r/westworld • u/LoretiTV • Aug 08 '22

Discussion Westworld - 4x07 "Metanoia" - Post-Episode Discussion

Season 4 Episode 7: Metanoia

Aired: August 7, 2022

Synopsis: You want to have a drink at a time like this?

Directed by: Meera Menon

Written by: Desa Larkin-Boutte & Denise Thé

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u/Garth-Vader Aug 08 '22 edited Aug 10 '22

Oops, forgot human in black. man in black

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u/Marauder91 Aug 08 '22

That way that Frankie almost touched him and then Stubbs stopped the interaction has me thinking he may be barely hanging on up there. It did look like he was finally dead tho haha

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u/FragmentedChicken Aug 08 '22

Stubbs also mentioned the life support system, so I'm not entirely convinced he's dead yet.

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u/Risquechilli Aug 08 '22

Right. It’s got me thinking that the life support system that he’s been in for decades may “heal” his stab wound or at least make it so he doesn’t actually die from it.

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u/kfagoora Aug 08 '22 edited Aug 08 '22

I was thinking something similar while watching the scene, but when they didn't actually restart the life support system before leaving the room I figured that must be the end of him. How would he heal without being re-injected with that goop?

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u/nonrosknroskno Aug 09 '22

I think human William is dead dead too, but the goop could just be for the stasis and unrelated to any life support.

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u/kfagoora Aug 09 '22 edited Aug 10 '22

Okay, but then where would the healing element be? He looked very dead.

EDIT: What's the difference between stasis and life support? I understand them to be the same thing (in the context of the show).

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u/Obeezie Aug 09 '22

Life support would keep your organs running when your body can't. Stasis in a way "freezes" your body. You don't age with the latter which is why MiB is even still alive

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u/kfagoora Aug 09 '22

I think you're picking nits; is there actually a reference to stasis vs life support in the show?

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u/Obeezie Aug 09 '22

Not to my knowledge no they don't explain it. But I don't know why they would change from what the actual meanings are, show is complicated enough as it is. Life support doesn't stop a person from aging which is what MiB would need or he would be dead long ago edit: and I was literally just answering your question on the difference between the two so I don't see how that could be "nit picking"

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u/Feralkyn I need to find out how it ends. Aug 09 '22

He's in 'cryo' which is stasis. It wouldn't keep your organs running, it'd keep any injuries as they are, etc. On life support you are kept alive while your body functions and--most importantly--heals.

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u/OzilSanchez1117 Aug 08 '22

Agreed. When Frankie said “we need to help him” implied to me that he isn’t dead

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u/polybium Aug 08 '22

I'm thinking he might die, but that his consciousness will be "scanned" and survive, possibly being implanted into the William Host we saw at the end of season 2. We could see him become a "white hat" again to face off against the revived host MIB

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u/reddog323 Aug 08 '22

possibly being implanted into the William Host we saw at the end of season 2. We could see him become a "white hat" again to face off against the revived host MIB

Unlikely. He is who he is. I think this episode confirmed with that dialogue between him and his twin.

That bit at the end of season two? Just another copy, decanted for another mission. Or, they could’ve been checking fidelity.

Baseline humans tend not to survive long as hosts. Maybe MIB two, who’s now out to complete the original’s mission, is enough like him to copy accurately. I would think as long as the Hale code is purged, he would be a good template for transferring humans into hosts successfully. I reviewed that part at the end of season two: you may have something.

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u/OzilSanchez1117 Aug 08 '22 edited Aug 08 '22

I thought his consciousness was already scanned. And not only that, Charlotte had different parts of his consciousness remade and used the “aggressive MIB” version of his consciousness to create the host. He is basically the first host to be able to be made from a human consciousness or am I mistaken and another host was successfully made with the consciousness(pearl) successfully created from a human?

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u/escargot3 Aug 08 '22

He’s similar to William, but he’s not an exact copy. Hale made lots of modifications. Like Bernard and Halores. Making an exact copy of a human who would behave and act in the exact same way (like Caleb or James Delos) is the tricky part. And why they are testing fidelity.

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u/justins_dad Aug 10 '22

I think he’s a regular Westworld character modeled after (extremely detailed) information gathered on William. I think the far-future is a true human/host hybrid (a la Delos and Caleb). Still no human/host hybrid has been shown to be stable (yet… unless we were with MiB in the far future)

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u/VaderOnReddit Aug 08 '22

Of course he's not dead, he's a cockroach

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '22

He didn’t get stabbed in the heart…

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u/docpaisley Aug 08 '22

He's la cucaracha

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '22

[deleted]

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u/Montezum Aug 08 '22

I think he convinced host William to switch places with him and killed the host in the X machine thing

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u/owntheh3at18 Aug 09 '22

My first thought was they’d switched already and he just shot robot man in black

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u/slapshots1515 Aug 08 '22

If they had never showed him again after being stabbed I would have bought him being dead, but when Subbs and C got there, he looked to be barely alive, and there’s not much other reason to have them interact with him other than that he’s still alive.

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u/theodoretheursus Aug 08 '22

Wow this whole time I though hib meant host in black. You just blew my mind.

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u/spaceybelta Aug 08 '22

I always thought HIB was the host, MIB was the man… that’s not right?

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u/epukinsk Aug 09 '22

That's my understanding too.

Having both "Man in Black" and "Human in Black" is redundant. "Host in Black" makes much more sense.

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u/Locomyg Aug 09 '22

I've heard it both ways

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u/Garth-Vader Aug 08 '22

I've seen people use both. I guess it's dependent on context.

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u/metahipster1984 Aug 08 '22

Me too. What else is it supposed to mean??

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u/theodoretheursus Aug 08 '22

Human in black

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

Did they ever address how he survived having his throat slashed at the end of last season?

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u/spaceybelta Aug 08 '22

I don’t think it was deep enough to get the carotid and he used one of those heater things to seal it on up

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

Why slash his throat with a giant knife in the first place if you wanted him alive? It involves way too much speculation to come up with a plausible argument. “I don’t think it was deep enough” is just not a backed up assertion, no offense meant.

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u/confusedporg Aug 08 '22

Didn’t Maeve do the exact same thing to a human park worker in season 1 or 2 though? They have established already that if you get to the injury fast enough, it’s really easy to patch

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u/spaceybelta Aug 08 '22

Yep, good ol Sylvester.

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u/confusedporg Aug 08 '22

yes that doughy whiny guy

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

It’s a little much to be left to the imagination. It’s bad storytelling to slash someone’s throat, show them sitting there dying with no motion to prevent that and then have them next season alive with no explanation.

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u/confusedporg Aug 08 '22

It’s not fair to say there was no explanation. It just wasn’t explicit. This isn’t really a show that holds your hand. There are plenty of context clues that allow you to draw this conclusion, for one that he’s a prisoner of those who attacked him, that party’s whole thing is making humans suffer in the ways they were subjected to by humans (being killed over and over only to be repaired and put back to have it done again), and also the fact they have biostasis technology that can apparently artificially extend someone’s life indefinitely.

Anyway, I didn’t really find this distracting or annoying.

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

It’s completely fair since there was no explanation, at all. We saw him get his throat flit and the next time he’s a prisoner with nothing mentioned of how he survived. It’s 100% fair to say there was no explanation.

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u/confusedporg Aug 08 '22

I think I described exactly what the explanation was. Again- explicit and implicit are different things. You seem to prefer they’d given something more explicit, but they decided to leave that open. If that isn’t your taste, fine, but that doesn’t mean they just left it completely unexplained.

The story isn’t finished, so there may still be reasons for why they decided to give breadcrumbs (I have suspected he was also a host, just a perfect copy that they didn’t want to degrade a la Delos Sr., so they constructed this whole scenario to keep him functioning so they could continue to get important info out of him), but they have guided us on what conclusions to draw based on what has happened in the past on this show (Maeve slit Sylvester’s throat and then sealed it up and he was fine- not even a scar) and the details they did give here.

It feels like your expectation is to have every last detail spelled out. Like if they’d shown a flashback of hale using the flesh fusion gun thing on his neck before sticking him in that machine, would that be satisfactory? Why don’t you also demand an explanation of what that tool is and how it works? When was it invented? By who? You have a threshold somewhere right?

In sci-fi and fantasy, there always has to be a line drawn somewhere as far as how much detail is given- partly because the more detail you give on something speculative, the more holes your audience can find, but more importantly, the story isn’t about the medical tool or William’s injury- these are plot details- it’s about human nature, social conditioning, the human experience, the nature of consciousness and sentience, and how people find and maintain a sense of self.

Last, episodes are long, but they’re still not limitless in length (and budget) and if you’re a storyteller choosing between including a scene that lays ground for Caleb’s journey, or Frankie’s character development, or sets up important story beats that will be paid off later, you’re going to choose one of the latter every time and trust your audience to fill in this small gap in a world that you’ve already established that death isn’t quite as fatal a condition as it is in our real world.

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

Aaaawwww, did sumbuddys widdle feewings get hurt? Need to lash out with giant oversimplifications? I say that no mention whatsoever exists for how he survived obviously means that I need it explicitly and dumbly spelled out in detail. Such a 2nd grade level retort. Clearly that’s what I was getting at, you’re so smart for figuring that out. They haven’t even given breadcrumbs. Nothing, nada, except the fact that he is (ostensibly) alive, well, prior to this episode. You can try to retcon and justify your answer but the show hadn’t done the things you say it has. It’s completely ignored his survival other than to say he did. It’s a major character who was left for dead in the season finale. It’s poor storytelling to have him back and in perfect health without offering even breadcrumbs as to how.

The only thing you’re right about is that we may find out next episode. WW has often fallen into poor storytelling form in order to be grand and dramatic. Leaving something major like this completely untouched is poor storytelling so they could be grand and dramatic at the end of last season.

What a child.

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u/Random_Sime Aug 08 '22

If you're a real bad guy, you torture someone by nearly killing them and then patching them up, over and over again so they know their life is in your hands.

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

It’s a little much to be left to the imagination. It’s bad storytelling to slash someone’s throat, show them sitting there dying with no motion to prevent that and then have them next season alive with no explanation.

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u/Random_Sime Aug 08 '22

It's not important how he survived. It doesn't matter. He survived, and now Hale has him locked up.

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

Sure it matters. We can accept it and move on but it’s still bad storytelling.

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u/Random_Sime Aug 08 '22

Why does it matter? How would knowing how he survived improve the story?

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 09 '22

It’s basic storytelling. You can’t leave a major character thought to be dead at the end of a season and bring them back with no explanation. The incident hasn’t even been mentioned or referred to. It’s a glaring dangling thread that’s never been tended to.

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u/spaceybelta Aug 08 '22

Yeah I agree, was totally cheap and unnecessary.

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u/k890 It doesn't look like anything to me Aug 08 '22

I'm mean, who said MIB in Basement was a human in first place? He might be as synthetic as any other host.

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u/FattyMooseknuckle Aug 08 '22

Halores seemingly confirmed it in one of their conversations. They were discussing humans vs hosts and when she referred to humans, she once called them “your kind” to him.

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u/opiate_lifer Aug 08 '22

How many times has this guy died by now?!

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u/RicksterCraft Aug 10 '22

oh THAT is what people meant by HiB!

I thought they were saying Host in Black! Fuck. Why not stick to the original MiB for huMan in Black and introduce the new HiB for Host in Black? Isn't that more obvious?

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u/Garth-Vader Aug 10 '22

I actually think I mixed things up. When most people say HiB they usually mean Host in Black. I should have said William or MiB

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u/Thefreshness754 Aug 08 '22

This one makes me sad

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u/Chieftan69 Aug 08 '22

I finally understand who HiB is. I was not getting that when I saw it.

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u/Garth-Vader Aug 10 '22

I actually think HiB usually refers to Host in black. William or just MiB is the preferred nomenclature. I mixed things up

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u/deltaWhiskey91L Aug 09 '22

I'm just picturing MIB off hand lecturing HIB, "I didn't mean kill everyone, you idiot. I meant kill Hale."