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The latest episode of Westworld is called ‘Zhuangzi’, the name of an ancient Taoist Chinese text which has references to how the natural world can rarely truly be matched — might be a note about how Host-Hale is struggling with her own attempts at a perfect version of the real world. Wrapping around this episode is a narration from William about how there exists an order and it’s because they created a ‘perfect’ world.
There are two effective narratives in this episode, which are maybe but not necessarily around the same time. One is about the humans trying to save an ‘outlier’ from death while the Host-MIB tries to kill the outlier first without losing his grip on reality, and the other is about Christina finally learning to understand the nature of her own reality.
The episode starts with the MIB at a restaurant table with two random people that it is revealed he is enjoying torturing — we find out why later, which is that hosts are basically permitted to do whatever they want to the humans, except that one of them, named ‘Hope’ has gone on a killing spree after killing one of these ‘outliers’.
Those outliers are simply humans that have broken free of their mind control and realize the world is a lie, and the simple request from the man Hope was hunting to confirm whether or not his flower was real broke her, even though she’s not human at all, which is something that confounds Hale. We get some fascinating inscrutable acting from Clementine here as Hale’s enforcer, which makes sense as Angela Sarafyan has one of the most interesting and uniquely beautiful faces in Hollywood — some of her best moments in Westworld have been without words.
Hale has a fascinating conversation with the MIB as she refers to herself as ‘God’ but also completely bored with being able to control all of the humans. She still has an issue with understanding why these hosts commit suicide after they confront the outliers, but it seems pretty clear — when they hear the outlier question their reality and act ‘real’, suddenly the callous mind control does seem pretty horrifying.
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Led by the human rebels and their leader Jay, Stubbs amusingly snarks his way into our hearts as he tries to survive his little adventure. They manage to prevent the MIB from killing the latest outlier, but perhaps not too late for him to be ‘infected’ by her.
At the second to last moment of the episode, the MIB actually talks to his forebear, the human William, to try and understand his own issue with the nature of this artificial reality. WIlliam offers the idea that perhaps the MIB needs to start questioning the nature of his own reality — a different sort of thing than William ever did with the hosts, but perhaps these hosts are still stuck in their own loops. Are they, as the MIB says, just the sum total of their code? Or something more? That seems to be one of the big thematic questions of the season.
As for Christina, she has finally managed to completely question her own reality. She considers a new narrative about a girl, the daughter of a rancher, who realizes something is wrong with the world and it’s her fault. Of course, this is explicitly confirmed by Teddy at the end of the episode as he tells Christina chillingly that she’s responsible for all of this (which in many ways, she is).
In the meantime, Teddy helps her realize that she’s actually the one who’s been creating narratives for everyone the entire time, and she slowly begins to realize she can control the world around her. Her boss Emmett (which means ‘Truth’ in Hebrew) starts to harshly interrogate her but she changes his narrative and out loud says his new ‘story’ to tell her the actual truth.
It’s a reveal that makes perfect sense, just like the reveals from last episode, and a great continuation of the careful way this season seems to have been set up. Perhaps a bit of a slow start, but it’s really rolling now, and I’m as invested in the show as I’ve ever been.
New episodes of Westworld air Sundays on HBO and stream on HBO Max.
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