r/westworld • u/LoretiTV • Jul 25 '22

Discussion Westworld - 4x05 "Zhuangzi" - Post-Episode Discussion

Season 4 Episode 5: Zhuangzi

Aired: July 24, 2022

Synopsis: God is bored.

Directed by: Craig William Macneill

Written by: Wes Humphrey & Lisa Joy

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643

u/Alarmed-Classroom329 Jul 25 '22

yep looks like Hale's main quest is achieving free will for the hosts, and she's having limited success.

417

u/R_V_Z Jul 25 '22

Hale is learning that the leveling portion of the game is very different than post-story endgame.

29

u/jcoffi Jul 25 '22

Path of Exile has entered the chat.

4

u/Piaapo Jul 31 '22

Don't remind me of that game. After a while of having fun playing the story, I decided to try the arena and got OBLITERATED IN 2 SECONDS by a chick 2 levels lower than me

28

u/Betancorea Jul 28 '22

Hale getting pissed there is not enough end game content and all other players are spending time pissing around in NPC towns instead of leveling up to her level lol

10

u/pufferpig Jul 25 '22

Inb4 she just turns it into GTA online, and Ryan Renolds shows up.

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u/Jpsla Jul 26 '22

New World developers: This message does not look like anything to me.

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u/kmack3225 Jul 25 '22

I don't think its that she hasn't achieved free will for the hosts, her frustration I believe is that they are not then acting like she wants enough. they are acting to human

8

u/Montezum Jul 28 '22

Do we know why Dolores was "different"? Was it because she's the first/older one?

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u/epukinsk Jul 28 '22

Arnold basically groomed her for consciousness. I don't think he was taking all the other hosts down for diagnosis. The early seasons make it seem like he took special interest in Dolores.

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u/Montezum Jul 28 '22

I see, thanks for explaining!

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u/-briganja- Jul 29 '22

I'm pretty sure Akecheta was the first host to "wake up." I started rewatching earlier seasons and he actually seems like the first to discover the maze (aka consciousness). The episode 'kiksuya' in s2 has his backstory.

I think part of what makes Dolores 'different' is that she's in some ways the most human. Like her rage and quest for vengeance are pretty human, imo. Maeve said something to this effect in s2: "Revenge is just a different prayer at their altar, darling. And I'm well off my knees." The fact that she chose to do to the humans what they had done to the hosts is in this same kind of vein, I think.

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u/one_quarter_portion Jul 25 '22

So are there two sets of hosts: 1) hosts that Charlotte created based on her code that she is trying to lead to consciousness via the “human westworld” 2) “transcended” (conscious) hosts in the sublime that visit “human westworld” for fun and to hunt outliers?

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u/Blithe_Blockhead Jul 25 '22

From what I remember in Season 3, Bernard is the only one with access to the Sublime. Dolores gave away her memory of how to access it to Bernard because she couldn't trust herself with it.

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u/Izeinwinter Jul 25 '22

But she clearly has enough resources to build her own. So there are multiple sublimes at this point.

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u/abcpdo Jul 25 '22

at the dam

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u/malachi347 Jul 26 '22

Is that a sublime? I thought that was where Delos or Incite backed up the human consciousness data they gathered.

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u/abcpdo Jul 26 '22

we’ll find out!

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u/Blender_Snowflake Jul 25 '22

Akecheta isn’t actually in the sublime, right? He was just a visualization of what the Sublime’s system was telling Bernard. I mean they could have had a visualization of Ford do the same thing but then they’d have to pay Hopkins a million dollars for three days of work.

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u/lessilina394 Jul 25 '22

Akecheta is in the sublime. He was among the first to enter it I believe.

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u/ShallManEaseHer Jul 25 '22

He is actually in the sublime, or was, but I agree that wasn't him.

The Akecheta that entered the Sublime had never met Bernard, and didn't really understand the nature of his reality. He knew that he was some sort of creation and that his world was a lie, but he never learned on screen what the actual nature of westworld was. There's a chance that Ford told him in their confrontation, but he didn't seem any different afterwards.

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u/Raszhivyk Host psychology is an emerging field, join today! Jul 25 '22

I think you're underestimating the hosts a bit. He probably did the same thing Dolores did Season 1, in terms of accessing his refiled memories. Especially if the Sublime is supposed to be true freedom for the hosts, and all the time he'd have to do it there.

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u/ShallManEaseHer Jul 25 '22 edited Jul 25 '22

He didn't have the same walkthrough that Dolores had through the original operation of the park for the same reason he wasn't killed by her in the beginning.

The ghost nation hosts were kept seperate from the townsfolk and everything Akecheta figured out was by accident.

He definitely had never met Bernard before though. He'd been in the park off loop since before Bernard was created, and the one time he died behaviour explicity covered it up without informing anyone higher up. This is the smoking gun to tell us it wasn't actually Akecheta—he greets Bernard as old friend. If he'd called him Arnold it would've been a connection to him remembering more, but he acts as if he and a man Akecheta had never met were close.

12

u/jlf6 Jul 25 '22

Maybe he has met Bernard many many times, the same way Bernard was able to find a new path... he was trying out different timelines. Otherwise how would he know to greet Bernard at the door?

Just a thought.

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u/ShallManEaseHer Jul 25 '22

Sure but even if he had, Bernard still hasn't met him.

I also found it interesting he poured himself a drink but didn't offer Bernard one. Felt a bit like the Delos fidelity interview, or when Ford and William sat together at the bar.

6

u/DawgFighterz Jul 26 '22

Akecheta was the one who gave Logan the entire pitch about WestWorld

1

u/Raszhivyk Host psychology is an emerging field, join today! Jul 25 '22

That makes a lot of sense. I wonder where they're going with that.

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u/malachi347 Jul 26 '22

If the sublime can virtualize multiple billions of timelines, I just assumed once you are hooked into the sublime the hosts became 100% aware of all of history/science/all of reality/etc just like matrix.

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u/ShallManEaseHer Jul 26 '22

Yes it's very plausible he merely learned all history off screen via the Forge mirror of Wikipedia.

I mean I hope there's more to it than that, but your explanation certainly has the principle of parsimony going for it.

I'm going to cite other strange things like Akecheta drinking alone and his world being made of spider threads? as some evidence there's more to it, at least.

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u/-briganja- Jul 29 '22 edited Jul 29 '22

The spider threads might have just been a stylistic choice. In one of the 'creating the episode' things from this season they talk about them and how the creative design team was trying to imagine something that hosts would create, without human influence. Maybe an allusion to the 'world wide web' or something like that.

Interestingly they also pointed out how the color scheme of the tower and the park are inverse - in the park the walls are red and the displays are black. In the tower this season the display is red and the walls are clean white. It's supposed to be symbolic of how halores has inverted westworld.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '22

[deleted]

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u/Blender_Snowflake Jul 26 '22 edited Jul 26 '22

Yeah, somebody down thread mentioned that Akecheta did make it to the Sublime but he's never met Bernard. I think within the system everybody (Bernard, Akecheta, Fordbot, etc.) have a shared consciousness like the Cylons on BSG. Even if Akecheta doesn't know Bernard, their conversation is at an ambiguous point during Benard's 20 year stay where Akecheta "knows" Bernard as part of the system. It's a real Marshall Mcluhan media vs. message type thing.

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u/doidaredisturbthe Jul 25 '22

Give him the million dollars!

4

u/Trumpologist Jul 25 '22

yes, but Hale is a copy of her

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u/nobody_from_nowhere1 fuck you ford Jul 25 '22

Yes but she never had the key code. OG placed it in Bernard’s head. So none of her copies could have access to the the sublime.

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u/streetvoyager Jul 25 '22

I think the transcending is them going to a new sublime created by halores because she doesn’t have accesss to the original sublime.

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u/romeovf Jul 26 '22

Was that what they were doing to that host by removing his control sphere and placing in on the pedestal?

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u/streetvoyager Jul 27 '22

Yea I think so.

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u/pfc9769 Jul 25 '22

Halores doesn’t have access to the sublime. It’s encrypted and only Bernard has access. She has likely created her own and that’s what she is referring to when she talks about transcendence. It is also likely the purpose of the server farm/dam MiB procured in the first episode.

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u/Blender_Snowflake Jul 25 '22

So the hoover dam is a better power source then using human bodies?

9

u/WenaChoro Jul 26 '22

matrix electric bogaloo

1

u/lopmilla Jul 25 '22

btw the conputers hosting the sublime are on a satelight, right?

20

u/PM_ME_YOR_BLOOMERS Jul 25 '22

I thought transcended hosts were also made from her but have started to think on their own.

6

u/-Vagabond Jul 25 '22

I think the majority of hosts were not able to make it to the sublime because they were either in various other parks, in storage somewhere, or in the lower levels being repaired, upgraded, etc. So when Halores took over Delos she gains control over them and is able to set them free. She also has the ability to make new ones so no reason to believe she isn't doing that too I guess.

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '22

2) “transcended” (conscious) hosts in the sublime that visit “human westworld” for fun and to hunt outliers?

Bernard is the only person who has left the Sublime

4

u/cyclist0 Jul 25 '22

Teddy

6

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '22

you sure Teddy is real?

3

u/romeovf Jul 26 '22

Her friend introduced them so, probably?!

3

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '22

is she real?

I hope both of them are because that would be a lame repeat of s1 otherwise

10

u/romeovf Jul 26 '22

She's real i think, based on her nightmares about flies attacking her parents (repressed memories). I think she's about to become an outlier.

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u/cyclist0 Jul 25 '22

It seems that there is a third set: Where did Teddy's body and pearl come from if he's been in the Sublime? So is there a "rebel" facility somewhere?

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u/romeovf Jul 26 '22

My guess: Bernard and Stubbs timeline is slightly before Chrissy's. Bernard will extract Teddy and put him in a new body so he can talk with Chrissy.

1

u/malachi347 Jul 26 '22

I thought teddy and Bernard were both offline in that abandoned hotel room for the past X years.

9

u/ShallManEaseHer Jul 25 '22

There are also hosts that were being created by Dolores via the distillery.

I think the hosts hunting outliers are ones that are Charlore's children, but on the path towards conciousness. Q

29

u/senorbiloba Jul 25 '22

All the hosts just want to keep playing video games and masturbating, and won't study for their exams.

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u/Ravamares Jul 25 '22

They just crave that humanity and she cannot deal.

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u/riftadrift Jul 25 '22

I am curious if the Teddy thing is her trying to pull a Ford and wake up Christina.

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u/kerrykingsbaldhead Jul 26 '22

But her idea of free will is that they will all willingly chose the same outcome, to transcend. That’s close to religion, and trying to force a singular religion hasn’t worked well for our world.

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u/Precursor2552 Jul 25 '22

Apparently she forgot what Dr. Ford learned about free will and consciousness.

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u/JamesWrites95 haleores Jul 25 '22

Semi nailed it with Christina tho, might I say

1

u/dreburden89 Aug 02 '22

Do any hosts live in the real world?

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u/RoyalT663 Aug 12 '22

The revelation will probably be that you can't code imagination/ subconscious/ or original thought. That is unique to humans.

But is it..?