Westworld Season 4 Episode 8 Review: Que Sera Sera

This Westworld review contains spoilers.

Westworld Season 4 Episode 8

William (Ed Harris) was always obsessed with the creations of Robert Ford. He wasn’t exactly into the narrative, but he was in search of something else. Something deeper, something more meaningful, called to him. William knew it as the maze, and all he wanted was to find his way to the center of it any way he could. Usually, especially as he aged into the Man In Black, that meant violence. He understands violence, and he’s at home when there’s shooting, screaming, and bleeding. The guy in a black Stetson stalking through the streets of Manhattan gunning down everyone in his math might not be the same as the human, flesh-and-blood William, but as he says later in the episode, he’s just William’s impulses in an evolved body. Meat does not make a person, unless it’s the three pounds of gray matter between the ears. Or, perhaps, a little metal-looking sphere about the size of a plum.

After a fairly controversial third season, the acclaim for Westworld this season is almost universal. The mysteries are more satisfying. The storytelling is more cohesive. The plots are a little bit less linear and recapture more of the confusing, mysterious magic of the show’s impeccable, unimpeachable first season. Westworld is heading towards an endgame, and the show feels stronger and more energetic for it. Whether that endgame will unfold or not is another story; the series hasn’t officially been picked up for a fifth season, but it seems likely to happen. Even if it doesn’t, Westworld finds a satisfying way to end the season all the same while planting the seeds for a potential final game.

But you can’t start a last game before you finish your current game. In this case, the game isn’t Charlotte Hale’s (Tessa Thompson) attempt to transcend her humanity, or the hosts’ attempts to enjoy their lives in the human-filled world outside of Delos parks, but William’s kind of game. It’s kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, and the only rule is the strong will survive and the weak will perish. That’s the world that Westworld plunges into in the opening moments of “Que Sera Sera,” to great effect. Blood, shooting, chaos, and a lot of very confused hosts, starting with Rebus (a returning Steven Ogg) – he doesn’t know why everything is happening, but he’s loving it, at least for a few minutes. That joy is short-lived, thanks in no small part to indiscriminate gunfire all around him and the merciless necessity of director Richard J. Lewis’s storytelling. Brutish, short, and violent is the order of the day, with emphasis on violence starting even before the Man In Black steps out of a haze of smoke with six-shooter in hand (in one of the coolest shots of all time for a show filled with cool visual moments).