HBO
The Season 4 finale of Westworld is called ‘Que Será, Será’ after the song of the same name, which is sweetly sung between Caleb and Frankie, but it’s also related to the actual meaning of the words, ‘whatever will be, will be’ which also feels like an encapsulation of this entire season. Bernard and his future seeing situation, predicting the one good future — whatever will happen, will happen, which is also self-evident and can either be reassuring or nihilistic.
This episode pulls together all of the plot threads, and essentially confirms that the Christina/Teddy stuff was in the same timeline all along. No fake simulations or flash forwards or flashbacks here, other than the one small one at the end where Hale hears the full message from Bernard, which seems to be cut the first time that she doesn’t listen to it.
Christina is one of the few surviving beings at the end of the episode, although we don’t see any confirmation of Host-Caleb dying again — they make it pretty clear it’s about to happen though. Frankie and her girlfriend Odina have made it, along with Hale without her human skin — just thematically a robot now more than ever. We sadly lost poor Stubbs along with the rewritten Clementine, although we did get a fun fight between the two of them.
Sadly, Clementine’s character was wildly underwritten this season, and when you have someone that looks like Angela Sarafyan and can kick ass like she can, why do this teasing ‘I want to be off the grid’ nonsense? I really hoped that after failing her character last season they’d give her something substantial to do this season — a real disappointment.
Also a kind of disappointment is the restarting of everything back to the beginning with Christina/Dolores remaking the original Westworld, although I assume this time without any of the humans. Maybe that means Maeve or Clementine will return (assuming the show does)? Fingers crossed, I suppose. But it feels a bit fatalistic, certainly a depressing outcome — humanity is doomed and so is the planet because life inherently is bad for it apparently. I’m not sure how I feel about that ending.
HBO
It was a few nice moments of closure between Host-Caleb and Frankie, with Aaron Paul really showing off some killer acting like he has been all season. A lot of it did feel pretty repetitive though, although at least we did get a final resolution to the William/MIB stuff because Hale is last shown destroying William’s brain ball. So I guess a series wrap for Ed Harris, always an amazing sinister presence?
I’m curious about how well they can really make things interesting for next season — I think that overall the season did work pretty well, certainly far better than the third season. There are unquestionably some issues with some of the storylines, but it’s unequivocally far more straightforward than it has been in the past.
The reveal that Christina created Maya and Peter to have people to interact with makes sense and doesn’t feel unearned. After that reveal and Bernard’s final hint to Hale about the hidden gun to shoot the MIB, there aren’t many mysteries left, other than whether or not anyone will even make it out of this mess.
I guess that overall I did like the season, but felt a little underwhelmed by the season finale, which was a bit underbaked. The season has stayed visually stunning, with consistently strong performances from our cast of characters with a few minor exceptions. But with all that said, I still do want to see how this whole mess ends, so I do hope they renew it for that one last season.
All episodes of Westworld are streaming on HBO Max.
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