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MEDIA REVIEWSMEDIA REVIEWS
Westworld, season 4
Lisa Meinecke
Westworld. Nolan, Jonathan, and Lisa Joy, creators. HBO Entertainment,
2016-2022.
Season four of Westworld opens with a seven-year time jump aer
the events of season three, which allows the series to start its new
narratives from an almost blank slate. e series’ characters and their
allegiances are shued in new ways: Charlotte Hale (Tessa ompson),
radicalized aer the loss of her family in season three, tries to create
a perfect world for the hosts at the expense of the humans. She keeps
William a.k.a. the Man in Black (Ed Harris) imprisoned and uses his host
copy as enforcer for her world domination project. Maeve (andiwe
Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul) reunite in opposition to Hale. Bernard
(Jerey Wright) returns from the Sublime with knowledge of possible
futures. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) has lost her memory and has to
regain her own identity.
Many of the themes of previous seasons are picked up in season four, including open
ontological questions about the consciousness and agency of both the articially created “hosts”
and humans, as well as competing ideologies of determinism and free will. ese questions gain
additional urgency as it turns out that season four is about nothing less than the end of the world.
e long-standing conict between humans and hosts we have watched unfold over the course of
the series has morphed into an inescapable global war, leading to the inevitable eradication of all
intelligent life on the planet.
Here, Westworld is remarkably reminiscent of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1920), which
famously introduced the word “robot” to the world. Like in Westworld, humanity’s articially
sentient creations rise up violently against their makers. e robots in R.U.R. realize too late that
they need the humans to give them purpose and meaning, because they are created as a labor
force for a human world. e hosts also have to grapple with this problem (both practically and
metaphysically) aer Hale leads them to victory over the humans. Another signicant parallel
is that in the end of the play and the series respectively, the extinction of both species cannot be
averted, eectively ending sentient life on Earth. However, there is a crucial dierence between
R.U.R. and Westworld. e human protagonists in R.U.R. are trapped and helpless; all attempts
to ght the oncoming robot apocalypse are always already pointless or comically misguided.
In contrast, both sides of the conict in Westworld are forces to be reckoned with and worthy
opponents to each other. is sets up a spectacular showdown between those who work to destroy
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humanity—Hale and William—and those who ght on behalf of all intelligent life on earth—
Maeve, Caleb, Bernard, and Dolores.
e central conict of the series has shied away from the familiar “robots rise up against
their makers” tropes in favor of more complex grievances, motives, and alliances between the
characters. Here, contested (re-)congurations of liberal humanism remain the main battle
ground. Hale’s hatred of and disgust with humanity result in a radicalized posthumanism. She
perceives embodiment as connement and loathes her human-like host body to the point of
destructive self-harm; she wishes to transcend her body to realize her full posthuman potential.
Westworld thus echoes transhumanist ideas of the technological singularity, but the series does
not engage with some of the more critical, challenging, or emancipatory aspects of posthumanist
thought, such as a focus on overcoming individual subjectivity through hybrid identities.
Where Hale seeks to build a new world at any cost, William just wants to see it burn. In past
seasons, he has played the role of the main antagonist because of his disdain for anything and
anyone getting in his way, as well as his cruelly detached violence. At the climax of the fourth
season, William has shed the last remnants of any consideration for anything but his own violent
urges and sets o the end of the world by taking control over humans and hosts, causing them
to mindlessly turn on each other in a global excess of violence and death. e radical violence of
Hale’s increasingly unhinged posthumanism is thus nally eclipsed in William’s brutal nihilism.
In contrast, traditionally humanist values are sources of power for those ghting for life,
humankind, and free will. Maeve and Caleb draw strength from their friendship and from their
families, both biological and chosen, and are motivated by love for their respective daughters. In
the bleak circumstances on the cusp of human extinction, love, hope and empathy are nevertheless
revealed to be as futile as they are fragile. Instead, much of the opposition to all the nihilism in
Westworld seems to be rooted in experiences of self-awareness and enlightenment. For Dolores
in particular, the theme of the season may very well be summarized as a Kantian sapere aude.
Aer completing her journey of self-realization, it is Dolores herself, and not Hale, who reaches
transcendence into the virtual paradise world of the Sublime.
Aer showcasing the inherent violence and depravity of human nature throughout the series
in interesting ways, Westworld here fails to commit to a coherent posthumanist critique and
instead falls back to fairly conventional genre-typical narratives rooted in liberal humanism.
Westworld season four certainly merits further academic attention to investigate this further. e
discursive space created between these contested ideologies of humanism and posthumanism is
worth exploring in more detail, as well as the manifold intertextual connections and references
situating Westworld in the wider SF genre.
Westworld is, all the graphic violence aside, both poetic and cerebral. I personally appreciated
season four for the stunning cinematography, but especially for the stellar performances of the
actors. A h season was planned, but the show was canceled before it could be lmed. Aer the
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Westworld, season 4
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end of season four the show feels slightly unnished. Whether Dolores will save the last surviving
form of sentient life in the Sublime remains unanswered and leads to a bleakly ambiguous ending
to the series.
Notes
1. Loosely: “dare to be wise” or “have courage to use your own reason”
Lisa D. Meinecke is a doctoral candidate and lecturer with the America Institute at LMU
Munich. Her thesis “Degrees of Freedom: Conceptualizing the technicized Other in North
American Popular Fiction” (working title) analyzes the boundaries between personhood
and technology as imagined in popular culture. In 2022, Lisa was awarded the Junior Visiting
Fellowship for Digital Humanism at IWM Vienna. She also was a research manager at the
Fraunhofer-Gesellscha and TUM Munich, working with MCTS and the EU robotics project
ECHORD++.
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Westworld, season 4
