Westworld it was always a story about the violent pleasures of the human mind. From voracious and cruel greed, in the search for a total meaning to the ambition to understand reality in all its nuances. For the final chapter of its fourth season – and probably the one in history – the series saved its best reflections.
But it also showed the sensitive core of his argument, for years criticized for being cryptic and unnecessarily complex. However, the new installment of the series, which ends with a formidable insight on all its great themes, is a tribute. An exploration into the spirit of the contemporary need to answer your most sincere existential questions.
Charlotte Hale returns from the dead only to discover that she is determined to rebuild, in the future, the world she shattered with a desire to control. She did it, moreover, from the insistent hope of the disappeared Bernard for a reality that could rise above the horrors. “Our world will not survive” says the last message of the architect of what Westworld It was like a basic idea. “But in your hands, you have the decision to make amends. She will be able to decide, if the world can be rebuilt”.
A pearl in the midst of sophisticated horrors
It is then, when the greatest of the secrets of the series is discovered. Beneath the deceptive, peaceful and unreal reality is the door to a possibility of redemption. The crimson map, which always showed the ideal city of a world under the fist of the robot, hid the pearl – consciousness – of Dolores.
The last survivor of a vanished reality, she is now the focal point of the future that Hale forged with secret violence. It is Dolores, the one who embodied control, the one who lived a new infinite cycle from which she could not escape. Charlotte Hale, her scarred alter ego, used her mind as a road map to an ideal that never came to fruition.
The hope of redemption was never possible and the series makes it clear, the notion of a mind capable of unifying a society of slaves. The script crosses the argument of the four seasons to narrate how the conscience of the flagship robot of DELOS, was always a key piece. That the ideal that was sustained in the identity of the first inhabitant of Westworldwas the engine of every situation of the unthinkable future.
Dolores, the privileged experiment of a Robert Ford determined on transcendence and sublime memory, found an answer in the robot. What are we but creations of our imagination? “In the world, I only see beauty” is what Dolores has repeated throughout the history of the series. But now, the phrase takes on true meaning and power.
the labyrinth of Westworld reaches its end point
Westworld, as a premise, is shown, then, in all its power. Reality is a warped version of unattainable desires. And Bernard, who inherits from Charlotte Hale the possibility of an answer, understood it clearly. Enough to give him the last of her predictions. “You can decide what will happen in the future” insists Bernard, the most human robot of all. Hale looks at her face on the screen in one last afterimage and understands her responsibility. “The decision of the future is in your hands”.
And of course, that is in the pearl of Dolores, in the total essence of the first robot to overcome the domain, the one that went through the labyrinth with suffering. Reborn, renewed, central element of a new perception about the total identity of WestworldIt is the beginning of something else. Also, the answer for Charlotte about the failure of her world. From Bernard’s look at the infinite possibilities of The Sublime. Of the fury of William, executor of an immense creation, deformed and degraded by violence and lack of meaning.
In the end, Westworld it showed that he played with the odds of a world in which the human dream of transcendence was the true purpose. But even that perception of the target, too, turned out to be a failure. Instead, the victory of the robots in the human world was a revelation of the true need for freedom.
The cataclysm and sublimation: Westworld and the apparent world
William’s order unleashed a general slaughter. One that included humans and robots. The original villain of the series returns in all of his terrifying violence. And he does, to delve into another of the essential points of the argument in all the singular beauty of it. “I am William, the best of him, everything he was and wanted to be,” he explains to Hale. And in fact, the few survivors of the great bloody cataclysm that close the season are just ghosts.
Caleb is the ghost of the man who died twenty-three years ago, now in the skin of a sophisticated mechanism. And it is his twisted journey to self-awareness — another labyrinth of horrors — that is the most symbolic of the plot. “I’m not your father” he says to his daughter Frankie, when she understands that, finally, his journey towards the search for the essential in himself is over. “I don’t know what I am anymore, but I was able, in the end, to fulfill my goal.”
Caleb, turned into the tragedy of the world of robots duplicated and reconstructed in an endless sequence, finds peace. And that is the resignation. “You will die?” Frankie asks. “I already died, yet now, I fulfilled the greatest ambition of any father. Seeing his daughter grow up ”says the robot, who was a man, and is now nothing more than a memory.
And while Dolores rediscovers the world, Teddy also understands that it was the reflection of love. That she was never there, that she never existed. Which, in reality, was also Dolores, in the midst of multiple searches for her. “You are love, yes, but the ideal” explains the character. “I’m not here, am I?” Teddy says to Dolores. “You are my memory, that is how I brought you” she replies. The symmetry of the series then is perfect, total, moving. Because in the end, all the ghosts of old desires and violent pleasures are the fragments of something greater, anguished, fearsome. They are the images of the world. A desire, so tenacious, that it refuses to die.
For the last scenes, the peace of oblivion
“The conscious life of the planet has disappeared” says Dolores, sole survivor of the death of William’s last order. “And we exist if someone remembers us.” And it is her, again, in her blue suit that immediately refers to the first season and her search for freedom, the last memory. That of each creature that died, that of all those who suffered slavery and died to regain consciousness, without achieving it.
Robert Ford dreamed of eternity in technology and created Dolores for wonder. Bernard, the most sensitive work of westworld, in the end, he had in his hands, the answers to the great devastation. William, who loved and hated freedom from blind violence, becomes a symbol of absolute evil. Charlotte Hale gives in and gives up the fight to understand that the world is just ashes.
Y Westworld, now more akin than ever to the unfulfilled dreams of mankind, stands on beauty. One intentionally similar to the great dreams about the future that preceded it. With Dolores surrounded by a stage that immediately refers to the classic bladerunner by Ridley Scott, the message is clear. Human ambition transcends limits. And the search for redemption will be the final triumph.
A cycle begins. This time, with Dolores as a strange prophet from a nameless land. “Maybe next time we’ll achieve real freedom,” she says, and the series closes her story with the chilling feeling that it was all a delusion. A stumble in a greater illusion. A strange and corrosive satisfaction to a version of reality, still incomplete. Perhaps the most exciting moment in a premise known for its raw perception of the pain of finitude.