SPOILERS for Westworld Season 4, Episode 6 ‘Fidelity’
Where the last episode caught us up to speed with Christina and William, this episode gives us a snapshot of where Caleb is at in this new world, as well as more updates on Frankie and Bernard’s mission to revive Maeve. Fidelity is a word that has become increasingly more important as each season of Westworld passes – and it’s a major theme within this episode. This is the first episode of the season that seems to be launching us directly towards an explosive finale. The big pieces that have been set up through the first half of the season are beginning to fall into place, and it’s all heading to a conflict that I have no clue on how it will resolve. With only two central arcs at play, it’s a relatively streamlined episode that is masterfully edited. The cuts between both storylines are brilliantly orchestrated to get the most emotional punch out of what’s going on. With that said, let’s break down the meat of the episode – starting with Caleb’s video game-esque journey.
Time and time again
With host Caleb (Aaron Paul) now alert to the reality that he’s been reborn as a host, he wakes up inside a glass room with Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson). She seems convinced Caleb knows something about how the outliers are “infecting” her hosts, or at least he has that information subconsciously locked away. She’s basing her assumptions on the fact that the real Caleb once mentioned that he had something she didn’t – something that allowed him to fight off the effects of her parasite. There’s also the revelation within this scene that after all this time she still hasn’t figured out how to perfect placing a human mind in a host body, saying his body will fail and his mind will reject itself in a few days. You’d think that after 278 attempts she’d have gotten somewhere with that project… but nope.
The scene ends with a great moment in which Caleb learns Frankie is alive and that Hale hasn’t been able to catch her this whole time. With the revelation that she’s sent Frankie a “visitor”, it seems she could be in imminent danger.
Realising Hale has kept the previous versions of Caleb locked in cages surrounding his, he’s able to get a slight hint from a version of him that’s about as scarred up as the human-host version of James Delos became back in season two. From here, Caleb is sent on a mission straight out of a video game. He pricks himself on a mysterious device, tricking a Drone Host into thinking he’s dead, then escapes his cell via the circular grate that has been etched with a conveniently helpful arrow. After falling into a pile of ashes made up of his past versions, he follows some dirty/bloody handprints into the air ducts where he happens upon one of the past hosts who didn’t quite make it out.
Just as Caleb is about to leap out of the vents and suffer the same gruesome fate as the bodies below, the past version next to him sacrifices himself and acts as a cushion to allow the current Caleb to survive. He finally makes it out onto the roof where he hooks up a radio and sends a beautifully heartfelt message to Frankie, presumedly on the same frequency from when she was a kid. Hale turns up behind him and reveals Caleb’s grand escape was all part of a plan by Hale to try get him to reveal the secret to what is infecting her hosts to his daughter – that explains why none of the bodies had been cleaned up. After 100s of times watching Caleb go through the same loop, all to get the answer she wants, she’s only met with disappointment when Caleb uses the moment to apologise to Frankie. As a result of Caleb taunting her about her own hosts turning against her, she kills him… again.
As she looks over her city, it’s clear she’s in a completely deranged state right now. She’s convinced Caleb is the key to fixing her outlier problem based on a quote of his from 23 years prior. Perhaps the answer does lie within Caleb’s “code”, it’s just more of a trait than a piece of information. Nevertheless, in her rage, she seemingly decides to abandon the project – burning the last remaining deranged Caleb copies. However, then we see she prints a 279th build, one that is subtly presented as being somewhat different to the others, at least that’s certainly how it seems. It’s also worth noting that she notions to Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) earlier in the episode that she wants “to put an end this” – a line that could be referencing the outlier problem, the Caleb cloning, or both.
Bernard, your local repairman
The episode opens with a cool, intense and quite relevant flashback in which we see the moment Uwade (Nozipho McLean) and a young Frankie (Celeste Clark) rescue a young Jay (Alec Wang) before he’s hunted down as an outlier. Things get really tense really quickly when Drone Hosts show up, forcing the crew of uninfected humans to freeze in place and blend in with the crowd. When their cover is blown, they make a run for it and escape to a safehouse where we see Frankie has been calling her dad on the same frequency every day to see if he answers. It’s in this moment we get the crucial bit of info that Jay isn’t fond of being part of this makeshift ‘family’.
Back with an adult Frankie (Aurora Perrineau) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), they’re heading to Frankie’s base of operations with Maeve’s (Thandiwe Newton) body in the back seat. Their base of operations turns out to be the run-down and abandoned remnants of Temperance – a shot we saw in Bernard’s insightful flashforwards. Bernard gains access to the lower levels to get supplies for fixing up Maeve, all the while he’s telling Frankie about his history working at Westworld – something that begins making Frankie rightfully suspicious of him (but maybe that’s his goal). After extracting the control unit from the Temperance version of Hector, they return to the surface and put Maeve in a milk bath. Bernard begins explaining that 60% of the time Maeve will wake on on their side, while the other 40% of the time she wakes up “on the wrong side of the bed”.
As they move upstairs, Bernard keeps going with the exposition – explaining that since Westworld, Hale moved on from the primitive tech of using the hats to collect data. Instead, she focused on exploiting the vanity of humans by placing scanners inside mirrors. This is an awesome little detail that I absolutely love – it gives us some further history on the world in a natural way. It should be noted in this scene that Frankie is scanned by the machine before Bernard extracts the chip from it – a potentially crucial detail in Bernard’s plan. They begin transferring Maeve’s consciousness to the new control unit, hiding it inside the piano to keep it out of the hands of those who are coming for it.
There’s a mole in our house
While Bernard is fixing up the last few scars on Maeve’s body, there’s the minor narrative detail that Uwade is most likely dead by now, having fallen ill. Frankie also kind of blames Maeve for Caleb’s death since the last time she saw him, he left with her. Jay (Daniel Wu) and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) return from the city with the outlier, and Jay isn’t thrilled with the weapon being a host. When it becomes apparent there’s a mole within the crew, Frankie figures it’s Bernard whose been feeding information to Hale, and so she shoots him (which doesn’t do much). What’s interesting about this moment is that when she sees her newly-scanned profile in a tablet Bernard was holding and mentions Bernard was trying to copy them all, Bernard doesn’t deny it. It looks as though Bernard made sure Frankie was scanned into the system for a reason. Perhaps it’s nothing, or perhaps it’s another of Bernard’s moments of foreshadowing.
With Bernard and Stubbs tied up by Frankie, Bernard reveals that one of her crew is a host who was planted by Hale while they were rescuing the outlier in the city. Interestingly, it seems that in every version of history it’s a different person who Hale replaces – sometimes it’s Odina, sometimes Jay, once even Stubbs. This kickstarts one of the most intense sequences in the season so far. The notion that one of the people in the crew is a host and neither us nor the characters know who it is is brilliant – it’s like a mini murder mystery within the episode. They make it seem like it’s Jay through a conversation with Frankie, then they make it seem like it could equally be Odina (Morningstar Angeline) since they both end seem intent on finding out where Maeve’s control unit is. As a precaution, Frankie locks Odina in a room for added safety.
In yet another conversation with Jay, he’s really campaigning against waking Maeve. In a moment that shows the true genius of Frankie, she realises Jay is the mole as soon as he mentions she’s like a sister to him – a moment that calls back to the flashback that opened the episode. Now that she knows he’s a host, they begin to fight. Their brief moment of combat is interrupted when the message Caleb recorded for Frankie begins playing over her car’s radio, however it’s stopped when Jay shoots the radio. Just as Jay is about to kill Frankie, he’s stabbed in the head and decommissioned by Maeve, who is now alive and well. Evidently, Frankie placed her new control unit in before the conversation with Jay.
We get a nice scene with both Maeve and Frankie talking about Caleb. Maeve realises that she thought she was giving Caleb a chance by leaving him, and has now failed him. We’re going to see them fully team up and finish what they started in the final two episodes.
Coming off of the huge mid-season twist, these last two episodes have caught us up on every single one of our main characters within what we now believe is the one time period. There weren’t as many huge narrative revelations in this one, considering the last episode gave us a deep insight into Charlotte Hale’s new world, but this episode definitely delivered more of an emotional punch. The way the episode cut between Frankie’s narrative and Caleb’s journey was fantastic, really enhancing the emotional weight of both of their arcs.
From all of the intense Frankie, Bernard and Maeve content, we’re left with the three of them presumedly about to team up with the rest of Frankie’s organisation and take the fight back to Hale. It’s not exactly clear how they’re going to go about that, but it’ll most likely involve using Maeve’s powers to turn the hosts against Hale. One of the most interesting tidbits from their scenes had to do with Bernard scanning Frankie into the system. It could be a nothing moment, but I feel like there’s a strong possibility Bernard has something very important in mind that we won’t know about until some point in the future.
In terms of the Caleb content, it was awesome seeing him navigate a path that had been taken by many of the previous versions of himself that Hale has created. Despite the fact that it was all orchestrated and allowed by Hale, it was still damn cool to see. One takeaway is that we find out why she’s been constantly recreating Caleb this whole time – she believes he’s the key to fixing her outlier problem. I believe this is just a way of showing how deranged Hale is becoming in her own skin (or technically how deranged Dolores is becoming in Hale’s skin), but it could also be indicating there is something about Caleb’s humanity that makes him unique. The biggest takeaway though, is that Hale ends the episode having made a 279th version. This begs the question – is it just another version she’s going to try get information out of? Or, is this an ‘altered’ host version of Caleb she’s going to recruit much like she did with William. Time will tell… hopefully.
From here, I don’t have much of an idea of where we go – and I love it. Obviously there’s the overarching plot points you can expect to hit, but the intricacies of how we’re going to get there are shrouded in complete mystery. I can’t wait to see how all the pieces fall together in these final two episodes. I suspect there’s many more twists and character reunions to come, and I’m immensely excited.
9.7/10
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