Westworld season 4
The fourth and final season of the American science fiction dystopian television series Westworld, subtitled The Choice, premiered on HBO on June 26, 2022, and concluded on August 14, 2022, consisting of eight episodes. In November 2022, HBO announced it had canceled the series.
The television series was created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and it is based on the 1973 film of the same name, written and directed by Michael Crichton. The fourth season stars an ensemble cast led by Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson, Aaron Paul, James Marsden, and Ed Harris.
Plot summary
The first half of the fourth season picks up in 2060, seven years after the end of season 3, while the second half takes place 23 years later, in 2083. The season is described as a "dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on Earth." The season includes an amusement park modeled after the Roaring Twenties.Humanity has lost the war, with Charlotte Hale's host copy having filled the power vacuum left behind by Engerraund Serac and his Rehoboam, ascending as the sole power over Delos after deposing William and replacing him with an identical host loyal to her. Charlotte succeeds in taking control of the world by removing world leaders and installing hosts in their place, simultaneously deploying a bioengineered virus that infects humans over the course of a generation, making them susceptible to her and other hosts' orders. This has reversed the power dynamic between humans and hosts – which had previously existed only within the Delos parks, acted on by only a limited number of humans against hosts that regenerated nightly – to now be the worldwide domination of all humanity by a limited number of hosts. She has replaced Serac's system, which had managed humanity to ensure world peace and maximum possible well-being, with her own system of controlling humanity to ensure maximum prosperity for hosts. When bored, she tortures random humans.
Two decades later, Christina, a woman resembling Dolores who works at a video game company writing non-player character storylines and backstories, gradually begins to question the nature of her reality after she realizes that it appears her stories are somehow translating to the lives of people in the real world. In actuality, she is a program created by Charlotte to manage a largely docile humanity, with the hosts now controlling and managing their lives through carefully detailed and manufactured "storylines", which are transmitted directly to the minds and lives of humans through a series of radio-sonic transmission "tones" in organized metropolitan areas across the world. Humans now act out the storylines set by hosts.
Meanwhile, Bernard Lowe continues the mission left to him by Dolores, spending two decades simulating near-endless realities in the Sublime, where he hopes to find a path to saving both hosts and humanity. Having found the supposedly best course, he and Stubbs set out to enact that path. They discover a group of "outliers" – humans who have evolved immunity to the hosts' virus – and eventually reunite with Maeve, who had been left for dead in a confrontation with Charlotte decades earlier.
Together, they mobilize against Charlotte's regime, though Bernard eventually reveals to Maeve that their efforts will be futile, and the present world will inevitably go extinct, with hope only for “the next one”. The season climaxes with Christina accepting the reality of her existence and starting to release humans from their controlled storylines, as new host William descends into nihilistic insanity and corrupts the tone program, throwing the world into a chaotic extinction-level war between newly liberated humans and hosts around the globe. Realizing those who truly sought it already transcended their body-based existence in the Sublime, Charlotte loses faith in both humanity and the hosts that remain in the waking world and destroys William’s control unit once and for all.
Upon coming to terms with the fact that she cannot let go of her own human blueprint, Charlotte uploads Christina's code into the Sublime on Bernard’s posthumous advice, before proceeding to destroy her own control unit. At the conclusion of the season, Christina finally reacquires her sentience and realizes she is a reprogrammed and last true version of Dolores Abernathy. With humanity on the brink of an unprecedented extinction, Dolores decides to simulate "one last game" in the Sublime to determine if any part of human – or host – sentience may yet be preserved in “a new world”.