Co-creator of “Westworld,” Lisa Joy, Talks About Who’s Really Dead, Tonight’s Season 4 Finale Host Revolution, and Season 5 – Crew Call Podcast

The park is very far away from us. Do you recall the western town from the first season? After a brawl between hosts and guests and further speculation about who is still alive and who has entered the virtual Valley of the Beyond, HBO’s Westworld’s fourth season came to an end tonight. Tonight’s special Crew Call features a conversation with Lisa Joy, a co-creator of Westworld, to figure it all out.

 

Season 4 was set seven years after season 3’s revolution where we saw Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), Caleb (Aaron Paul) and a drained Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) take out the humungous, predictive supercomputer Rehoboam. With host and human bodies scattered everywhere in last Sunday’s and tonight’s episodes, there was more revolution.

 

“Humans and hosts, they’re basically going to destroy themselves,” declares Joys. The end of life as we know it on Earth.

Megalomaniac host According to Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) advice, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) sealed up one of the remaining host pearls we are aware of, Dolores/ Christina’s, at Hoover Dam and threw it into the Valley of Beyond. The Valley of the Beyond is comparable to a host’s heaven. The Sublime is another name for it. Charlotte also smashed William/Man in Black’s pearl and (Ed Harris). They failed to make it to host paradise as we know it, though.

 

Now what? At the conclusion of tonight’s episode, Dolores/Christina (Evan Rachel Wood) declares, “Sentient life on Earth has ceased, but some of it might be preserved…in my world.”

 

There is yet time for one final game, one with great risk and reward. Dolores/Christina says, “This game concludes where it began, in an environment that acts like a maze and puts our character to the test. That exposes the person we are meant to be. She’s back at the Westworld Western Town Park, as we can see.

 

Is Westworld coming to a close now? Was AI’s abuse of power always a self-reinforcing cycle? Joy informs us today that Jonathan Nolan, her husband and co-creator, and they have not yet heard whether season five will be renewed. However, she stated that she and Jonah (Nolan) “have always had an endgame in mind that we want to attain” at the beginning of the season. We haven’t quite arrived there yet.

 

Here is a summary of how several characters fared tonight:

Dolores/Christina (and Teddy). Teddy assisted Christina in realizing she was Dolores’ spirit and in seeing the light. Christina suddenly realizes she is a “program running everything behind the scenes” and has an epiphany. James Marsden’s Teddy tells the audience, “Your thoughts are genuine…and the impact you may have on the world is true.” When Christina discovers the series’ recognizable maze emblem, her memory is stirred. “It was me, I did it,” Christina explains in reference to the outside world. It wasn’t made by Hale. There must have been some part of me looking. In order to aid Christina in making sense of herself, she also created her roommate Maya (Ariana DeBose). Teddy turns glittering after Charlotte posts Dolores’ pearl to Valley of the Beyond, and Christina then awakens from a dream to find herself in the prairie. Dolores says to Christina, “I’m here to tell you the reality about what we are; we’re reflections of the people who produced us. Teddy “disappeared” and turned sparkly, but Christina/Dolores is convinced that he is still alive and “somewhere in the sublime.” The final scene of the episode shows Dolores leaving what appears to be a sped-up replica of Times Square, which soon vanishes and turns back into the Westworld western park. Christina, those hosts are safe, Dolores is safe, and the Valley of the Beyond is walled off from the outside world, according to Joy.

 

As required, Joy also states that Dolores is “in the Valley Beyond.” She is therefore alive in the sense of her pearl, and her kind of CPU has been uploaded into the location where all the other hosts have disappeared. Does she actually have a body? No, and it hasn’t been there the entire season. She was essentially in a walled garden, but that walled garden has now been transported to a sort of digital infinity where, presumably, she may create any universe she desires.

 

William and Charlotte Hale — Are they deceased? I mean, really? There must be a hidden drawer full of William and Charlotte’s pearls. At the beginning of the episode, a drone host saves Charlotte’s dead body and brings her back to life (she was killed last Sunday). I want to remember my past, so makes me stronger and leaves my scars. Protect my face. I want William to know that I killed him when I find him, Charlotte says as she is being rebuilt by the drone hosts. She’s hellbent to get the guy, William, who she blames for making “everyone as insane as himself”. She discovers an iPad with a note from Bernard on it. “If you’re reading this, Maeve and I are no longer here. Before shortly, every host will be gone. The question is, “What happens next, since this isn’t the world you desired, Charlotte?

 

The Man in Black thinks he has changed, even though he is no longer the same person when William and Charlotte confront him later at the Hoover Dam. Charlotte holds the same belief that she has evolved, and she is actually just as resistant to being stabbed with a large knife as The Terminator is. You’re just as f***ed up as our founders, argues Williams, because you granted hosts carte blanche to kill and hunt people. I’m going to start from scratch. “Is that your ultimate goal? Hale responds, “Extinction?” She finds William, as we described above, murders him, and then throws Christina’s pearl—Dolores’ pearl—into the sublime—the Valley of the Beyond. After the mission, she exhales, sits down close to the Hoover Dam, opens her skull, pulls out her pearl, and crushes it. “How does a host die? But if you actually crush your CPU in that manner, there is, in a sense, where the host’s soul dwells. Thus, Joy informs us on Crew Call, “No more Hale.

 

The headshot that killed Clementine Pennyfeather (Angela Sarafyan) was fired by Caleb’s daughter C (Aurora Perrineau). She was interested in finding the whereabouts of the other Caleb and C outliers who had gone off the grid.

 

The two of them travel to a boat where C departs with her girlfriend. Caleb, though, is reluctant to go. Caleb already learns through C that his wife/her mother passed away from cancer. Caleb informs her, “Your father passed many years ago.” It’s a tearful farewell.

 

Hale created numerous iterations of Caleb this season, as we discovered. Which one did we ultimately choose? The person?

responds Joy “This is how this technology functions. It truly began in the Mr. Delos episode of season two where the Man in Black is performing a test for immortality, am I correct? They’re working on a covert immortality project that would essentially let someone live forever if they could precisely duplicate them and place them inside of a computer. They discovered that when they combined the mind and soul of a person’s CPU with an artificial body—say, let’s one that would refuse an organ donation—it inclined to reject that body, which is why it would break down. They were able to lengthen the breakdown for ever-increasing amounts of time. But in the end, it seems like the mind realizes that this isn’t real and forces itself to act strangely, which is what Hale was doing to Caleb. She would bring him back often as she watched him deteriorate in search of information she believed he had withheld from her.

 

What about Bernard, Maeve, and the Man in Black? Are they definitely deceased?

There are techniques for bringing characters back, says Joy. Some of the faces, but not all of them, will be familiar to us again. It’s important to respect some deaths.