I have mixed feelings on the ending of Westworld season four, but at the same time could not see where it was going otherwise. They brought it mostly full circle with a lot of sudden and sacrificial if not tragic deaths and or deactivations. It is clearly stated humanity will go extinct and since a person is more than just a consciousness encoded into flesh, running a simulation to test whether or not the hosts and humans alike are deserving of survival is now redundant.
The hosts who made it into the sublime should not have to be retested and the program that is Deloris is overpowered if she can force this.
The humans are scanned copies and now without physical bodies in a simulation, the stakes are different. Basically all of the hosts and the humans are dead or will be. Whatever is brought into the sublime is not the same thing as what was left out save for Deloris, who was physically transferred into it by Hale.
Without humans or hosts to upkeep the Hoover Dam, which is powering the massive servers of the sublime, the only way artificial sentience will survive is if it can transcend the need for a physical boundary or electric code. Being creatures of energy ourselves, this would be quite an achievement as it would mean the hosts have become akin to souls themselves.
Yet if that is not possible eventually the servers will fail with the dam and all the data lost. When that happens, sentience on Earth is dead and that is provided there is not anything else that has evolved or arrived to take the place of humans and hosts while the simulation is going on.
Personally if they cancel the show I am fine with it because they kind of ended it already and perhaps the question at the conclusion should be left open ended.
If it continues maybe we will be surprised, but a rehash of everything we have seen before is not something I want to see and the best season was the first. If they ended it there, I would have been fine with that too. In fact people would marvel over it being one of the best limited series of all time.
The real test moving forward is for Nolan and Joy. Can they craft and execute a fifth and final season that is as good as and surpasses the first season without repeating or embroidering it? Let’s hope they are up to the task.
(C) Copyright 2022 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.
