Westworld :: The Auguries

HBO

The season premiere of Westworld’s fourth season is called ‘The Auguries’, after the ancient Roman practice of trying to predict the future by watching birds. Of course, trying to predict the future of a Westworld season is always a dangerous practice, so perhaps it is a warning to all of us not to think we know how the story is going to go.

There are two main storylines so far, which is almost quaint for this show, one that directly follows up seven years after the end of Season 3, and the other a complete mystery. In the mysterious one, we follow a lady who looks like Dolores (who is supposedly dead) but is actually called Christina, living in a futuristic NYC. She works as a writer for the company Olympiad Entertainment but specifically writes for the “NPCs” (Non-Player Characters) in the background of video games.

Her friend Maya (award winning Ariana DeBose) wants her to get out of the apartment and get laid, with a very particular exchange. Maya says that no one wants ‘easy or natural’ but that ‘art is a lie that tells the truth’ — which might as well be just another way to describe the point of storytelling itself. Christina’s actual date with an investment bro goes quite poorly, but the dude intriguingly says that NPCs are merely ‘cannon fodder’ — an interesting connection to the realms we’ve already seen in Westworld.

But at the same time Christina is getting a lot of calls and voice mails from a mysterious man named ‘Peter’ — he discusses a mysterious ‘Tower’ being real and that she is somehow writing what’s happening to him. It’s vague enough that it’s hard to guess at what’s really happening, but we certainly don’t know that the world Christina experiences is not a simulation. Certainly the experience at the very end of our old buddy Teddy staring up at Christina or the maze on the balcony doesn’t paint a very ‘real’ picture.

It’s enough of a coherent mystery though that it’s pretty interesting so far, with a lot of interesting thematic concepts about stories and storytelling, which is ultimately what Westworld has always been about.

HBO

In the ‘we assume this is real’ storyline, we first follow the now-host William, or the Man in Black, taking control of some mysterious land owned by a criminal group. He does this by getting a dude named Hugo (Arturo Del Puerto) to kill his superiors by controlling his mind and getting a creepy and huge amount of flies to appear in his apartment (it seems).

It also seems that he’s trying to kill Maeve and Caleb, as the former is able to figure it out — but does she actually know he’s a host now? Maeve has been off the grid for the past seven years and we get to see a fun little action scene where she fends off her invaders easily and later saves Caleb from being killed.

Caleb has the more complex ‘real’ story, with new wife Uwade Nichols (Nozipho Mclean) and young daughter Frankie, to whom he is imparting his skills of paranoia and marksmanship. There’s references to the war gone past and the riots, but we don’t really know everything about all that yet. Instead we see Uwade struggle with Caleb’s PTSD and seeming desire to want to fight in the war again.

But they are given little choice at the end of the episode as Caleb is a target again — he chooses to follow Maeve to track down another target, a Senator living in California (could be a lot of people we’d recognize, no way to know yet). The choice is also to leave his family behind to protect them, which is another way of saying that he’s trying to write his own version of his story again.

It’s a pretty interesting start to the season, with enough of the classic Westworld mystery to keep us guessing but not enough to really be annoying about it. The two storylines are easy enough to follow so far, and hopefully the show doesn’t get too complex about it like last season often did. I really want to see if we get some of my other old favorites again like Bernard or Clementine, or even Ashley Tubbs — dare I hope for the late lamented Elsie? With this show, you really never know.

New episodes of Westworld air Sundays on HBO and stream on HBO Max.

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