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Spoilers follow for season 4 of west worldincluding season finale “Que Será, Será”, which aired on August 14.

Did you hear that? west world nice again? It is! And the fourth season finale, “Que Será, Será,” featured many of the reasons why. Charlotte Hale wears her own take on an all-black leather Sheet outfit and snap at the creepy meat robots who upgrade her skeleton to leave her face alone: exciting! Dolores and Teddy are finally making out – good for them! Jonathan Tucker returns for a five-second retaliation for his gunslinger guest character from past seasons: I screamed!

There is still a lot of lengthy “What is reality?” philosophize, but the tone is lighter, the murder and chaos is more comical, and video game plotting is easier to follow. So simple in fact that I think some characters actually die at the end of “Que Será, Será,” which involves a potential fifth (and final?) season spent in robot Heaven, aka the Sublime. Am I being tricked? Possibly. Let’s see who could really be dead, who certainly wasn’t, and who could somehow be brought back, if we return to west world.


Shoutout to these two colleagues who became mortal enemies, a very natural development for a few megalomaniacs whose vision of the future was never as synergistic as they had hoped. (As an aside: are these two simply the most unnecessary startup you’ve ever seen? Like a buggy app that crashes your phone instantly? Discuss.) west world Charlotte and William used this season to scrutinize what would happen if the worst person you know became indestructible, and the result was fascinating. These characters never really wanted the same thing for the hosts and the people, but they chafed at the same restrictions and limitations, and their shared hatred of being controlled made them seem like allies.

By the end, their ideological differences were too great, but kudos to Charlotte for accepting Bernard’s help and making her believe in a future, no matter how bad or good, about William’s desire for no future at all. I’ll go ahead and say that Charlotte crushing William’s pearl and then crushing her own pearl, coupled with Host William killing Human William, means these characters are off the board for good. Tessa Thompson is fully booked and busy and Ed Harris has earned enough “WTF am I doing for a paycheck?” faces for life, so let them go and be free. At least we’ll always have this wonderfully horrible moment when west world joined HBO’s human furniture collection:



I know Bernard Stubbs gave that somber goodbye, but note that Clementine just stabbed him in the eye during that pharmacy fight – she didn’t remove or damage his pearl, and that means there’s hope for the future. Luke Hemsworth spent three seasons frowning, but who knew this man was capable of such comedic timing and solid sarcastic line deliveries? Give us more of that! Let Stubbs be crazy, I say!


As for Cal, is west world Are you really just gonna leave Aaron Paul on that pier? That is unacceptable. Give my husband the 280th version of his body and let him live! He has been reunited with daughter Frankie, who will apparently be fine now that she sails to the Undying Lands or wherever the other human outliers go, and he knows that his wife Uwade died of cancer while being held hostage. He has entangled his human ties, so get a new host body and let him join the revolution in the Sublime or whatever. Don’t he and Maeve deserve a better ending than what they got?


Speaking of Maeve, is that for real? She and Bernard were shot in the head by William and that’s… all? We knew from the conversation in the Sublime between Bernard and Zahn McClarnon’s Akecheta that Bernard had gone through every simulation trying to find a way to save this world, and that destruction and collapse came up again and again. It’s not that west world wasn’t preparing us for a screw-up outcome, but it’s pretty anticlimactic for William and Maeve to just languish outside the Tower as we see the meat robots can get Charlotte back and make her as good as new. to make. So if William didn’t? actually shoot them all three in a way that destroyed their pearls, I guess that means what version of Maeve and Bernard might stay alive somewhere, and maybe they’ll make it to Sublime. If I don’t see a pearl being smashed, which we don’t see for either character, I’m going to harbor a little hope – especially since Thandiwe Newton’s ferocity has been so integral to west world for so long.


There is no doubt about this, although I do not understand all the details of what Charlotte did to Dolores. Was Delores’ Pearl in the Tower just for safekeeping, and Charlotte allowed Dolores to live in her own imagined world as Christina, just to… pass the time? One of those little games that Charlotte likes to play, I presume? Mine are Wordle, Actorle and Framed, but who am I to judge others! Anyway, Christina’s minimalist wardrobe and brown hair reverts to Dolores’ blue western dress and blonde hair when she ventures into the Sublime, so I think we’re now back to a confident version of the character, someone ready to her final test on – humanity? Awareness? I really can’t explain this show anymore. But it sure is fun!