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The most recent episode of Westworld is called ‘Années Folles’ which is what the 1920s were called in France, but it also translates to the ‘Crazy Years’. We seem to stay in one overall timeline this time, although there are two pieces to it — one is the Maeve/Caleb adventure and his family’s escape and the other is the return of Bernard and Ashley Stubbs as they pursue a new adventure.
Of course I’m always happy to see Bernard return and he has a great rapport with Stubbs, but it’s not entirely clear how far in the future they are. At the end of Season 3 we saw a glimpse of Bernard covered in dust, but here Stubbs merely says he just didn’t clean the room or disturb him for however long it’s been.
But the episode starts with Bernard in the Sublime seeing a vision of his own design until Akecheta returns, completely explaining everything without any question marks. Due to the nature of the digital world, they can live millenia there while hours pass in the analog world and they have thus spent time simulating the world and the possible futures.
Akecheta presents essentially two options — either humanity is doomed or Bernard will end up dead saving them. Fair enough, but we know which one he’ll choose, and sure enough, he takes Stubbs on a little trip where he freaks him out with amusing little predictions of the future. All of the things like needing a shovel or killing the random dudes are explained or will be — it becomes clear that the random dudes were actually hosts meant to infiltrate some group only referred to here as ‘the cause’.
The two get a ride from a woman only identified as ‘C’ (although I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a grown-up version of Caleb’s daughter Frankie, as this show does love to play with timelines) — and they go to the ‘condemned lands’ where Bernard promises to show them where some weapon is buried. Is it the ‘tower’ we’ve heard of or something else? Is it the mind control over humans or have we already seen that? Still some questions but at least Bernard has actually explained his high-level plan to Stubbs.
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Otherwise it was pretty straightforward, but the other storyline was completely understandable. Maeve and Caleb plan to infiltrate the ‘Temperance World’ or whatever they’re officially calling it by sneaking into the facility with the dead hosts. We get to see the remixes of our old friends in different ways, including a remixed Maeve and Hector and Armistice in a sort of Bonnie and Clyde take.
Although it’s always fun to see Maeve kick ass, here we see here being impressed (at least a little) by Caleb’s capable shooting prowess. At the same time, we keep cutting back to Uwade and Frankie preparing to flee with Carver, until Frankie is able to figure out that Carver is up to no good — her training from her dad coming to good use. This directly sets us up to be tricked like Caleb is as we see Carver open a closet door and then the scene cuts out without seeing what’s happened.
Thankfully the episode doesn’t keep the tease going too long — it seems that a host Frankie has been used to trap Caleb and infect him with their mind control flies, right after we see a bunch of actual humans shoot themselves under that control. So we’re primed to believe our eyes, despite knowing how often the human/host switcheroo has happened on this show. But the shoe drops as Host-William now seems a match for Maeve and is now super difficult to kill.
Although we do see Uwade and Frankie successfully get away, the episode horrifyingly ends with Caleb getting swarmed by the flies. A pretty great cliffhanger for a compelling episode, one that kept things simple to just two storylines, which definitely helps us keep track of things better. Pretty good set of episodes so far this season, so fingers crossed that continues.
New episodes of Westworld air Sundays on HBO and stream on HBO Max.
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