Westworld: Generation Loss (4x04)

There's so many different timelines... so much is going on... but this was a great episode!

Cons:

I don't like having to work so hard to figure out what's going on. We get that scene at the end with Bernard, and the mystery woman who rescued him and Stubbs. Turns out, that's Frankie, Caleb's daughter all grown up. I don't need to be that confused about timelines! Why is it always Bernard, who's in the middle of all the timeline fuckery? It's kind of exhausting.

I've got to say, visually I didn't really enjoy Caleb's "oh shit" moment when he goes outside and he finds out that Hale's future dystopia has come to pass. It just looks like a generic sci-fi vision, a big creepy panopticon tower or what have you. Visually, despite how impressive a lot of the effects are, this show can have the tendency to get a little same-y.

I was legitimately shocked by the Maeve and Caleb (temporary-ish) deaths, but I wish they hadn't had Maeve be in love with him. If that's even what they were implying. We see in flashback that she decided to leave so that Caleb could have a normal life, but then got pulled back in because she was curious and wanted to check on him. This just felt a little weak to me, I don't know. I really like the energy between Maeve and Caleb as characters, and I don't want it to be this thing where Maeve is the martyr putting herself through suffering for Caleb's sake. That just doesn't feel great.

Pros:

Overall, though, despite my resistance to actually trying to track the various complexities going on in this story, I did greatly enjoy this episode.

Tessa Thompson does a good job with the sort of Dolores-esque inflection to her speech. Charlotte Hale/Dolores is a fascinating character, and I liked the standoff with her and Caleb, who turns out to be dead, and is now a host. Good twist, if not exactly hard to predict! It's a sci-fi staple to have the reveal of the dystopian future, that moment where you realize that the bad guys won. This was a pretty good version of that trope, especially because we were in the midst of Maeve and Caleb trying to prevent this outcome, and then there's the slow dawning realization that they failed long ago. That worked for me!

Christina, who I mentioned in earlier episodes was probably my least favorite aspect, suddenly got interesting. You put Teddy back in the story and I'm immediately perking up. We still don't quite know how Christina contributed to Hale's evil future where all humans are controlled, but we know that she was writing stories for NPCs who turned out to be real, in some sense. I loved the romantic tension in the date scene with Teddy, and I'm eager to see where this story might lead us next!

Despite generally not caring much for the Bernard story-line, I did like that we got confirmation that the woman rescuing him and Stubbs last week was in fact a grown up Frankie, looking for a weapon to help bring down the baddies. Who do they find buried in the desert? Maeve's body! Assuming they can get her back online and on their side, I'm excited to see how they might be able to combat Hale's evil shenanigans. I'm actually pretty excited about how all the pieces are aligning right now!

So that's where I'll leave things. A pretty solid installment of the show, one where even paying half-attention as I am sometimes wont to do, I was still surprised and gripped by the turns the story was taking.

8/10