Season 4 of "Westworld" has come and gone, leaving viewers with as many questions as answers. Will Earth ever recover from the catastrophic events of the show's fourth season? Have we seen the last of so many of our favorite characters? And most importantly, what the hell was the deal with Christina?
"Westworld" is a show that's famous for having seriously convoluted science fiction twists. Sometimes they work splendidly and are depicted very clearly, as with Season 1's big timeline fakeout. Others require a few watch-throughs before everything really clicks into place.
If you have questions about the Season 4 finale of "Westworld," you're in the right place. We're going to break it down for you as simply as we can. Beyond this point, there shall be SPOILERS APLENTY.
"Westworld" finale explained
There are two stories at play in "Que Será, Será," the final episode of "Westworld" Season 4. The larger story is about the destruction of the Earth. Earlier in the season, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) — who is actually a copy of Dolores Abernathy, as we discovered in Season 3 — enacted her master plan to overtake the human race. Using a degenerative mental disease spread by flies which allowed her to control humans with a series of spooky tones, Charlotte and her hosts totally subjugated humanity.
In essence, they flipped the narrative from early seasons of "Westworld." Now, instead of a park where hosts are abused by humans, Charlotte turned the Earth into one giant park where the hosts control humans. Though the hosts have conquered the world, they keep populations of humans corralled in certain areas; the only one we see in the show is New York City, which has been turned into a "park" of sorts for hosts to work out their mortal impulses before they "transcend."
That's the background. What happened in the finale is that the host version of William (Ed Harris) sabotaged the tower, presumably sending all humans on the planet into a murderous rampage. As a result, every human and host on Earth ends up dead, either in the impending slaughter, or in the unlivable aftermath. It's hinted that even if some escaped, such as Frankie (Aurora Perrineau) and her girlfriend Odina (Morningstar Angeline), their days on this blasted Earth are numbered.
However, there was a glimmer of hope. After William caused so much destruction, Charlotte took a control unit that contained the consciousness known as Christina (another copy of Dolores Abernathy, with a few new tricks), and transferred her into the Sublime. So even though Charlotte puts an end to William before eventually killing herself, Christina escaped.
But who is Christina, and what is her purpose on the show?
Who is Christina in "Westworld"?
While Dolores Abernathy sacrificed herself to save humanity from the AI supercomputer Rehoboam back in Season 3, the actor who plays her, Evan Rachel Wood, is still around quite a bit in Season 4 as a new character named Christina.
Christina has been the biggest mystery of "Westworld" Season 4. She seemingly lived in the host's New York City park, writing narratives for the humans there. But in the finale, we learned a lot more about Christina's true nature. As it turns out, Christina is not in the city along with Charlotte and the rest. She's actually the host AI program that is running the whole simulation. The curtain gets peeled back on this when Charlotte destroys the red projection of the city at the top of the tower, revealing a small gray sphere embedded in its foundation. This is Christina's control unit, which contains her consciousness.
So Christina lives in a digital representation of the city: that red map. She actually is programming narratives for the city's real-life human residents, and those residents do appear in Christina's world. We saw the homeless man raving about the tower as Christina walked by in Episode 2, but he then showed up later in the season in the real world in Episode 5 when Hope (Nicole Pacent) killed him because he was an outlier (meaning he realized he was being mind-controlled and was then able to see the tower). This makes it clear that while Christina may not be in the real world, she is surrounded by digital representations of the humans who actually do live there.
But she isn't only surrounded by those simulations. One of the finale's big twists is that Teddy (James Marsden) is not real, but a projection of Christina's own thoughts. Essentially, Christina's subconscious created numerous things to help her process the nature of her reality, including bringing back Dolores Abernathy's lover Teddy, creating a plucky roommate named Maya (Ariana DeBose), and leaving a drawing of the maze on her own patio in an attempt to help her sort through her thoughts.
Let's not forget, the maze was originally designed as a way to help hosts reach sentience, recognizing that the voice in their head is actually their own thoughts. This has often been symbolized in the show as a host having a conversation with another imagined version of themself, and by the end of the season finale, we do get a scene where Christina speaks to a mental projection of Dolores, symbolizing that she has taken this journey to sentience herself.
Was Charlotte Hale really in Christina's world?
As for Christina's employer Olympiad Entertainment, it's very likely that all of the other writers in there are actually creations of Christina's subconscious as well, helping her normalize what she's doing in her own mind. In truth, she seems to be the only actual writer creating narratives for the humans in this dystopian park.
Remember when Christina's boss seemingly alluded to Charlotte Hale, saying "she" wouldn't be happy about Christina digging through files back in Episode 5? One question we had is how he could possibly know about Hale, if he was a human and able to be seemingly controlled by Christina. But he wasn't real; he was a figment of Christina's imagination, and because she knows about Charlotte Hale on some deep level, even if she isn't able to totally comprehend it until late in the season, he does as well.
This brings up another intriguing question: in that same episode, Charlotte and Christina had a lunch date. Christina believes Charlotte is her college roommate. There's an ominous undercurrent to the whole thing. Even after finding out the twist with Christina, this is one of the most inscrutable moments of the season. Was Charlotte actually there, plugged into Christina's control unit somehow to check in on her? It would certainly make sense.
On the other hand, Charlotte seems exceptionally interested in whether Christina "met someone." This plays off Christina's guilt over the fact that she did meet Teddy, and feels she has to hide it . . . but since Teddy is a creation of her own mind, it wouldn't make much sense for the actual Charlotte Hale to even follow that line of questioning. It seems likely that this Charlotte was also a creation of Christina's mind, the foreboding presence she knows on some level is responsible for the world being so distorted, but doesn't have the frame of reference to fully understand.
"Westworld "explained
The revelations about Christina's true nature are one of the biggest twists in "Westworld's" run, and as with Season 1, when we found out that Dolores was experiencing multiple timelines simultaneously, it casts a whole new light on the season.
After the destruction caused by Charlotte Hale and William, Christina's consciousness is transferred into the Sublime. This is a digital world that we've seen a few times throughout the show, and where we now know that hosts can mentally create their own digital realities — not dissimilar from what Christina was doing in New York City, minus all the real-world casualties. You can tell that scenes are taking place in the Sublime because the picture becomes letterboxed, giving it a slightly different feel than the rest of the show.
After she makes her own inward journey toward sentience, Christina has the wherewithal to attempt one last simulation that could hold the key to building a better world from the ashes of the one the hosts and humans destroyed. As she talks about this last "dangerous game" that could decide the fate of future civilizations, Christina creates a simulation of the original Westworld park in the Sublime. Who will appear in this digital park, and how it will effect anything beyond the Sublime remains to be seen.
Will she be watching as digital recreations of people either commit great evil or good, judging what traits to bring to a future species that lies somewhere between hosts and humans? Will she ever reunite with the real Teddy, who is out there in the Sublime somewhere? Did she pull all the other hosts who were already in the Sublime into her new Westworld?
We'll only ever find out if "Westworld" returns for Season 5. Until then, this finale gave us plenty to chew on.
