Westworld: Années Folles (4x03)

Okie dokie, things are getting creepy up in here.

Cons:

We're back with Bernard and Stubbs, and god, I had to go back and remind myself how things left off last season, and even after the reminder I just so super did not care. We're talking about The Sublime, and different timelines and versions of events, and what basically amounts to robot heaven, and we've got the maze, and all this imagery from earlier seasons, and I don't know, y'all, it's just not gripping me. I remember in season two, I found Bernard's stuff wicked confusing and literally couldn't figure out where he fit into the timeline or connected with the rest of the events, and I'm nervous that the same thing will happen here.

Pros:

Thankfully, I really enjoyed the other plot threads that we got to focus on this week. First we've got Caleb's family, his wife and daughter, trying to get to safety. The utter spookiness of people not being who they look like is employed so expertly here. I loved how Frankie started picking up that something was wrong right away, and managed to solve the mystery, while her mother was still none the wiser. But then of course they're able to work together to try and get away. I'm surprising myself with how invested I feel in Caleb and his family.

Speaking of, once again Caleb and Maeve steal the show in their scenes together. I loved, loved, loved being back in the park. They did a good job of making the miraculous and disturbing reality of the hosts and the story-lines seem mundane, almost quaint. We see how stories from season one have been adapted into the new time period, how the hosts have supposedly been sanded down and made less able to resist, while still playing out their various roles. We see the new Maeve, the new Dolores, as it were, playing out their stories. The most chilling aspect of this, of course, is how they've turned Dolores's original uprising into another part of the game, making it a story that the guests can interact with, the terrifying thought of the hosts turning on the humans. I love that as a meta moment.

And then we get into the inner workings of the park, where we see some of the science behind the scenes. One thing I really loved about the host that looked like Frankie was how obvious it was, and how much Caleb just could not see that, and needed to get to her at all costs. We as the audience were sitting there waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it did, it was creepy and frightening and that little girl's face sure did open up and expel a bunch of weird bugs... yikes. And yet what could Caleb have done? The image of him sobbing and begging Frankie to look at him through the door was a really powerful one.

Once again, keeping things short over in Westworld land. This show sort of confounds me, in that it can't quite get me to care about it enough to pay it the attention it probably deserves, and I can never quite tell if that's more my fault, or the show's. This was a decent installment when it focused on the things in the park itself, and a little less interesting when we got into the deeper stuff with Bernard.

7/10