Westworld season 4's premiere pretty much abandons last season's cliffhanger - but for the right reasons. Season 3 saw HBO's Westworld refocus its narrative from Delos' wild west theme park to an even wilder real world, where the Rehoboam AI algorithm effectively controlled humanity. A freshly liberated Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) resolved to win back mankind's freedom, sacrificing herself to dethrone Rehoboam. Westworld season 3 then concludes with Aaron Paul's Caleb and Thandiwe Newton's Maeve watching on Fight Club-style as explosions ricochet through the city skyline, the iron-scented winds of human revolution beginning to blow.
Westworld season 3's explosive final moments promised a very different season 4. Like a toddler tossed into a swimming pool by an especially careless parent, human society would sink or swim without Rehoboam. Incite's rogue AI system also predicted an extinction-level event rapidly approaching. Was mankind charging headfirst toward this inevitable outcome, or could total destruction be averted? Just like its Fight Club inspiration, Westworld teased a lawless landscape of violence and hysteria for season 4, and Maeve's "this is the new world" stinger unambiguously signaled change a-coming. The very foundation of society had been ripped away. How would civilization rebuild? Would humanity destroy itself as Rehoboam predicted? Audiences were about to find out... weren't they?
Strangely, it's very much business as usual when Westworld season 4 begins. Normal society is resumed, humanity is doing just fine, and as Caleb's co-worker points out, the "riots" didn't fundamentally change Westworld's landscape whatsoever. Fears of an apocalypse have been greatly exaggerated, and Caleb later plugs the narrative gap by revealing he and Maeve spent a few months blowing up Rehoboam's remnants before mankind quickly got back on its feet. On one hand, Westworld has wasted season 3's final promise here. Rehoboam's downfall looked to be ushering Westworld down a darker, post-apocalyptic Mad Max route that would've turned the real world into an "anything goes" arena akin to Delos' WestWorld theme park. Resuming normal service so quickly undercuts the gravity of Westworld season 3's ending... and can't help but feel just a little anti-climactic.
Westworld has its reasons for glossing over season 3's cliffhanger ending... and those reasons involve the story's eventual endgame. Ever since Westworld premiered on HBO in 2016, the final chapter has been painfully obvious - a battle for supremacy between man and machine. Seasons 1 & 2 established the hosts as sentient and thrust them beyond the wild west. Season 3 then drew battle lines between pro-human hosts (Dolores, Maeve, Bernard) and anti-human hosts (Hale, the Mandroid in Black). The finale's post-credits sequence then explicitly foreshadowed this upcoming battle when Hale revealed an army of fresh hosts already in creation. For Hale's robotic takeover to mean anything, mankind needs something actually worth taking over. Had Rehoboam's destruction resulted in societal collapse and human extinction, Hale's goal would've already been achieved. Hosts win by default, which isn't very exciting.
Instead, Westworld season 4 begins with humanity enjoying a fragile peace, barely recovered from the aftermath of Rehoboam, but steadily finding its feet. The stage is perfectly set for Hale to strike by taking advantage of humanity's weakness to achieve her sinister goal of cyborg revolution. Her Phase 1 is already underway in Westworld season 4's opener, with William acquiring the Hoover Dam and mysteriously buying up nearby scrub land. Since season 3's ending obviously wasn't the extinction-level event Rehoboam foresaw, the specter of apocalypse still hangs heavy in the background - and looks increasingly likely to be triggered by Hale, which suits Westworld's core themes far better than humanity rioting itself into oblivion. Does season 3's Fight Club finale now seem misleading in hindsight? Absolutely. But while the promise of a post-revolution real-world wild west has been officially squandered, Westworld's long-anticipated battle between hosts and humans will be all the better for it.
Westworld continues Sunday on HBO.