Warning: The following contains full spoilers for the Westworld Season 4 episode "Annees Folles," which aired on July 10 on HBO.
To read our review of last week's Westworld episode, "Well Enough Alone," click here.
"Annees Folles" journeyed into a new cyborg theme park, The Golden Age — a Roaring '20s reskinning of Westworld — as Maeve and Caleb stumbled further down the rabbit hole and into the clutches of Hale and William. It was the most exciting, and devious, Season 4 episode so far, saddling up very close to what might be the big secret of this new storyline, which is robots puppeting human beings as if they were machines.
To be fair, we've seen this happen already with William's flies. We've witnessed people become A.I. playthings thanks to the black nano-goop being developed in the park's sub-levels. Now we just have to, perhaps, broaden our scope a bit. Think on a macro level: the entire world. But also, to this end — and "Annees Folles" seemed like it was about to give us this reveal — the use of actual humans in theme parks and games. We didn't get absolute confirmation but it sure felt like we were about to find out that the hosts in The Golden Age were actually humans.. humans who get gunned down and replaced by new humans. There's a sinister poetic justice at work here, all in line with what Hale said last week, where humans would be unknowingly offing each other, thinking it's all just part of the theme park theatrics.
Check out our video review of Westworld's Season 4 premiere here:
One thing you sort of have to ignore here, if you want to fully absorb the entertainment aspects of "Annees Folles," is that this elaborate trap for Caleb was totally unnecessary. Taking him and Maeve into the park, knowing they'd head down to the labs, setting up a robot version of his daughter to trap him… they could have just knocked them both out on the train — you know, since the plan was that Hale wanted, and needed, him. It was a very "three left turns instead of one right turn" plan but it's easy enough to shrug off because "Annees Folles" was fun and ferocious in a way that Westworld often struggles to be these days.
As an interactive, immersive amusment park, The Golden Age contained amusing echos of the original Westworld, with the Mariposa Saloon now standing as The Butterfly Club, a new "Maeve" in charge, a new "Hector" after the safe upstairs, and guests scampering about looking for a hidden game-within-the-game (which turns out to be the Westworld massacre itself on a fake lab level!). Watching Maeve and Caleb witness the chicanery and scoffing appropriately was a good way to keep things light and exciting before delivering on a devilish ending. Plus, between this episode and Stranger Things, Metallica is having one heck of a week as the player piano's "Enter Sandman" morphed into a fully orchestrated version.
"Annees Folles" also made decent use of Caleb's wife and little girl, Frankie, elevating them up past their premiere showing of "family left behind." Here, Frankie came face to face with replacement/host danger again and it helped weave, and feed, into the "gotcha" aspect of the final scene, since we didn't know if Frankie had been killed and "fly'd" (she hadn't been, they just built a robot of her, filled with flies, complete with a nightmarish face separation). Because of the series' constant toying with time, the tension was able to build because we didn't know when the attack on Frankie and her mom was happening.
The ending felt grim and ominous, as humans were forced to shoot themselves, Maeve battled William, Caleb succumbed to the flies, and a giant mechanical cone seemed to control it all (a device only Maeve could hear).
And speaking of timey-wimey follies, we were introduced to the third story arc of the season as Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) returned. But when are they? One might assume their adventure is running parallel to Maeve and Caleb, but nothing's certain. Bernard's come out of his time in the Sublime, years later (which is apparently thousands of years in the Sublime), with a master plan to save the world. Inside the Sublime, aided by Zahn McClarnon's Akecheta, Bernard ran the Doctor Strange-Time Stone-Endgame trick — though as an A.I. in a virtual space — and glimpsed an unfathomable amount of futures in order to discern the correct path forward.
On this path to victory, apparently, are rebels in the form of a Mad Max-garbed, buggy-driving resistance movement against the robot uprising housed amongst sand dunes, a desert that Bernard claims hides a weapon they'll need to fight back. We don't know enough about what Bernard's plan is or the future he's trying to save humanity from but his story, like Maeve and Caleb's, moved well and answered smaller questions a few scenes after they were raised (like when it seemed like Bernard just murdered two dudes in a parking lot for no reason). Bernard's now part prophet too, using his knowledge of the winning play to effectively bring about the winning play. It makes for a good Bernard cocktail of proactiveness and passivity.
