As of this writing, season 4 of HBO’s Westworld is over, and we await word as to whether season 5, reputed to be the show’s last, will be green-lit.

Spoilers ahead:

Given that the season ends with the deaths of (nearly) all main characters, not to mention the entire human/augmented human race(s), the idea that we would continue on is a bit absurd. Presumably the show will happen within “The Sublime,” the show’s version of robot heaven. Dolores, made to suffer, is our only survivor that we know of for sure, and it seems that she has resolved to relive her experiences, perhaps to try and understand how she can possibly rectify the destructive natures of human and host alike. Conveniently, the Hoover Dam, which in season 4 is a short drive from Manhattan, has been turned into a server farm with unlimited hydroelectric power to support the open-ended adventures of Dolores in The Sublime, creating her world as she sees fit, or finding Teddy, “her cornerstone,” (a rough analogue for the Freudian concept of a founding trauma, a memory so profound that it becomes an anchor for all other features of subjectivity or subjecthood or subjection…. whatever is handy, as we will see).

The first season of the series was remarkable. It was visually stunning – often shocking – even apart from the typical HBO penchant for gratuitous nudity and buckets of fake blood. It brought up some really mind-bending ideas around AI, agency, and the self, all pertinent questions for my research and which I attempt to address in my dissertation. The plot twists were complex and sophisticated, but didn’t feel like obfuscation or cheap shots, nor did they feel stilted the way that, for instance, Christopher Nolan and M. Night Shamalan’s films always do to me; films like Inception and The Village often seem like slight-of-hand but with the magician explaining the trick as he does it, on the one hand a cheap gimmick, but on the other one that justifies itself and makes viewers feel self-congratulatory over their ability to understand something so complex. Anyhow, the parallel time trick was well-executed and meaningful, something which season 2 tried to recreate and multiply. For me, it reached just a bit too far, and what had been a welcome twist in season 1 simply became a chore in season 2 as the various narrative threads wove together to create a bizarre tapestry.

The third season felt like a hard reset. We leave the park and deal instead with Delos’s real, insidious, hidden agenda: the prediction of individual behavior. What is free will if a computer knows what you are likely to do, and the powers that be do their best to corral potential free-thinkers before they become a threat to business as usual? Here, the alliances start to get way, way, too complicated, and the seeds of season 4’s myriad shortcomings are sown. With all of these shifts in allegiances between guest and host alike come deep shifts in character and perspective. These changes sometimes left me, at least, feeling confused and perhaps a little cheated. The season had plenty of redeeming qualities, however: Vincent Cassel as the villain, a reframing of the existential stakes, beautiful scifi environments, and fulfilling action sequences to name but a few of these things.

So for season 4, the natural move would be to combine every single philosophical, ethical, or existential issue of the preceding 24 episodes, add in a secret time shift or two, plus multiple realities that interact (when convenient, but not when it’s dramatically useful for them to remain apart), and make the characters even more malleable and prone to massive, massive reversals. Well, for me this became an issue. Again, the season actually has plenty of redeeming elements: music is used in a more sophisticated way to gird, rather than simply accentuate, the plot, the Frankie storyline was nice, and there were other subtleties that made the show feel more well executed in general. What I take issue with was what, precisely, was being executed.

The title of this post refers to how the season constructs itself in a metafictional way. It refuses to take a side, even provisionally, on how it will treat the multiple existential questions it raises. Instead, it loses its internal self-consistency, the cardinal sin of plot since before Aristotle, to keep its narrative hurtling toward armageddon. Are the hosts’ personalities predetermined and immutable as a result of their programming? Yes. But also no, if it means that Caleb, as a digital copy of himself, can shed light on human nature for Charlotte, or if suspending this qualification will allow drama between William and his synthetic double, who himself has a crisis of identity. The reversals continue on the level of character. Bernard does a lot of work making the sympathetic Maeve seem likely to abandon the cause (she doesn’t), and in the end Charlotte does abandon hers to become an eleventh-hour ally of Bernard and company. So why did she spend two seasons becoming increasingly power-hungry and villainous? What a waste…

As a counter-example, take the contradiction-rich territory of time travel narratives. The best time travel movies do one of two things: they either provide the audience with an explanation of what will happen when a contradiction occurs – branching timelines, holes in space/time, if you touch your past self you both explode, or even embracing nonlinear notions of time as in Arrival – or they acknowledge how dicy the territory is in the first place. For this last, see Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which both break the fourth wall to ask audiences to simply suspend their disbelief. I’ll take that over trying to simply have it both ways within the same storyworld, and it would be one thing if it were “both” ways, as in “all of two ways,” but Westworld season 4 wants to have multiple shades of ways, mutually contradictory at times, and completely inconsistent. Honestly, it leaves me questioning whether the writers didn’t care or whether they reveled a bit in the sheer insanity of it all, and this has left me ultimately questioning myself. Am I being unfair, analyzing the show to an obnoxious degree and nit-picking? If the reviews for the final episode are any indication, these issues might be more than just a world of my own creation.