‘Westworld’ Episode 4 Recap: Cowboy Up

Warning: This recap contains spoilers for the “Dissonance Theory” episode of Westworld.

After last week’s relatively sedate affair, Westworld entered its fourth hour, “Dissonance Theory,” with all guns blazing. Written by series co-creator Jonathan Nolan and comic book scribe Ed Brubaker, this episode made room for all the action-packed staples of an Old West yarn, including a jailbreak, a bounty hunt, and a saloon shootout. Amidst this hail of bullets, though, key storylines were still advanced. The Man in Black continues to inch towards the entrance of the Maze; Dr. Ford continues to reassert his God-like powers over the future of Westworld; and Maeve continues to dig deep inside of herself, both figuratively and now literally, to understand who — or what — she is.

It’s heartening to see that Westworld’s masterminds are, for now at least, being careful to use action to expand the storytelling canvas rather than distract from it. That’s a trick that the show’s channelmate Game of Thrones sometimes loses sight of amid the demands of giant set pieces like the Battle of the Bastards. Of course, Westworld is still early enough in its run for plenty of fresh details to incorporate into action sequences. We may eventually hit a point where the writers fall back on shootouts to kill screen time while they hastily construct another Mystery Box to keep those Reddit forums busy.

Let’s break down how this week’s various skirmishes affected the park’s four main camps.

The hosts

Dolores is a mere passenger on William and Logan’s grand bounty hunt, and a smitten Will (don’t call him “Billy”) is eager to protect her from witnessing any violence. Little does he know that this seemingly innocent farm girl already has a short but significant history of violence, having shot and “killed” a robot assaulter at the end of the third episode. She comes this close to putting the beat-down on another guy, when she’s approached by an enforcer from Behavior HQ who has been tasked with checking up on her for wandering so far away from her normal loop. He grabs her arm, and she clutches his tightly in return, shooting daggers with her eyes. Fortunately, William picks that exact moment to show up, or there might have been a one-armed man loose in Westworld.

At the top of the episode, before the shooting starts, we learn that at some yet-to-be-determined point in time, Bernard inculcated Dolores with the concept of the Maze, the very thing that the Man in Black is hunting for. And, as in his case, one of the first totems guiding Dolores to the Maze is the little girl who watched the Man in Black gun down her entire family — save for her father, Lawrence — in the second episode. Her appearance stirs buried memories of a visit to a church, perhaps the same church that Ford noticed sticking out of the sand while chatting with the little robot boy in “Chestnut.”

For now, Dolores’s visions are fairly innocuous; not so for Maeve, who is continuing to see bloody horrors in her mind’s eye. She’s taken to drawing the figure she’s glimpsed in these fragmented flashes of memory, the image of what the citizens of our world would recognize as a kind of hazmat suit. Driven past the point of robotic complacency, Maeve convinces the bandit Hector to poke around inside her flesh — even as lawmen pound on the door — until he pulls out what resembles a bullet fragment. “I’m not crazy,” she says, chillingly adding, “And none of this matters.”

The staff

Wake us when the affair between Bernard and Theresa gets interesting. Or when Elsie and Stubbs develop personalities, for that matter. Let’s fast-forward straight to Ford’s encounter with Theresa, where he demonstrates just how much power he has over Westworld, and why he’s not about to have it taken away from him by the suits. Expressly taking Theresa to the same restaurant, and the same table she sat at when visiting Westworld as a young girl, Robert proceeds to put on a show of his godlike abilities, freezing his creations in place before dispatching them from the premises as the destruction crew moves in to make way for whatever renovation plan he has in store for that location. (Also, let’s start placing bets on who the visiting “representative” from the board turns out to be… now.) If Ford began the series as Richard Attenborough’s Santa Claus-like version of John Hammond from the Jurassic Park movie, recent weeks have revealed him to be more like Michael Crichton’s original conception of that character: venal and motivated by self-interest. And Anthony Hopkins’s performance has only gotten richer as Ford has gotten meaner. Here’s to the dinner date we want to see: Dr. Ford and Dr. Lecter discussing humanity over glasses of Chianti.

The new guests

William convinced Logan to join him on his hunt for bad hombres, but his future brother-in-law reasserts his alpha male status by putting a bullet through the brain of their guide, and dragging William and Dolores off on a side mission with their bounty, Slim. Logan has clearly been keeping this side of himself well-hidden, because Will appears perpetually flummoxed that this guy is related to his fiancée. “The relationship between Logan and William gets very tumultuous,” Will’s alter ego, Jimmi Simpson, told us in our postmortem interview. If that includes William punching Logan in the face, we’re all for it.

The wild card

The Man in Black has learned a lot about Westworld during his three-decade visit to the park. Not only is he aware of the Maze, but he’s also acquired intel on Arnold, Ford’s former colleague, whose backstory we learned about last week. “He created a world where you could do anything you want except die,” the MiB lectured to his accompanying hosts. “Arnold went and broke his own rule — he died in the park. I believe he had one story left to tell.” That would seem to put the kibosh on the “Arnold is the Man in Black” theory, and also calls into question the “William is the Man in Black” theory, since Will hasn’t crossed paths with a guy calling himself Arnold… at least, not yet. (On the other hand, Past Will could have acquired his knowledge of the Maze from Dolores, and could be putting it to use now. But in that case, the Dolores/Bernard scenes would also have to be taking place in the past, which seems unlikely.) Whoever the Man in Black really is, his jailbreak to spring Hector shows that he’s a force to be reckoned with.

Westworld airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.