7 Things We Learned From 'Westworld' Episode 4: "Dissonance Theory"
Despite being heavy on mythology and exposition, Westworld is now a bona fide hit with audiences, and is waiting no time pumping the brakes on its android characters' evolution. After last week's thrilling, transformative episode took Dolores fully over the edge into rebellion, episode four saw Maeve experiencing her own breakthrough.
Here are seven of the key things we learned from "Dissonance Theory."
1) Maeve does not mess around when it comes to getting answers.
After that immensely disturbing sequence in which she hallucinates-or remembers-Clementine being shot in the head, Maeve finally snaps, and runs home to sketch out a mysterious image. It's a man wearing a hazmat suit, just like the technicians in the laboratory, and afterwards she realizes that she's drawn the same image before, again and again.
After bribing an outlaw to slice into her stomach, in what becomes a weirdly erotic moment, her suspicions are proved right. He pulls out a bullet from her stomach, confirming that she was shot just as she remembers. Being shot is part of her loop, which explains the staph infection she developed in her abdomen two episodes ago. "I'm not crazy, and none of this matters," she says triumphantly, passionately kissing the kind-of-sexy outlaw just as bullets begin to fly.
2) Quality Assurance, aka corporate, is taking more and more control over Westworld.
With hosts deviating from their loops, going on milky rampages and smashing their own brains in with rocks, Theresa's "Quality Assurance" team is stepping in to handle all "incidents" within the park. This is bad news for Elsie and Bernard, who work on the programming side and are seemingly much more qualified to deal with the hosts' glitches. Corporate red tape reigns supreme, even in this science-fiction future-but is there a deeper reason why Theresa is trying to ring fence the malfunctioning hosts?
3) Happy news doesn't sell, and neither do happy storylines.
We learn a little more about what drove Ford and his former partner Arnold apart, and it all comes down to whether the glass is half full or half empty. Ford says that in the beginning, he imagined a perfect balance between positive and negative scenarios inside the park, making a bet with Arnold that there would be takers for both.
But after 100 hopeful storylines had flopped, Ford finally had to admit that he was wrong-people really are inherently terrible, or at least the kind of people that come to Westworld. Arnold bet against the human race, and he won. Just in case you were in any doubt about this show's bleaker-than-bleak worldview.
4) Westworld brings out the very worst in its guests.
On the subject of believing the worst of people, there were some interesting exchanges between William and Logan this week. We know that Logan is both a regular Westworld customer and a pretty disgusting human being, and that he's brought his soon-to-be brother-in-law William along as a means of welcoming him into the family. Because… sure.
But William actually seems surprised by just how repugnant Logan's behavior is, complaining, "The second we get away from the real world, you turn into an evil prick." Logan's more than just a hedonistic douche-he's actively eager to shed as much blood as possible, begging William to "go black hat" with him. Westworld doesn't just indulge its customers' worst instincts-it fosters them.
We don't know anything about what the world beyond Westworld looks like, but imagine the kind of social commentary that would arise from a place like this. It's the "violence in video games" conversation taken to extremes, because there's no way on earth you can spend days indulging your every sociopathic urge inside a fantasy world, and then go back into the real world unchanged.
5) The Man In Black knows Arnold.
Last week, we (along with a lot of viewers) speculated that the Man In Black is actually Arnold, and that the latter faked his own death in order to stay inside the park forever. That possibility's still on the table, especially now that we know he actively preferred the hosts to human beings – but at the very least, the Man In Black has a strong interest in Arnold.
TMIB talks about Arnold as though he were the sole creator of this world, not mentioning Ford at all. Arnold is dead, he says, but he still has one story left to tell: "a story with real stakes." Which sounds an awful lot like what Ford is building towards with his new storyline.
6) The brothel offers a "bathing" discount.
One dollar off if you go in clean – but considering these guests are paying $40k a day to be inside Westworld in the first place, it's probably not much of an incentive.
7) The hosts can deviate from their storyline, but not from their personality type.
At least, that's how it seems from Dolores' arc. Even after turning the gun on her attacker last week, Dolores has not fundamentally changed-she's still the damsel in distress who needs rescuing on a regular basis, and William's happy to play her white knight. We've seen that the hosts' personalities can be re-calibrated, traits like "emotional intelligence" and "aggressiveness" adjusted up and down, and so even though Dolores is now becoming self-aware, those underlying traits remain static. She knows there's something wrong with the world, but she only has a limited capacity to change her role within it. In order to truly change, and become less of a damsel stereotype, she would have to be re-programmed.
That's an interesting philosophical idea, but it's also a writing challenge. If the hosts' personalities are externally defined and there's no possibility of actual change, can they ever be truly compelling characters? Or now that Dolores and Maeve are both self-aware, will their personalities begin to shift too?
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