Can ‘Westworld’ Break Its Self-Defeating Loop In Season 4?

So about that Westworld Season 3 finale… We could break down the meaning behind the two post-credits scenes — one which kills a major character onscreen and replaces him with a host copy — or ruminate on how it was weird that Maeve (Thandie Newton) brought a samurai sword to a gunfight. But what’s more interesting than looking at Easter Eggs and parsing out twists is looking at how the show has progressed in the last three years.

Westworld‘s Season 3 premiere promised a bold, pulpy new chapter set in “the real world.” But halfway through the season, Westworld stumbled. It started leaning on incomprehensible twists, introducing a chaotic amount of Deus Ex Machina, and rebooted whole character arcs with a switch. In fact, when you think about it, every season of Westworld has done this. Every year the show starts confidently, teasing a creative new direction, before running out of steam mid-season and delivering a disappointing finale. In the end, Westworld might think it’s devoted to the idea of free will, but its writers, themselves, are stuck in the same shitty loops.

From the beginning, Westworld has been one of HBO’s most ambitious shows. Set in a future Western-themed amusement park where wealthy humans, or “guests,” can interact with robots who passed for human called “hosts,” it looked at the ethics of AI. Between the lavish production value, star-studded cast, and bonkers big robot orgies, Westworld was obviously gunning to be zeitgeist-devouring successor to Game of Thrones.

However, Westworld soon became overwhelmed by its focus on its puzzles. The Man in Black’s (Ed Harris) obsession with winning a secret game he found embedded in the park aside, the show sacrificed character development and straight-forward emotional arcs for mind-bending timeline reveals and insane twists that undercut its own narrative. When Westworld Season 2 premiered, it seemed that the showrunners had found a way to add actual stakes with human characters like Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) fighting for their lives. But Hale was also replaced with a host at the end of Season 2, and Westworld revealed that the part was actually collecting data on the guests in order to recreate them as immortal AI.

Once again, Westworld Season 3 opened with an arresting premiere that seemed to give the show a jolt of humanity: Aaron Paul’s Caleb was a new human ally for Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in the real world. But wouldn’t you know it, by season’s end, it’s revealed that he’s not who he thinks he is and that Dolores chose him to take over as leader of the rebellion because, uh, he chose not to rape her in a war games park scenario?

Through it all, Westworld seems to value puzzles more than plot, needle drops more than dialogue, and action sequences more than characters. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about Westworld is how it plays fast and loose with its characters, rebooting hosts with new personalities and bringing just about everyone back from the dead. This means that there are literally no stakes in Westworld. In fact, if you step back, each season has seen most of the characters working at the behest of genius men or insidious robots. For a show devoted to the idea of people fighting for their free will, they can’t seem to give it to their own characters.

The super irritating part about this is I feel like I’ve written this Westworld piece before. At the end of Westworld Season 1, I wrote an incensed post listing all the ways the finale upset me. But it all came down to this: “The most impressive puzzle in the world will never be more interesting than a compelling human protagonist just dealing with stuff.” Westworld is stuck in its own loop and I highly doubt at this point creators Jonathan Nolan or Lisa Joy care about making a show that cares about its characters.

I hate that Westworld keeps disappointing me season after season because I want to love it so much. The stars continue to give riveting performances and the cinematography only gets more dazzling year after year. The concept is urgent and fascinating: when tech companies control our data, does that also mean they control our freedom? Unfortunately, it’s hard to care about a show for more than three seasons if there are no consistent three-dimensional characters to pin your hopes and fears on.

Instead, watching Westworld has become an exercise in masochism: it’s like watching a video game when someone else is holding the controls, but they don’t know how the buttons work to get to the next level.

Where to stream Westworld