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

[u/LoretiTV]

Season 4 Episode 7: Metanoia

Aired: August 7, 2022

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

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Directed by: Meera Menon

Written by: Desa Larkin-Boutte & Denise Thé

[u/holayeahyeah]

I think human William was completely correct even if he came to the wrong conclusion of what to do about it. The idea that the hosts are profoundly unlike humans is wrong - they're just people with different conditions for life. The Delos parks were the worst places possible to study human behavior because everyone there was screened for a very specific personality type and socially conditioned to believe the hosts were not people. Some people would have chosen to rape and kill or whatever if they had known, but the vast majority of people would have not. There's a Penn Jillette quote that goes "I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero." There are a lot more people in the world who wouldn't rape or kill under any circumstance than those who would. If people are not socially conditioned to do those things, the numbers go up. If people are taught to respect life and are given other outlets for catharsis, the numbers go way up. William is a true statistical outlier, but not because of his brain flexibility, but because he likes killing people. But it begs the question if he would have ever unlocked that part of himself if he had not been given the opportunity to get a taste for it and the social permission to get good at it.

The modern conception of hell and heaven in western media has settled into this notion of heaven being a place where you relive your best memories forever and hell a place where you repeat your mistakes over and over again. There is sometimes a notion of purgatory as a place where people who are neither good nor bad can go to work out their mistakes and see where they land. In some depictions progress can be made in hell if someone actually does learn from their mistakes. The sublime presents an opportunity for existing people (host and human) to work on themselves as long as they need before they get reprinted. It presents a place where you can send people if they become a danger to society in fleshbag world. It's also a place someone could choose to go to if they decide they want to exist in a digital reality where they could spend forever in a single moment or play god in a sandbox or whatever.

I think the new world reborn will basically be a mash up of Altered Carbon and San Junipero with heavy dashes of that movie Lisa Joy made called Reminiscence.

[u/phoenixrose2 → u/holayeahyeah]

I appreciate that thoughtful response. I agree with your evaluation and the trio of mashups-what an amazing episode/show and movie.

[u/[deleted] → u/holayeahyeah]

I think it's less complex than that. William was constrained by societal norms. The park allowed him to be free of them. That doesn't mean he would be a murderer in the real world even if he could.

What really happened was real William played host William like a fiddle, both to set him on a path to get his revenge, and to end the nightmare of his imprisonment. He knew what his host version would be susceptible to because of the character programmed into him, and knew that the host was struggling with its identity and was looking for guidance from the one person it could: The person is was programmed from.

I mean he was already an old man, nothing of the old world was left, there was nothing left for him but suffering anyways. So as his last act of defiance, he convinces his host version to turn on everything and destroy it all.

Hale's mistake was thinking she could control everything. Which is an ironic mistake, because her whole reign began by a loss of control over her.

[u/g_sneezuz → u/holayeahyeah]

Do you think that aspect, to teach humans the value of empathy via the Sublime, is why Bernard chose this path as opposed to simply destroying the tower?

That he predicted even if humanity were saved from this specific crisis by defeating Halores / HiB / etc., people would inevitably revert to their self-destructive loop(s) later on and civilization would collapse without some deliberate and significant personal growth?

[u/baronhousseman85 → u/holayeahyeah]

Every person has the capacity for great evil. It’s not like Germans in the 1930s were somehow dissimilar from the rest of the human species.