WW – Westworld S4 E4 Generation Loss

Jason and Cristina break down Westworld season 4 episode 4 Generation Loss! In this action packed episode timelines collide, a weapon found, and only outliers remain?

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Podcast Notes –

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne?”

CRITICS: Less telling us what has happened and more showing us what’s happening, please!… That said, “Generation Loss” does push the story forward to a compelling place and gives us a lot to chew on.

“Generation Loss” brought two big storylines together (while also tethering the third) in an action-packed, emotional ride filled with harrowing answers and harsh revelations.”

.3 million viewers per episode

TITLE

Generation loss is the loss of quality between subsequent copies or transcodes of data. Anything that reduces the quality of the representation when copying, and would cause further reduction in quality on making a copy of the copy, can be considered a form of generation loss. File size increases are a common result of generation loss, as the introduction of artifacts may actually increase the entropy of the data through each generation.

MUSIC

• “Pink & White” – Frank Ocean – Djawadi (Christina’s date at restaurant)
• “Sweetwater Theme” (Jazz riff) – Djawadi (Maeve & Caleb escape park)
• “Control Theme” –Djawadi (end of episode)

PLOT

CHRISTINA

Maya tells Christina about her nightmares – flies interrupting a family picnic when she was younger and swarming her parents, then herself.  Christina hasn’t been sleeping either and was up late again painting, what turns out to be an image covered with the tower.  “Does it look like anything to you?” she asks.  But Maya is more concerned with needing a night off and persuades Christina to come. 

(keeps saying she needs a night off but they don’t ever spend it together, just setting Christina up on dates – that doesn’t seem odd to her?)

She is introduced to her date, Teddy, who starts off trying to look chivalrous as usual.  Christina is pleasantly surprised; a little wary when he knows about her work dedication, but he explains he also used to live like that – the rinse and repeat routine, like a train circling the smallest track.  He feels they’ve known each other for lifetimes and she senses he is familiar. Some of the most unbelievable things turn out to be true and the things that feel the most real are nothing but stories we tell ourselves.  He toasts her and her path, wherever it leads.

BERNARD

Out in the desert, J thinks C has lost objectivity and won’t risk his men to follow her myth with Bernard.  They have a more important task – to extract the new outlier they found.  C’s partner steps up to volunteer, allowing C to go on the mission with Bernard.  But J is keeping Stubbs as collateral. 

Taking them to a spot in the desert, C notices a drone coming and they all begin to take cover over tan tarps that hides their presence from the camera tracing their signature.  Noticing a beetle and clearly lost in a thought (which variation is this), C needs to save him just in time.  He thinks what they’re looking for is just over that ridge – he knows the weapon is here because he tried everywhere else first.

            Why does no one question all the weird things he is saying?

Bernard says most of the others don’t really believe there’s a weapon but he knows C has her own reasons for digging, she’s looking for her father.  She’s told herself he was dead since she was a child, but could never really believe it.  If it did happen, they will find a body here.  After uncovering the sand, they don’t find Caleb but they do locate the weapon Bernard promised – Maeve’s body.

            Why didn’t Hale come looking for it here before?

MAEVE & CALEB

In a flashback, we see the experience at the lighthouse between Maeve and Caleb.  They are there to disable the last of Rehoboam’s outposts.  Caleb wonders what happens after the war is over and what a regular life looks like for them.  Inside, they find the device hanging from the center and set up explosives to take it down.  They make it out and away from security btu Caleb is badly injured.  Maeve’s helps him to the beach where it looks like he will die.  She hacks into his Limbic to show him what freedom looks like (we see images in the field with her daughter).

Distantly, Caleb wakes to the lab room floor where the flies attacked, Hale telling him she’s going to do this to all mankind.  While he can’t resist, she didn’t kill his family (there alive out there somewhere for now), but soon it won’t matter because everyone will be under her control.  The park was always about turning the guests into carriers (“hosts”) for her disease.  The super-spreader event of the century, he is part of the first wave.  The hosts that killed themselves were just her ironing out the kinks, she wants to keep these humans around to use them. Hearing the droning sound, Caleb is slowly being brought over to it. 

Meanwhile, realizing the MIB is a host now, Maeve fights him.  “Hale made some upgrades, you can’t control me now”.  But it turns out Maeve was hacking the Sound System.  The MIB is temporarily disabled, Caleb overcomes and gets control of Hale, and they take her captive.  Caleb tells her he’s infected and they need to get the parasite out and stop Hale before it can spread further.  He thinks if they can get to the extraction point, his boys can pick them up outside the park.  Hale thinks they’ll never make it and Maeve could have done it on her own (why does she keep coming back for Caleb; she’s too sentimental).  When the sound comes next, Caleb is almost overtaken but controls it.  A mob begins coming after them, stabbing Caleb in the side.  But Maeve thinks she’s lived these loops 1,000 times and no one knows the game better than her.  They steal a Bootleg Moonshine Truck (Laundry) and make their way to the outskirts. 

While driving, Maeve remembers Caleb almost dying the last time.  He thought she had disappeared then but she corrects him – she sat at his bedside for weeks, fearing the worst, confronting mortality of his kind for the first time (what about Lee?).   Our kind are locked in a perpetual struggle; I wanted you to do more than fight to survive, I wanted you to have something to fight for.  She had planned to spend eternity with her daughter but if she stayed out of sight, no harm would come to Caleb, and he might have a chance at a real life.  So she left and went into hiding but she got curious one day; it was her reaching out through the grid to find him that led Hale to them. 

Coming to the checkpoint, they arrive at a large quarry with a sign that says “Park Expansion Project” on front (to show her continuing to build in the desert). The MIB approaches shooting and Maeve holds him off while Caleb goes inside the building to call his men on the radio.  After sending their coordinates, Hale wonders if he feels the burden of his consciousness being released.  She orders him to fire the gun at Maeve but at the last minute he resists, shooting the MIB.  But he still gets to Maeve, stabbing her.  Near death, Maeve makes a choose – she sets off the explosives around the yard to kill them both.  Caleb watches, screaming, as a helicopter approaches.  He tells Hale he won’t rest until everything she built is destroyed, he won’t let his daughter grow up in a world controlled by her.  Hale, regretting the loss of Maeve, something special (she can always rebuild the MIB), prompts Caleb to remember – where he is, what happened in this moment.  She says he died right here.

Hale tells Caleb this is part of an interview to establish a baseline – Fidelity.  This is the 278^th version of him; it’s been 23 years since he died in the park.  The parasite worked on adults initially but there was always resistance.  At a certain age, their brains become more rigid and difficult to change.  Fortunately, that was not the case with children (so good at taking orders); it was seamless with them, the parasite growing in symbiosis with their minds.  It took a generation for them to mature and her to gain complete control over the world.   He starts to see the truth – sitting in a room with Hale being questioned. 

He runs outside of the building (Olympiad Entertainment), and looks up to see a huge tower in the middle of the city.  Suddenly, everyone freezes, and Caleb looks around to see Hale with her hand raised.  She won. “Welcome to my world”. 

CLOSER LOOK:

EL FARO VIEJO

El Faro Viejo, a 19^th century lighthouse sits high on the dunes along the Pacific Coast of Cabo San Lucas within the Quivira Golf Course. Renovations are being made around the old lighthouse making it only accessible with a previous reservation for a guided visit in very strict hours

Situated where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific Ocean, a fortress-like lighthouse dates to 1905 and is the oldest structures in Cabo San Lucas, now a National Historic Monument. Perched at the edge of a cliff more than 200 feet above the surf.

They had to use soft explosions and CGI so as not to hurt the building.  Some of the largest effects is the glass exploding from the Hale towers.  Went through and scanned all the rooms to track in the glass with CG.  Glass always tricky with special effects. 

SPOILER SECTION:

NEXT ON:  Episode 5:  “Zhuangzi”

Zhuangzi is the pivotal figure in Classical Philosophical Daoism. The Zhuangzi is a compilation of his and others’ writings at the pinnacle of the philosophically subtle Classical period in China (5th–3rd century BC). The period was marked by humanist and naturalist reflections on normativity shaped by the metaphor of a dào—a social or a natural path.