Westworld Season 4 Episode 5 has just released on HBO Max, and in this episode, we get more
reveals surrounding Christina having met Teddy in the previous episode, Host Man In Black
beginning to question his reality and more on the control of Halores in this new world.
In this spoiler review and explained analysis, I'm going to be giving you my breakdown of
Westworld Season 4 episode 5, entitled Zhuangzi, alongside discussing my general thoughts towards
it.
But before I get into it, if you want to see more videos on Season 4 of Westworld,
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But without further a do, lets dive into my review and explained video for Westworld Season
4 Episode 5.
So in Westworld Season 4 Episode 5, we learn more about the world that Halores has constructed
and the place that Christina has within it.
Zhuangzi may have once again displayed the loop that Christina is in, but it's here
that we really start to feel that she's having an important awakening.
She talks about a familiar character that might or might not be
herself and that there's that something wrong with the world.
And like we learnt in Episode 4, it's the world in which Halores has finally succeeded
in turning into her own playground for humans.
But that world also includes human outliers that are apparently causing a bit of a problem.
It's similar to what I theorised in my trailer breakdown video, but
we learn that there's a bit more to that problem.
They are disrupting what Halores apparently imagined would be a temporary place for her
kind, before they can transcend beyond a physical realm.
This week, the Humans and the Hosts are essentially both facing an existential crisis, and it's
going to be interesting to see where this all goes.
But let's get into what happened this week and how these complications
seem to be developing.
Episode 5 begins with William having dinner with a wealthy couple and while the mood is
quite relaxed, we begin to see a turn in the motives of our fellow host.
When one of them start talking about being successful on their own
merits, William questions them for believing a lie.
He follows by explaining that their meal together and freindship isn't real.
Their lives aren't real and they have no free will because
of what Halores has done to the world.
Host William reinforces that he can do what he wants to either of them and they can't
do anything to stop it.
However, that's the basis for which things start to change with Host William, and it's
not long before Clementine arrives and asks him to come with her to survey an important
situation.
They arrive at an apartment building, step over many bodies on their walk to one of the
rooms, and once there, they find a woman covered in blood, saying that she's won the
game.
She claims that she’s entitled to a reward and Clem tells William that she was ready
to transcend before she was sent on a mission to hunt an outlier.
We know from Season 3 that the outliers were the unpredictable humans
that Serac either stored or wanted rid off and it's here that we learn that they may
be causing problems for the hosts that Halores orders.
Host William tells the woman that there are no rules in Hale's world and that if he wanted
to, he could eliminate her for mistreating this reality.
He tells Clem to take the woman back to where she came from and he eventually returns
to that meal he was having before.
So like this host that went crazy after hunting down a human outlier, it seems many characters
are beginning to have an existential crisis over the world that Halores has constructed.
And maybe even Halores herself.
That's because she admits that the world she has made and controls is also quite boring.
In a scene with Host William on the streets of New York she
states that she can make 99% of humans do what she wants or dance until they can't anymore.
As we see in the scene the fly infected humans dance until they drop down, they form a chair
for her to sit on, and even one of them has played the piano for so long that their fingers
are split open and bleeding all over the keys.
But you can only do that for so long.
Halores says that she doesn’t understand why her
vision hasn't gone further, even comparing herself to God and saying that God is bored.
Eventually, her and host William walk towards the tower
that we've heard about and seen for so long now, and on the way, we see the crazy host
from the opening scene lying next to the pathway with a bullet wound to the head.
William doesn't know why but it's clear that Halores wants
to know why she was acting strange and why she eventually killed herself.
She explains that she did so after successfully hunting down and
killing the outlier, who we find out is the homeless man that was in Christina's narrative
in previous episodes.
She tells Host William that 38 hosts have committed suicide after coming
in contact with these Outliers that they have been ordered to hunt down.
She blames William for their failures surrounding this and in a way of him regaining command,
she brings up a picture of a new outlier on the control map
at the tower and orders him to kill her himself.
So essentially, Outliers, the humans who are immune to Hale’s fly program can see the
Tower, can realize they’ve been living in a fake
reality, and have an existential crisis in the process.
And Hale sends Hosts to kill the Outliers, but some of them that communicate with them
end up going crazy and killing themselves.
And it seems that her plan was to create more Hosts and send them out into the world to
live with the goal that they’d later choose to leave
their bodies behind and ascend into… something that we currently do not know of.
We see a host in the tower having his pearl taking out by a drone host and placed into
a new device but it's mysterious over what that actually
involves.
My guess would be that it's something to do with the sublime and if we remember when Bernard
went in there, he came out with predictive paths of the future and now seems
quite evolved.
I could be wrong But I think we'll soon find out what that all means.
What Halores also explains though is that most of the
Hosts living in her world prefer to stay in reality and live their lives traditionally.
So we're guessing that only a few of them have transcended or evolved, leading her down
this path of revenge and also boredom.
She's truend the whole of New York into basically a Westworld park for the hosts and the humans
are programmed and controlled in loops, just like the hosts
were before.
But when Host Man In Black goes off to find this outlier that Halores ordered him to track
down, things begin to get quite complicated.
We learn that Stubbs, Jay, and the resistance arrive at the city and they aim to rescue
the outlier that William is hunting down.
Something to keep in mind with this is that it seems like Halores has made hunting the
outliers a game, similar to what we saw in Westworld
with the Maze but in reverse.
That's why the host who killed herself in the beginning of this episode referenced winning
a game.
So even more questions come of the world that Halores is
controlling and what that means for the individuals who play this game and fight to stop it.
But coming back to those events with host William,
he tracks down Stubbs, Jay and the resistance members, and in an attempt to cause a distraction
while finding the outlier that the resistance are trying to save, he activates and
controls the many fly infected humans around them to attack.
Jay is the only resistance member to quickly escape this fight, while Stubbs and the others
continue brawling, and he attempts to reach the outlier before Host
William can kill her.
But once William reaches the outlier, he maskes a mistake in listening to her as she talks
about the unusual peace that comes to their world once figurring out that
it's all a lie.
Before he can pull the trigger, Jay intervenes and shoots host William, in turn, saving the
outlier and escaping with her.
What she said to William though has already eaten away at his mind and it leads him to
pursue a conversation with Human William that Halores has kept as prisoner in that cryo
chamber we saw in previous episodes.
Host-William is now questioning his place and purpose in this bigger game and in his
chat with human William he may be on the path of change that I also suggested in my trailer
breakdown video the other day.
The human version tells him that this reality doesn’t have to belong only to Halores and
this leads to him repeating the line he spoke at the beginning of this
episode.
"There’s a beauty to this world.
An order.
So we like to believe”.
So while Halores believes that there should be an order and that beauty lies within that,
Host William and even Chritina have come to a point where they
both think very differently.
It’s of course what led OG Dolores to break out of her loop in season 1 and now host William
might be following a similar path after his conversation with
an outlier and now Human William.
He's questioning whether he has free will, and like most of hosts made by Halores, do
they just follow their code and live normally.
As Halores has become disappointed in him over the years, he is feeling distanced from
what she has done to the world.
So a few characters are definitelly having an existential crisis and breaking out of
their loops, which very much reminds us of those earlier seasons.
And coming to the other narrative of this episode, while Christina is also having a
similar experience, she's channeling into what seems to be a more positive outcome.
After her date with Teddy in the previous episode, she returns
to work at Olympiad Entertainment and begins designing a story that is identical to the
story that Dolores had in Westworld.
A rancher’s daughter living a simple life in the country.
Her boss, Emmett, soon interrupts her though and asks her to pitch the idea to him immediately.
She tells him the story we know but while doing so, she gets a call from Teddy asking
her to leave work as soon as she can to meet him.
When she meets up with Teddy, she wants to know who he really is and why he knows all
he does about her.
He tells Christina that her stalker was telling the truth in that she ruined his life and
that the world she believes is real is all a lie.
She initially doesn't believe him on that but Teddy proves that he's right
when he asks her to control two controlled humans on a bench, to start interacting and
then eventually fall out and go their seperate ways.
It works and Teddy tells her that she’s a god and that the only way she can stay safe
is to stick to this loop.
She leaves Teedy to meet an old college roommate for lunch and it's none
other than Halores herself, searching for answers she may already know and asking if
she's met anyone new.
Christina keeps Teddy's words in mind, catching on that something isn't quite
right here, and uses her newfound ability of controlling gumans, so that she can cause
a distraction at the restaurant, and leave to go back to work.
Coming to the end of this episode, when she returns to Olypiad, Christina searches for
Charlotte Hale on the system and there's no results, but then when she searches for Dolores
Abernathy, it brings up an alert that seemingly leads her boss right back over to her desk.
After him pressing her with many questions, she uses her ability once again and is able
to force him to stop and go home.
Christina then enters Olympiad’s database to access the system or map that we saw Halores
use in the tower before and when Christina asks it to show her
the game, and eventually those of the population that she’d written stories for, it turns
out, that narratives have been written for virtually all of them.
So Christina believed that she was writing stories for npcs in a video game,
but she's creating the personalities and narrative loops for the Humans controlled by Halores
in the city.
She understands now that the world is a story, and she’s the storyteller.
This leads to a final scene between her and Teddy on the street where he tells her, “this
world is a lie.
It’s a story.
A well told one but a lie all the same.”
Like Maeve though, she’s now able to use a newfound power to see beyond this reality
that Halores controls.
She finally sees the Tower that Teddy tried to make her
see earlier on, and she asks him “who did this to me?”
He replies “you did,” and right now, we think that implies the version of Dolores
inside of Charlotte Hale.
That could take a twist if this narrative turns out to be set in the
future and this is a simulation of hale's world that they are using to make Dolores
re-gather who she is, but if this is taking place at the
same time in the same world, then he's likely talking about Halores.
I'm currently not sure which of these options to currently lean towards, but I can imagine
that Halores would do this to her, making a version of Delores or
using one of the lost pearls to help her enslave the humans.
Without her knowing so of course.
But then I come back to the question of, why would she take such a risk of allowing Christina
to potantially work out what's going on.
Christina is reminiscing of Dolores, programming the life of her into a character at work and
gaining the ability to people in the street.
So why would Halores risk any of this happening.
I guess you could argue that Host William is breaking out too and he has been Hale's
minion for many years.
I just don't buy that with Christina as of yet and I think the big questions still remain.
Is Christina in the real world, or is she in a simulation of the real world
that either Halores or someone else is using?
And the same thing goes with Teddy actually being here.
Yes he may very well not be the Teddy that was put in the sublime, but he's hinted
an awful lot towards the history we know of.
And if she is in the real world, what doe Halores plan to do with her?
I guess we'll just have to wait and see but this episode did bring
much more questions to an already big list of ones that we had.
I think from here we could see the battle for the future of humanity between Christina
and Halores, with Maeve, Caleb, Bernard, both Williams and the rest of them
alligning with one or the other.
Likely Christina's side at this current point but we still need to find out exactly what
Halores means when she talks about her kind transcending.
Maybe it's to do with what's going on with Christina or what we see in the trailers surrounding
the sublime.
Hopefully we will get our answers very soon.
So what are my overall thoughts of this latest episode.
Well, after last week’s fantastic entry, Westworld could have slowed down, but it seems
like it's fully returned to it's thought provoking discussions surrounding evolution
and it clearly isn't cutting the pace.
It may not be as thrilling or as action packed as the previous episode, but it's direct focus
on the biggest mysteries make it as engrossing as
ever.
We still have questions surrounding Christina, but it does reveal that the nature of her
reality isn't completely real.
And like with all the main characters, this episode once again
alligns itself with the outliers that seem to want to make sense of the world and it's
control, making it so fascinating to see this from
an entirely new perspective.
The show has been about outliers right from the beginning.
And even with season 4 showing a reversal with the hosts now in control, there are still
problems with the system because of the outliers.
Outliers still go against their codes and want to see how they’re being controlled.
It's going to be interesting to see how this develops in the
last 3 episodes of the season, but I really enjoy that the show is going head first into
the questions that made it so intriguing to begin with.
If it's goal was to have us questioning our own reality, than it's definitely succeeding.
What matters now is how they answer all the questions they've outlined and if it pulls
it off, then it will be a hell of a final act
to get us anticipating how this whole show will end up.
But that was my spoiler review and explained analysis for Westworld Season 4 Episode 5.
I'm giving it a rating of 8.5 out of 10.
I will doing a trailer breakdown, predictions and
theories video for episode 6 in the next few days, so keep a look out for that and stay
tuned to my channel each week for breakdowns on every episode of Season 4.
But to those who have already seen the episode, what are your thoughts
on all the events that went down and what do you think will happen in Episode 6?
Let me know down below in the comments section.
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