cornerstones, and then Dolores (can we call her that now? Really, there’s no use in pretending) realizes what she’s been brought into the Sublime to do. She says she can construct “one final test” to discover whether humanity, which will eventually go extinct outside the Sublime, can break its cycle of violence and destruction and prove itself worthy of survival.

The physical form of that test? A version of… dun-dun-dunnnnnn… Westworld! As the episode ends, Christina transforms into Dolores in earnest, complete with her blonde hair and iconic blue dress. With “Sweetwater” playing and the hustle and bustle of the city swirling around her, she turns and smiles — and with no post-credits scenes, that’s where Season 4 ends.

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Other Observations

• I’m of two minds about this episode. On one hand, I’m satisfied with the answers we got about Christina, and the conclusion of Hale-ores’ arc was fitting. On the other, some storylines felt rushed, and certain characters didn’t get the endings I thought they deserved. Of all the deaths this season, I really only thought Bernard’s worked. He both succeeded in following his “path” to save humanity and wandered through that open door with his son.
• It was neat to see familiar hosts return in this episode, particularly Steven Ogg’s Rebus and Jonathan Tucker’s Major Craddock.
• My biggest disappointment in this episode? Maeve. Bernard made it sound like she was an integral part of his plan to save the world, but there’s no reason she, specifically, had to fight Hale-ores. She never got to use her powers or be a “weapon,” her character better served in every other Westworld finale. She got revived only to die again one episode later, without reuniting with Caleb or Clementine. In my opinion, she’s one of the show’s cornerstones, so her absence here was glaring. If HBO would choose not to renew the show for a fifth season, her shocking death in the lake being her final end would leave a bad taste in my mouth.

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• If Season 5 does happen, here’s my current “way out there” Maeve theory; her body is (presumably) still in that lake. Caleb is alive and in the city. Assuming he’d survive long enough to get to the remains of the Tower, he might fix her up much like the drone hosts did for Hale-ores. I don’t see who else would still be around to rescue her—Clementine and Bernard are both dead, and Frankie’s gone. There has to be a reason Westworld didn’t commit to definitively killing off Caleb in this episode… as they say, no body, not dead.
• STUBBS! DESERVED! BETTER! I thought he was safe after Bernard died last week, and I hate that I was wrong. Poor guy never got his pastrami sandwich.
• The cool thing about Dolores’ remembered Westworld is that almost anyone could show up. Some version of Bernard/Arnold feels like a given. While it seems both human and host William are dead, that doesn’t prevent The Man in Black—or Jimmi Simpson’s young William(!)—from appearing. Maeve could be the madam of the Mariposa again (although it likely wouldn’t be the “real” Maeve, since she probably wasn’t uploaded to the Sublime). Maybe even… Ford (Anthony Hopkins)?
• Rating: 4/5. “Que Sera, Sera” does a great job of answering the big Christina question, and it leaves the door open for a potentially game-changing Season 5. While not everything in Season 4 made perfect sense (what was Transcendence, anyway? How did Caleb resist Hale-ores?), it was still a major step up from Season 3. Nothing’s certain with the Discovery merger, but I think the show deserves to end on its own terms. Here’s hoping HBO renews it for one final round.

Westworld Season 4, all episodes now streaming, HBO Max