Jason and Cristina break down Westworld season 4 episode 6 Fidelity! To thine own selves be true.

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Podcast Notes –

CRITICS:

Narratively, I can see how this season might be a little frustrating. Even though I’ve been enjoying the episodes increasingly, they have been bleak with just a glimmer of hope at the very end, as if to say, just keep watching! Keep hoping!   Our heroes are scattered and up against impossible odds. It doesn’t seem possible that they’ll be able to make a dent in Hale’s world dominance with only two episodes left in the season. We may be leading up to a cliffhanger or a reunion between Caleb and Frankie that leaves the world’s fate uncertain.

TITLE:         

Fidelity:  The degree to which an electronic device accurately reproduces its effect

faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support.

the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced.

MUSIC:

• “Love and War” – Fleurie. (Frankie talks to Maeve about dad)
• “WW Original Score – Ending Theme” – Djawadi (end credits)

PLOT

CALEB & HALE

Caleb flashes back to a memory with his daughter, running through a field (that looks a lot like Maeve and her daughter – did she give him a cornerstone to hold onto? That why it keeps him going?) Hale prompts him to wake to a white sterile room, where she tips over an hourglass filled with red sand. Asking again about Frankie, she thinks he’s not the only one who lost something and all the problem with his kind started with him – Outliers.

Unlike yours, my kind are perfect.  Perfectly immortal, perfectly rational; and yet, they’re making irrational choices. Choosing mortality, staining themselves with death.” She wants answers – when he said he could fight off the effects of the parasite because he had something she didn’t, what did he know? He’s been dead a long time – she keeps bringing his mind back into a dying body (only a few days left, then she’ll toss him away and start over again).  The only way out of this torture is to give her information and if he won’t, she’ll go after Frankie. “You made your choice, you all did.”

With time running down, Caleb sees another version of himself in the next room, cut up and bleeding. Still others in more rooms are twitching, staring, glitching.  The one next store tells him – “The only way out is death. Dying is just the beginning. You must burn. If you succeed, run – if you fail, hide.”  Caleb opens the timer and finds a needle inside, pricks himself, and immediately falls to the floor.  A host checks Caleb’s body and finding him unresponsive, clicks “Terminate Build”, causing fire to start pouring down from the ceiling.  Seeing a down arrow scratched into the metal of the floor vent below him (leaving himself clues), he opens it and drops through just in time.  On the floor below, the ashes and remnants of previous builds litter the ground. 

He proceeds through rooms with Drone hosts until he finds a handprint on the wall, following the prints to a storage room.  A drone finds him and nearly kills him, until Caleb fights back with a medical implement and stabs it several times (bleeds?) 

FLASHBACKS

• Caleb remembers waking in hospital, Uwade greeting him. – “Am I now?” he asks. (says his friend didn’t return)
• Frankie falls and gets hurt while they’re out together. He encourages her to be strong and not accept the impossible.  “The kind of person that can’t be beat, is the kind that doesn’t give up.”

Meanwhile, Hale tells Clementine that Caleb is on the run but won’t get far – “these humans and their petty defiances, everything they do is so small, it’s exhausting.” She wonders if they ever get under Clementine’s skin, but she responds that she doesn’t get close to outliers, preferring the sheep.  

Crawling through ventilation shafts, Caleb finds a seemingly dead version of himself, and two more fallen to the ground far below.  The one in the shaft stirs and urges Caleb to use him to fall safely.  He does but is fading (dying – physical?)  Making it to the roof, he rigs up a radio and sends a message to Frankie – “You’re going to win, do what I couldn’t, because you’re stronger than me. This world she made is a lie but what you have is real. Sorry I failed.”

Hale finds Caleb and says it’s a disappointment to finally hear what he had to say.  Hundreds of times she sat through the memory, waiting for a clue of what makes him special, resistant to her command.  She thought that maybe giving him hope would reveal it (let game play out), but he just wasted he shot with a worthless apology Frankie won’t hear.  But he responds that she is still going to lose.  They didn’t infect her hosts 0 they would rather die than live in her world. She quickly kills him but he has clearly gotten to her.  She surveys the world below, her arm bleeding.

Then, she returns to remove all the clues and burn all the Caleb builds.  It appears she is done with the experiment, until, we see – Build #279.

FRANKIE – PAST

A younger Frankie and Uwade work with the team to extract an outlier – J. They know he remembers his brother Daniel but his parents don’t.  They apologize that there’s nothing they can do for the ones they’ve already found.  They explain that what they do doesn’t work on all of them – he’s been asking questions and they will notice soon.  He doesn’t have much time unless he joins them.  They start to make their way out when everyone freezes and the Drones slowly approach.  The group freezes too and the act seems to be working until a fly lands on the front man and he blinks, drawing the Drone back. The group makes a run for it. 

They arrive back at a safe house and introduce J to the others and Uwade tells Frankie she was brave, her father would have been proud.  Separately, Frankie explains to J that her father had to leave and help fight the war but she always tries him on the radio.  She likes him and always wanted a brother.  But he pointedly tells her not to call him that; his real brother is gone, and so is her father, there’s no point leaving him those messages.

FRANKIE – PRESENT

In the present, Frankie approaches their base with Bernard – a small, deserted city that turns out to be the old Temperance Park.   He says they both want the same thing, to rebuild Maeve – all the answers are in her head.  But he needs supplies to do that.  He explains his familiarity with the park as it shared an architect with Westworld, where he used to work, programming the hosts.  “You gave the puppets strings long enough to strangle the world.”  But he says that was never his intent. “I didn’t always grasp the complexity of the problem; but what I’m most concerned with now is the solution”. 

He explains that being underground so long has corrupted Maeve’s control unit and they need to replace it with another one.  They place her in a tub and Bernard opens the host head to extract the pearl – they can transfer the data and he reformats the process to handle large amounts of information quickly.  Their odds are mixed – 60% of the time she’ll wake up amenable to our plan; the other 40% she wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.  She wonders how he comes up with these predictions.  The people at the park started by running the hosts in a simulation, using hats to collect data.  The tech was slow and primitive by today’s standards but would soon control the world.  Hale needed something quicker so she set up a ubiquitous system; one that could easily be camouflaged in every room of the park – mirrors.   

Knowing her friends will be there soon and they don’t have much time, Bernard stores the transferring pearls inside the piano, and works on healing Maeve’s exterior body.  Frankie reflects that the care he takes reminds her of when her mother got sick and she had to do everything for her.  She cared for her because she didn’t want her to feel more pain than necessary.  The way Bernard treats Maeve, he knew her, she wasn’t ordinary.  But the last time she saw her father, he was with Maeve and never came back.  Disdainfully, she thinks that the hosts don’t feel anything.  “You can’t love or lose fully when it’s just a choice”. 

The team and Stubbs return with the outlier, Lindsay. But they were onto them and J thinks one of their team is spying for the enemy.  C is quick to shoot Bernard, thinking he is the mole; both he and Stubbs are hosts.  Bernard tries to explain that it is complicated and they need to trust him but she has them tied up.  C says they won’t destroy Maeve until she gets all the information about her father she needs.  Then, they can get rid of all the hosts.

Privately, Bernard tells C that she has killed him many times and it doesn’t change the outcome.  The betrayer is among her friends – sometimes her girlfriend Odina, sometimes J – she’ll have to kill the person before they kill her. 

Sweeping the perimeter,  J tells C she is the only one he can trust now. C confesses she met Maeve as a kid and if there’s any chance her father is still alive, she would know.  He thinks this is a bad idea, it can only hurt her, and they will find another way.  When he goes on to say they are like family, C knows something is off (J wouldn’t call her his sister).  They begin fighting but then she hears Caleb’s message playing on the radio.  J turns his gun on her but Maeve comes up from behind and kills him. C admits – part of me blamed you but part knew that if there was a chance he was still alive, it was because of you.

CLOSER LOOK

HAMLET:

‘To thine own self be true’ is a line Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1: Scene 3.   It is spoken by King Claudius’ chief minister, Polonius as part of a speech where he is giving his son, Laertes, his blessing and advice.   ‘And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’  In the first place, Polonius is a bore, and all of the wonderful advice is probably not even being heard by his children as they know how he goes on about everything.

As well as being a bore, Polonius is an unpleasant piece of work. Immediately after making this speech, he sends someone to Paris to spy on Laertes as he enjoys his student life. Polonius also spies on his daughter, sets her up for entrapment, interferes with her romantic life, and ultimately contributes to her suicide.  Coming from Polonius, this advice to be true to oneself is pompous, hypocritical, and empty.

SPOILER SECTION:

NEXT ON:  Episode 7:  “Metanoia”   

An Ancient Greek word meaning “changing one’s mind”, may refer to:

• Metanoia (psychology), the process of experiencing a psychotic “breakdown” and subsequent, positive psychological re-building or “healing”
• Metanoia (theology), “conversion” and “reformation” or repentance. Changing one’s way of life as a result of spiritual conversion.

May come as a shock to some of them but it’s the last day for their species, time to evolve.  Bernard sees a path.