after last week awesome and mind blowing episode, Western world I could have taken it easy this week. But after his Lackluster third season, the show has returned to its heady, thoughtful sci-fi roots, and clearly has no intention of stopping and retiring. While tonight’s episode isn’t as exciting as last week’s, it’s enough because it focuses on the biggest mystery of the season :what the hell is happening with Christina?
An immediate warning to anyone reading these summaries without seeing the episode: “Zhuangzi” is not completely explains What the hell is going on with Christina™, but does reveal that the nature of her reality, as many have guessed, is not strictly real. Wwe’ll get to that momentarily, bBecause she’s not the only one to have the unnerving revelation that what they perceived as their reality isn’t strictly real either.
Basically, everyone in “Zhuangzi” is having an existential crisis and I love it. That starts with Hale (aka the Dolores Core in its most twisted and human-hating form), who discovers the world she made, the world she controls, where she is most either less omniscient and omnipotent, it is also boring. She can make 99 percent of the humans she infects do her bidding and dance until they fall off, form a chair for her to sit on, or play the piano until her fingers literally start to fall apart. But you can only do that for so long before she loses her shine, and Hale has been running things for 23 years (barring additional shenanigans). Western world throw later).
Also, Hale’s new world hasn’t worked out exactly as she’d hoped. Her plan was to create more Hosts and send them out into the world to live with the goal that they would then decide to leave their bodies behind and “ascend” to…something. But it turns out that most Hosts prefer to stay in the real world, for lack of a better term. They are content to live their lives. It probably doesn’t hurt that Hale, in a very impressive act of revenge, has turned an entire city into a Westworld-style park for the Hosts to play in. Humans are even programmed into predetermined loops, set paths that repeat every day, just as the Hosts had been. Now, they are the ones who can do what they want with their former oppressors… within a certain number of reasons.
But Hale’s utopia/dystopia has a bigger and more dangerous problem. The outliers, humans who suddenly become immune to Hale’s sticky fly-based mind control, show up from time to time, see the Tower, realize they’ve been living in a false reality that no one else perceives, and have one. of those existential problems. crisis I mentioned earlier. Hale has traditionally sent a variety of Hosts to be shot for sport, but now Hosts who talk to these Outliers end up killing themselves days later. So when a new one shows up, Hale sends his henchman William, aka the Host-in-Black to remove them.
Unfortunately, William has been having his own existential crisis. The episode opens with him having dinner with two humans who have no idea what they’re up against, especially since William has ordered them to believe they’re all old friends. When one of the guests starts talking about how he got a little help from his rich family but got to the top thanks to his own hard work, William calls him to believe in a false reality. And then William explains that the “reality” of his dinner is fake, because these “old friends” don’t even know his name. And on top of that, their lives are fake, as they don’t have free will thanks to Hale.
It seems to be occurring to William that nothing is real and that he may not have free will himself. He (and most of the other running Hosts) were created by Hale based on his code; they are acting and feeling like Hale has essentially told them to. William’s discomfort grows as over the years, he becomes increasingly disappointed in his main female henchman. She asks him to find a new outlier that has appeared and not screw it up by listening to the woman.
William fucks it up and listens to the woman talk about the strange peace that comes after finally discovering that the world is a lie. Before she can shoot him, J and Stubbs, who have led a small group of rebels into the city to find and rescue the Atypical: shoot him, and they and the other rebels abscond safely with her. The bullets don’t bother William, but the woman’s words do, to the point where she goes to have an unsatisfying chat with the other William, aka the trapped version which may or may not be a host.
Comparatively, Christina’s existential crisis is more of a positive experience. After a big date night with Teddy, who is actually called Teddy, she sneaks out of work to meet him at a dock. where reveals “this world is a lie, a story.” But it’s a story that Christina can control, as she finds out when Teddy tells her to “rewrite” the people she sees, changing her emotions, creating encounters and more: “In this world, you are a god.” Unfortunately, the the lunch date he’s going to meet after talking to teddy is also a lie“It’s Hale, posing as Christina’s best friend.
Hale talks a lot about the sinister stating that he knows what Christina has been up to, but Christina uses her new power to cause a distraction and leave. When she returns to work, her boss calls her aside and she too begins to issue less and less subtle threats, but she Christina rewrites her story, fires him and discovers a door that she hadn’t been there. before. Inside, there is a computerized map of the city, which is very reminiscent of the map the Delos operators had from Westworld. When Christina asks her to show her the game, she just shows the map again. And when she asks for which inhabitants she had written the narratives, it turns out that it is everybody from them. Christina believed that her job was to write stories for non-player characters in a video game. Turns out most of that is true. She is creating the origins, personalities, and loops for the Hale-controlled humans of the city, who are worthless and meaningless NPCs compared to the Hosts. Christina has always been working on a game. It’s just not a video game.
before when Christina met with Teddy, she finally saw the Human Control Tower for the first time. “Who did this to me?” she asks. “You did,” he replies, which would be a great answer if I weren’t 99 percent sure he was referring to the version of Dolores inside Hale. I can’t imagine a scenario where the original Dolores—the Host who supposedly had his memory permanently erased and thus “died” in season three—had a sort of modified version of herself set to create NPCs in Hale’s world. But I can very much imagine Hale, who hated Dolores, making her a version of her who would unknowingly help Hale enslave humanity.
I think the biggest question is this: IIs this Christina in the real world or is she in a simulation of the real world that Hale is using to run the real world? as in, is Christina essentially a program that gives real-humans of the world their marching orders? Maybe I’m overthinking it, but his ability to control people with his mind, unlike Hale and William who give verbal commands, strikes me as a bit more fantastical than even fly-mind-control parasite technology. goo you can remove by hand. Also, if she is a sim’s goddess, she might have subconsciously created Teddy as one of her stories; someone would have to create a new Teddy Host in the real world, and there’s no obvious culprit for that (yet).
best question 😀Does it matter if Christina is in The real world or a simulation? What is the difference between the two if Christina is more or less in charge of both? What is really changing when these humans are presented with a false reality if Have your own misperceptions already skewed your view of reality? Is the end result really any different if a sentient robot is dictating what you say, what you do, and how you feel?eitherOr if your genes, your biology and your past experiences are dictating? Who is in control? Is there a true reality, or is it just a perception?
Western world He doesn’t have the answers, obviously. But I’m really excited that you’re asking the questions.
Assorted reflections:
- Hosts can “use, not waste” humans in the “game”. I don’t think it’s because the Hosts have a higher morality than the monstrous humans that were invited as Westworld, but because once they kill a human, they can’t be rebuilt.
- So my guess is that the machine Hale has been keeping Maybe-William in has been keeping him alive and keeping him from aging for the last 23 years. Or is it just an obvious sign that he is also a Host? I don’t think so Western world makes it obvious like that. It is notable that Maybe-William says “the jury is still out on that” when she is asked about her status.
- When Christina leaves for work, she starts writing the same damn narrative about Dolores’ life in Westworld without realizing that she’s repeating herself. I think she might be in a loop of her own, but if she is, when did she write the stories for all the people in town?
- She searches for two specific people in the town/game: Charlotte Hale and Dolores Abernathy, neither of whom can be found. I’m racking my brain trying to remember if Christina has been told that name before, and I don’t think she has. Presumably, she has given the name to the girl in the rural narrative setting that she continues to write?
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