Westworld Season 4 Episode 5 Review: Zhuangzi

Westworld Season 4 Episode 5 Review: Zhuangzi


It’s not entirely clear what transcendence is, but it seems to be something Hale thinks the average Host should love, only to discover that the Hosts would rather wallow in the pleasures of the flesh by cavorting with humans and making the most of her walled garden for eternity. William, who understands better than most the appeal of playing games both in the real world and in Delos parks, says that after a few centuries of playing around with the humans, they’ll lose their appeal. What else to expect after a bunch of beings created in the image of their hedonistic, violent, petty creators? True transcendence would mean giving up the eternal party, and who wants that?

Any episode of Westworld that bookends with scenes of Ed Harris talking to people about the nature of reality and free will is probably going to be a good one. He’s able to make any dialog sound good with his sonorous, dry voice and droll, vaguely amused delivery. It’s perfectly done when he’s antagonizing the two humans he sits down to dinner with; he’s a cat playing with mice too dumb to know they’re mice in the presence of a cat. It’s even better at the end of the episode, when he’s talking to his freeze-pop human self about the beauty of order in the world, and how Hale and her kind have worked hard to ensure the world is beautiful, orderly, and absolutely perfect.

It’s no wonder he’d question his place in this world, particularly after spending most of the episode thinking on free will and whether or not he’s just the sum of his code. William the Host is lost, adrift, searching for something to clue him in on whether or not he’s as free in Hale’s world as he thinks he is; William the Human is just enjoying watching himself suffer on the horns of a dilemma, relishing the thought of potentially turning one of the guards of his jail against the warden holding all the keys.

The script from Wes Humphrey and Lisa Joy doubles down on all that deliciously philosophical Westworld stuff. The whole show has been about the search for meaning, about being a square peg in a round hole world, and nowhere is that reflected more when Ed Harris is talking to Ed Harris about whether or not the Host William is as real of a person as the Human William is. As Human William says, that’s the center of the maze, isn’t it? That journey from being just a Host into being a truly intelligent artificial being capable of rising above programming and finding true sentience, whatever that means? That’s the journey Dolores and Maeve took, and they found wildly different answers about what it means to be human.

For all the fun of multiple Ed Harrises (there’s a reason “Decoherence” was probably my favorite episode of Westworld season 3), the head-screwing was also on display during the Christina/Teddy portion of the show. It’s not quite as dramatic as William’s awakening, or the awakening of Hope (Nicole Pacent) from the beginning of the episode, but it’s fitting. Dolores tried everything to awaken Teddy to the truth, only to have to reprogram him to serve a purpose rather than join her in sentience. Now, 30-something years later, he’s the one to bring her into knowledge of the wider world, and she’s the one struggling to accept the information given to her. The chemistry between James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood is so good, even when they’re at odds with one another, and Wood’s face is brilliant as she sells first disbelief, then shock, at the discoveries Teddy guides her to. It’s a lovely, happier parallel to their sad end in “Vanishing Point” and Craig William Macneill does a solid job of playing up our history with those two characters throughout the episode by weaving in familiar little moments between the two of them.

Everyone is discovering all sorts of things that they shouldn’t as Stubbs and the desert rebels sneak around New York City in search of the very same outlier that William has been sent to kill. Any time the Hosts use their control to stop everyone in their tracks, like the police investigating the massacre in the beginning of the episode, Charlotte Hale’s bored dance routine in the middle, or the scene in which all the humans turn to attack the rebels attempting to track down the outlier? Those scenes hit hard for me, and Macneill makes sure they’re effectively creepy by showing little touches like the piano player’s ragged, bloody fingertips or the way everyone moves or freezes in unison under the control of the Hosts.



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