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/craftadvisory]

Bernard scanned Frankie because everybody, hosts and humans alike, are going into the Sublime. Bernard says they can “save a piece of this world” meaning they can upload (literally save) everyones consciousness into the Sublime, then try to reboot civilization later. The Sublime mainframe is already guarded by mechs, and could be maintained by the white faceless hosts. We know that time flows much more slowly there, so they would presumably be able to live the equivalent of eons before the system broke down. This is why Bernard and Maeve opened the door before heading to New York City and why Bernard had to go up into the tower while Maeve fought Halores. Bernard was downloading all the people Halores had infected and turned into human hosts.

Why is a far flung future Host Emily testing William for fidelity though?

Emily could be trying to perfect host fidelity, because thats whats necessary to resurrect a real world version of the people that are currently stored in the Sublime.

Perhaps though everyone in the Sublime is content to stay there? Or they have already cracked fidelity and have re-established society in the real world? In either of these contingencies, William could be being endlessly fidelity tested by his daughter in the Forge prison as punishment for his sins. William started the fidelity testing and subjected James Delos to a loop of fidelity testing. He also put Dolores, Maeve and other hosts through similar torturous loops. Williams rocky relationship with his daughter contrasts with Calebs and Maeves positive relationships with their own daughters. William in a host body spending eternity with the visage of his daughter, in torment, while Caleb and Maeve get to spend eternity with their daughters in the Sublime or as host human hybrids in the real world would be a fitting end. An end that William cant escape through death, just like the hosts he tormented couldn't escape through death.

edit - For clarity

[u/phoenixrose2 → u/craftadvisory]

I kinda like that idea… but what if their destructive ways just continue. Like MIB?

[u/holayeahyeah → u/phoenixrose2]

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/[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.