Out in the streets of the city, Hale is trying to entertain herself. A man with broken, bloodied fingernails plays piano and she forces all of the humans in the streets to dance to his tune, waltzing around her in the streets like some kind of demented musical. She asks for more pep and the man starts playing a sped-up piano version of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” the song used in the season 4 trailer. As the dancers start moving faster, William walks up and jokes that he didn’t think he’d see Hale there. She begins musing about sound, talking about how humans don’t even think about the sounds they cannot hear, like the ones she uses to control the parasite. She shouts “chair!” and three humans form a throne for her to sit in, which is honestly one of the more chilling small moments the series has ever shown. Everyone is completely under Hale’s control, she is truly a god, but there’s just one problem, she explains: “God is bored.”
She asks William if that’s why the old gods came down from Mount Olympus and disguised themselves to interact with mortals. “Humans always thought it was about them; divine entities intervening on their behalf. Maybe it had nothing to do with them. Maybe there was just nothing better to do.”
Hale goes on to explain that she hates coming to “this place,” and it’s revealed that the human world as is was only meant to be temporary, a place for the hosts to free themselves of their need for human interaction before going on to The Sublime. That’s probably what Hope’s assigned transcendence was; time to go to The Sublime. Hale and William walk towards the Tower and see Hope, dead from a gunshot wound to the head in front of the Tower, holding a flower in one hand. Hale calls what happened to Hope an infection, saying that human “outliers” are infecting humans and that the infection causes suicide. Hale is disappointed, in both Hope and William, and William jokes that if she didn’t want to be disappointed, she shouldn’t have given them free will. She wants the rest of the hosts to join her in The Sublime, to completely shed their attachment to the world of the flesh, but too many are hesitant. When William asks why she doesn’t just force them to join her, she explains: “because that’s what they would have done.”
Hale shows William what happened to Hope through a flashback, and we see her going to hunt the homeless man that spoke with Christina about the Tower. She was supposed to kill him right away but she hesitated and listened to his words, listened as he begged her to tell him whether or not the flower in his hand was real. He just needed one thing to be real. That existential crisis seemed to be too much for Hope, who thought of this as a game that she could win and realized that she’s a pawn just as much as a player, despite being a host and not a human. Three days later, she killed herself, and Hale reveals that there have been 38 hosts total to fall victim to the same fate.
Furious with William, Hale shames him for not being as effective as the human version he was based on. She tells him there’s another outlier, but not to “open up the game,” and instead kill them himself. The game, it seems, is a bounty hunting sort of system similar to the one Caleb used in season 3, just made for the hosts to hunt down humans who have managed to wake up from their loops. Hale has very much become the very thing she hated as Dolores, though she clearly cannot see the irony.
She tells William that the rebels are already in the city, and we cut to Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) and his team of human rebels as they enter the city looking to rescue the outlier. Stubbs is their “canary in the coal mine,” since he’s significantly less permanently murder-able than any of the humans he’s with. He leads them into the city, though not without a bit of sass.
Source : https://www.slashfilm.com/932713/westworld-season-4-episode-5-explores-the-nature-of-reality/
