Westworld Season 4 Episode 6 sets up the penultimate episode with a couple of twists here and there. As always the show is set up with easter eggs that callback to earlier episodes and throughout this, we’re gonna be breaking them all down.
Questioning Reality
We open in New York and see the first meeting of Frankie and J. At this point, the parasites have infected everyone and the outliers like him have started to question the nature of their reality. Now we saw this heavily throughout last week’s episode with the rescue mission carried out by the Rebels. Here we met Lindsay who was seemingly saved by J though we’ll get into the truth of this down the line. This very much gave us an idea of how the outliers slowly realise that something is wrong with the world and then the rebels have a short window to pull them out. I’m unsure how they learn about this but they clearly have some way to monitor the park and all its systems. It might just be a case of them breaking their loops which we now know are designed by Christina.
Now Frankie approaches J and she brings up his brother Daniel. Turns out that he was an outlier too who was taken away and this memory was erased from his parent’s minds.
This is very similar to Maeve who had the memory of her daughter removed after her loop was changed. However, like Maeve, J still had flashes of him and because of this its set off several red flags in the park surveillance. Frankie takes him to her mother Uwade who reveals that Drones are coming to shut him down.
Shut Down
As they try to get out the tower sounds off and everyone freezes including a pair having a picnic. This reminded me a lot of the nightmare we heard from Maya about how the flies swarmed her when she was out with her family and potentially this could be based on that.
Children sit in their swings with rictus grins and overall it’s a creepy scene that’s made even worse by the arrival of the drones.
Clearly, the flies that they work on must have hitched a ride as we see one appear out of nowhere and attach itself to one of the rebels.
The imagery of flies crawling across someone’s face happened with Dolores in Season 1 as well as Jim Navarro in this one.
Uwade and co make a break for it and we see how the surroundings change for the rebels. Gone are the pristine and spotless cities and instead they hide out in run-down homes with broken fences and destroyed trees. Lots of Matrix vibes here with this being the real world and the city being the simulation. Up the stairs, we can also catch a graffiti tag that says Free Free Will which calls back to the same wording that was used outside Caleb’s house.
Frankie goes to her radio in an attempt to reach out to her father on a CB radio which we’ve seen her do throughout the season. This becomes very important later on and it’s a routine she’s carried out for most of her life. At this point, she also drops this line about wanting a brother to which J says.
“I’m not your brother and there’s no point leaving these messages. Your dad is gone.”
This ends up giving away the host version of him later on who tries to act overly nice whereas this guy is a bit of a d**k.
Unpredictable Frankie
Cut to Frankie and Bernard who are currently escorting Maeve to Temperance.
Bernard drops an interesting line about Frankie.
“I never quite know what you’ll do next.”
Now this means that she’s truly an Outlier as it’s impossible to predict what she’s going to do. This was mirrored in Caleb during Season 3 and the reason that Serac basically had him reformatted is that Rehoboam was unable to predict his actions. Now with her being the child of an outlier, she isn’t really in the system as he was unpredictable so therefore his offspring would be too. Potentially Rehoboam was used as a way to infect people with the parasites and the outliers that may also be carried over as the outliers here.
Caleb’s Memories
After the title sequence, we cut to a memory of Caleb and Frankie holding hands as they walk through a field together. We later see how this happy memory inspires the recreation of Caleb to push further than he’s ever gone before. Now, this idea of walking through a field holding hands with a daughter figure is of course something that’s also been reflected in Maeve. We too have had visions of her doing this in the recent entries and the sublime itself is also a golden field like what we have here.
Charlotte’s Games
At this point though Hale tells him to wake up.
This is something that she later repeats at the end and it very much starts a new loop for her to study him. This is revealed to be a game which Caleb actually guesses instantly.
Now Charlotte mocks him for constantly bringing up his daughter and she says he’s not the only person who lost someone.
This is likely referring to Charlotte’s child and ex from Season 3, who ended up being killed whilst she survived.
She’s desperate to know why so many of her hosts end their own lives when they come into contact with the Outliers and it makes sense why she instructs them not to talk with those that become targets. However, Hope did, as did William, and slowly they seem to realise that they don’t find enjoyment in killing humans. They’d also rather die than be at the mercy of Hale and would rather no longer exist than be stuck inside this prison of her making that chains both the humans and also the hosts.
Hale has spent a lot of time putting things in place so that Caleb runs through a simulation in which he finally sends out a message to Frankie so she can see if provides any insight. Caleb refuses to talk and thus she has to concoct this plan. She even plants the idea that Frankie is alive in his head which sends him off on his quest.
Now the booth that they’re in among the cylindrical structures is also very similar to the one James Delos was stuck inside during the fidelity test.
There are further nods to this with the version of Caleb that has cut up his own face. During Season 2 both Elsie and Bernard came across a version of him that had scratched away at his face too echoing the horror that we see here. Hale is also wearing all black which is the same colour that William used to have on when he went running through the tests with Delos.
Multiple Calebs
As Hale exits the room we can see a control panel with 278 written on it which is a nice little detail as she brings in 279 at the end.
She unfrosts the glass and at this point, we see the other Calebs. There are hints towards how further along they are due to the quote-unquote ‘hourglass’ and where the sand is in it. The more they deteriorate the more they start to self-harm and this system moves in a circular motion to place the oldest and the newest in cases beside each other.
Now Hale also self-harms throughout by scratching her arm. However, I don’t think that this shows she’s deteriorating, more so it’s calling back to Season 3 in which she used to do the same thing.
The beat-up Caleb tells him how to escape and he also hints at the other loops.
Now Caleb discovers a needle in the hourglass that knocks him unconscious. The Drone comes in and attempts to incinerate him but he manages to escape.
I’m guessing all this is what plays on the credits scene, namely how it ends. Similar to what we have here we had several people inside of cylinders that ended up burning up which I think this scene is meant to hint towards.
In Caleb’s dream, he recalls how he met Uwade which is where Maeve left him. She realised that he’d found happiness and Uwade is revealed to be his nurse. This was hinted at when Maeve dropped him off due to her fixing his drip.
Great cut of the torch scene being cut with the creepy, creepy Drone and I’ll be honest, I’ve woke up to worse. She tried to kill me too, having that.
Anyway, Caleb escapes through a vent in the floor and it begins a game that’s hinted towards due to an arrow being scratched on the metal. At the bottom, he finds a burned corpse along with ashes which we are the ones who weren’t lucky enough to make it through this part.
Temperance
Cut to Temperance which is now completely run down and covered in dust. This actually appeared as a vision to Bernard when he was in the sublime and other moments in that had the Hoover Damme servers hinting towards where his quest may be going.
They pass a shop called the Oyster Bar and if you cast your mind back to episode 4, this is actually where Maeve and Caleb led Charlotte past when they made a break for it.
We can also catch the Butterfly tavern in the background and Westworld this was called the Mariposa which translates to Butterfly.
Using the same service elevator that Maeve and co escaped out of Bernard leads Frankie down into the hidden floor which was used as a game itself. This was one of the main places that were used to create super spreaders and Bernard says that this place wasn’t built to last.
Hale and William had it thrown up to attract people and rather than being something they could run for a long time they used it as a front to enact their endgame.
They find what I believe is the fake Hector and pull out his pearl as a way to duplicate Maeve. I love this detail as Hector, of course, saved Maeve at several points during the earlier seasons so having him also be the one that brings her back is a nice carryover.
Resurrecting Maeve
Bernard starts the host tank up and though this might be a reach, I got a lot of flashes here of when he used to work for the synthetic meat farm back in episode 3. I think that at the time they purposely used that iconography to show how Bernard had moved from one synthetic meat farm to the next and it’s sort of like poetry they rhyme.
Now they start to resurrect her in the Butterfly tavern which too has a lot of symbolism as it’s where Maeve was reborn in Westworld when her loop was changed to remove her daughter. Now whereas Westworld used to monitor and copy people’s brains by using the hats, Hale developed a much faster way to copy guests in this park that wasn’t designed to have a long lifespan.
Hidden behind mirrors these monitored people and helped to make duplicates which explains why she would easily create exact duplicates of people.
Bernard also says the phrase through the looking glass, a nod to Alice in Wonderland that was too brought up in the Matrix to talk about going on the other side of the mirror. In the source material, this was meant to signify someone passing into another world which mirrors the dual ones in this season.
Using the tech in it they’ll be able to copy Maeve across quicker and at the poker table they put her into Hectors.
After hiding the pearls Bernard starts to fix Maeve with the pen that was used in Westworld to heal the hosts. Frankie compares this to taking care of her own mother who couldn’t get medical attention due to the world being overrun by machines.
At this point, the rest of the group arrives in a drop-ship similar to the one Serac used to fly in. I couldn’t see it for a while but it’s there if you look close enough.
Ey, sometimes the jokes are pretty s**t.
Who’s the Host?
Now the big mystery around this part of the episode revolves around which one of the rebels is a host. However, if you were paying attention last week then you’ll know that it was Jay because he was the only one that went off on his own. They suspect that someone leaked their attack to Hale who is thought to be Bernard. He says it’s complicated and due to him not knowing who was swapped out he likely did do this because of what it would lead to. Remember, Bernard is basically a version of Rehoboam at this point that is constantly working the angles to get on the path in which humanity ends up saved.
It’s a bit of a theory, but he likely leaked the info to Hale and then she leaked the news about the outlier to the rebels so that they come in and get Lindsay out. Hale could then swap whichever one broke off.
Westworld Data
Now going forward as mentioned earlier, Bernard’s vision could end up leading him to the Hoover Damme which is where all the data from Westworld was kept in servers by the original Hale. Halores wants access to this but she doesn’t have the passwords. However, a person who may is Bernard because he gained access to it at the end of Season 3. In the Sublime, there would be a copy of Hale because she accessed the park and thus this could have told him. He also, of course, can run through every possibility so potentially he’d already just been able to work out the passwords.
This place would also have a copy of Caleb due to him doing training exercises as part of the army. So now that the pieces have fallen in place for Frankie to learn her dad is alive it might end up leading to them going there.
Might not though and as always that’s the end of theory time theory time theory time.
Frankie Attacks
Frankie shoots Bernard, rounds up the others and holds Bernard and Stubbs hostage. He basically goes through the possibilities of people and how in some realities it’s different members of the group. As we’ve kinda touched upon this is because Hale would’ve swapped out whoever went off but Bernard couldn’t have known for definite.
Jay enforces the feelings of paranoia but I would’ve just been like ‘ey mate, remember that time you didn’t like and subscribe’ and if you said ‘yeah’ I’d know it wasn’t you cos you always do.’
She suspects her girlfriend a bit after she doesn’t know why she’s resurrecting Maeve and also when she probes about where her brain is.
At Olympiad
Back with Caleb, we watch as he makes his way through the Olympiad building. We even see the room Hale tested for fidelity in as well as a Drone working on the host processing unit that the one we meet at the end is currently being processed in. He ends up fighting this but not before discovering some more clues that this has all happened before.
There are several hand prints on the walls, a cupboard full of his clothes along with more wedding rings than Elizabeth Taylor…one for the dads, that one.
This is hinted at being a game again by how relaxed Hale is when we cut to her in the next scene with Clementine. She’s just waiting for it to play out and she looks at the chair, which in retrospect is her just waiting for the whole thing to culminate rather than wondering where Caleb is.
Caleb’s Escape
Doing his best John Mclane impression Caleb crawls through the vents and he comes face to face with a version of himself. On the floor are two others which we can tell a lot by the blood stains. The first one is stationary whereas we can see from the other one that he crawled forward.
When using the other to cushion his fall the duplicate ends up with a similar blood pattern to the one that seems localised showing how these prior two likely came down together.
Caleb finally makes it to the roof.
Back in Temperance, J gives himself away by saying this. “you’re my family, you’re like a sister to me”
It leads to a big fight whilst Caleb sends out his message to Frankie. Really emotional scene in which we can see him shaking as he starts to break down. He delivers a very important line here that also hints at why Hosts are taking themselves out rather than staying under Hale’s control.
Host’s Reality
I really think its a case of the hosts realising that even though they’ve escaped everything they’re stuck in this manufactured reality. Caleb could’ve resisted the parasite because he had something real. He lived off-grid, didn’t seem that materialistic and wasn’t really a slave to the societal systems that most humans were. Calling back to the other point before, if the parasites are artificial they may have been created using elements of Rehoboam to control people which again, he’s not really part of. I think the reasoning behind how they work will be a big point of contention and who knows, they might not even bother explaining it. I think just in the same way that midichlorians weren’t really needed to explain how the force worked that we don’t really need it in the case of the parasite.
Now the radio message somewhat reaches Frankie and though she doesn’t hear all of it it’s enough to let her know her father is alive. She of course met Maeve when she was a child and she saves her from Host Jay.
What’s Next?
They’re likely gonna head to New York next and I do think that Maeve will be able to destroy the tower due to her setting off the miniature one in Temperance. This sent the hosts into agony and I think that she’ll end up going there next or they could head out to the Damme.
Either way, I am loving this season so far and we close out with a great ending in which Hale kills the Caleb we’ve been following this episode.
Hale ends up wiping out all the Calebs through by using fire which is similar to how James Delos was finally exterminated. She returns to the room to find Caleb hunched over like he’d just been shot and once more she tells him to wake up.
The fidelity tests continue which ties into the title of this episode. This idea of the loop is of course seen in Caleb however it’s also very much seen in Hale too. Though she’s completely unaware of it she’s actually going through her own loop here of continuing this exercise once more, probably in the hopes of getting a different result or learning more about what’s going on.
It really is a great way to end it showing that all the hosts are stuck in cycles whether they believe it or not. Just in the same way that Hale self harmsself-harms, the hosts that come across the outliers do too and yet she’s unable to understand why they do it.
Hale herself spends lots of time with Outliers but she cants grasp what’s going on with them which makes for an excellent way to wrap up this entry.
We have just two episodes left now and I can’t wait to see what happens with them but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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