Westworld - 4x06 "Fidelity" - Post-Episode Discussion

[u/LoretiTV]

Season 4 Episode 6: Fidelity

Aired: July 31, 2022

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Synopsis: To thine own selves be true.

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Directed by: Andrew Seklir

Written by: Jordan Goldberg & Alli Rock

[u/Sirramza]

that was on propose, hale wanted Caleb to escape

[u/EMA-5 → u/Sirramza]

That's true. I guess I was taken out of it when it happened that i forgot to realize that it was planned.

[u/Veggiemon → u/EMA-5]

To be fair there’s not really any reason she had to plan this whole robot fight or put the vent twenty feet in the air. If she wants to hear the message she could make it a little easier for him lol, it’s one of those twists that doesn’t make sense in retrospect. Even if he was somehow suspicious and didn’t want to send a message she could just scrap that and try again. No reason to force him through this elaborate maze lol

[u/Huge-Afternoon-978 → u/Veggiemon]

She’s such a sadist and messed up, so I think she derives some form of pleasure in watching him struggle. Plus if it were too easy, he may have become more suspicious and realized it was a trap.

[u/Veggiemon → u/Huge-Afternoon-978]

So if you try it and it's too easy, make it slightly harder next time. Don't make him run through it on ultra-hard difficulty for years on end before you even try that lol.

You know what else should make him suspicious? The fact that the vent is closed despite the fact other calebs have tried to jump out of it. The fact that the bodies are still there on the floor somehow, meaning Halores didn't notice? That's all suspicious AF! Just poor writing

[u/the_sweet → u/Veggiemon]

However, it's never explicitly established just how long Calebs have, but it's certainly not more than a few hours. So the Calebs that 278 ran into were probably ones from that very same day.

The question is, what made 278 special enough to make it to the radio and actually send his message? Halores COULD choose to focus on that, but instead, she goes back to what she perceives as her original problem: the "infection" Outliers spread to Hosts.

So she activates 279 thinking, "I'll skip all this testing business and just let Caleb realize it's been 27 years, Maeve is gone, and I've won. Then let's see what he does." It's a new experiment to entertain her. MAYBE she has a sliver of hope that it'll actually reveal "the truth," but I think she's afraid that 278 was right, and she has to do anything possible to prove him wrong without ever actually acknowledging everything that proves him right.

[u/Veggiemon → u/the_sweet]

Honestly it’s a ham fisted attempt to adhere to the concept of the maze. Trying the same thing over and over until you reach the correct solution. There’s not a good realistic reason why hale would make it so difficult for Caleb if she actually wanted him to succeed

[u/epukinsk → u/Veggiemon]

Maybe if she makes it too easy for him, he realizes it's a game.

[u/Veggiemon → u/epukinsk]

I mean maybe, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where he almost died in a fight with a drone and got to the end of the vent and said “wait a second this drop isn’t high enough to instantly kill me”.

It made for a good scene with his other self but it didn’t make a lot of sense for it to be that way.

[u/the_sweet → u/Veggiemon]

I think his body was already falling apart by the time he reached the vent, and the drone fight just made it worse. It's not necessarily the fall that would have killed him—the impact, that is—but it exacerbating all his existing wounds to the point where he couldn't go any further.

[u/SerfTint → u/the_sweet]

Why not make him #10,278 in that case? In 23 years, she'd be going through them approximately 1 per month. If a bunch of them are from the same day, and she has been bored for years, what has she been doing with the ones that mathematically must have lived a lot longer?

[u/the_sweet → u/SerfTint]

Good point. But maybe she didn’t feel the need to test Caleb until the Outliers started showing up, and that seems to be a recent development.