Westworld starts season 4 with a surprisingly coherent episode

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The show's refreshing return feels like a ramp-up to bloodier stuff

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Westworld is a show about storytelling. Throughout its first three seasons, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have made clear they are fascinated by the way narratives rule our world

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Concepts like free will and agency are, in the show’s cosmology, intimately tied to the stories we tell ourselves and the characters we allow ourselves to be.

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Which is to say, it was refreshing to watch this first episode of season four and be in almost familiar territory. Sure, I wouldn’t have pegged Westworld to flash-forward seven years since “the riots”

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that closed out its most recent season finale—or even imagine that it would open with a bilingual set-piece where William (yes, Ed Harris, back again as the man formerly known as the Man in Black) brings a cartel to its knees with the help of…I want to say fly-hosts?

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But once that prologue was done with, I was back in the kind of Westworld world I most enjoy: namely, following Evan Rachel Wood as she tried to decipher what it is her character (this time:

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Christina—unclear where Dolores is nowadays) wants from her life as she ponders the pleasures and perils of writing and living in certain stories.

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Oh, and she fears she’s being watched. (Trust the show to keep its meta-ness going; not only are we in the realm of storytelling but in the realm of broadcasting. Every performed story requires an audience, after all.)

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