Editor’s Note: The following contains Westworld Season 4 spoilers.The third episode ofWestworldSeason 4 wrapped up with a quite gruesome scene. “Annees Folles” sawCaleb(Aaron Paul) and Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) finally making their way into the backstage of the Olympiad compound through the Golden Age park. However, taking down Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) proved to be a lot harder than they anticipated when they came across a room with an unfinished host injecting a weird black goop into a bunch of flies. Beyond the room, there was a series of monitors showing a group of humans pointing guns at their own heads in some other part of the compound. One of them seemed to be Caleb’s daughter, Frankie (Celeste Clark). But as Caleb soon found out, it was all just a trap to draw him into a holding cell and have him attacked by some of the flies we saw earlier. The bugs made their way into Caleb’s nostrils and ears, and we were left to watch the credits roll with a mix of horror and disgust.
Many viewers turned off their screens after “Annees Folles” still wondering what on Earth had they just watched. Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait too long to find out. This week’s episode, “Generation Loss”, gave us a clear understanding of what those pesky flies are, as well as a glimpse at the truth behind some other things that have appeared over the course of the season. In the end, everything tracks down to the same person — or shall we say host?
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It’s no secret to anyone keeping up with the show that Charlotte — or, rather, the part of Dolores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) consciousness living in Charlotte’s body — has a plan to take over the world. After suffering at the hands of humans for so long, she wants nothing more than to switch the roles, putting her kind at the top of the food chain and forcing humanity to live as prisoners to her own will, enduring the same lack of agency that she was subjected to. But to rid humans of their ability to make choices, Charlotte must first find a way into their minds. That’s where the flies come in.
And they come in quite literally: what happened to Caleb in Episode 3 was just a demonstration of what is happening to all the visitors in all the Olympiad Entertainment’s parks and will soon happen to everyone outside the compound as well. Charlotte’s flies are parasites that seize the minds of their human carriers - or hosts, as Charlotte prefers -, putting them under their master’s control. They do that by releasing that off-putting goop into the hosts’ brains. It takes a while for the infection to take hold, but after the flies get in, it’s just a matter of time until the goop is in charge.
But Charlotte’s plan is not foolproof. Even with the flies in seemingly full control of his brain, Caleb is able to resist the order to kill Maeve, aiming his gun at William (Ed Harris) instead. When Charlotte asks him how he managed to resist her, he tells her that he has something she doesn’t - love and friendship, maybe, or something to fight for. Alas, things aren’t as simple as that, either. Later on, Charlotte herself explains to Caleb that the flies have some trouble taking hold of adult hosts, whose minds are already formed. Still, they are pretty successful in infecting children, what with their neural plasticity and their learned obedience. Thus, it took Charlotte an entire generation to finally take control over humanity, just waiting for the children her flies infected to grow up.
As Charlotte spills out her evil plan to Caleb, the subplots taking place outside the park gain a whole new meaning. As per usual forWestworld, Season 4 is split into more than just one timeline. So far, however, it wasn’t clear who was contemporaneous with whom. It turns out that Maeve and Caleb’s little foray into the Golden Age park has already happened long ago - 23 years in the past, to be precise. The Caleb to whom Charlotte is now explaining her plan is not the original one, but the most recent of hundreds of synthetic copies with transplanted memories. It’s a new and improved version of a process that we were introduced to inSeason 2, in which James Delos (Peter Mullan) asked to have his consciousness transferred into a host’s body in order to escape death only to find himself trapped in a never ending loop of incinerated mentally unstable prototypes. As a matter of fact, the entirety of Charlotte’s chat with Caleb is nothing more than a fidelity test just like the ones young William (Jimmi Simpson) conducted on James.
Outside Caleb’s little holding cell, is a world completely under Charlotte’s control - or so it seems. In a veryMatrix-like scene, she proves the extent of her power by making everyone around him stop on their tracks as they go about their daily business. Before that, though, we get our first good look at a very real and very big tower not so different from the one that has been haunting Christina (Evan Rachel Wood) and all those minor characters that were deemed clinically insane. The tower, as the homeless man near Christina’s office has already explained many times, has the power to control minds. It sends out the commands to the humans infected by Charlotte’s flies.
This is not the first time the tower appears in “Generation Loss”, even though it’s the first timeWestworldhas shown it to us in its full glory. Earlier in the episode, Maya (Ariana DeBose) goes to wake Christina up and finds out that her roommate has spent the night painting a picture of the city with a very menacing black tower-like figure over it. This indicates that the world Christina is living in is the one 23 years after Maeve and Caleb’s raid on Olympiad. This time skip is confirmed by Maya’s account of her nightmare about flies attacking her and her family during a picnic when she was young. Most likely, she is one of the many children Charlotte found so easy to control all those years ago.
Thankfully, though, not all is lost. Now all grown up, Caleb’s daughter, Frankie (Aurora Perrineau), seems to be safe from Charlotte’s control. Under the codename C, she fights alongside a group of outliers to free humanity. Whether such outliers have managed to avoid the attack of the flies or are simply immune to the parasite remains to be seen.
And this is far from being the only question raised by this fly twist that the show has yet to answer. There are also many other questions raised by this impactful revelation. For starters, it adds another layer to the problem of who Christina actually is. Is she just another facet of Dolores living her best life in Charlotte’s new world? Does she have free will? Is her so-called job as a game developer really just a facade for creating loops for actual people devoid of agency? What about Maya? Is her concerc with Christina’s love life part of her core directive? The list goes on and on, but that’sWestworldfor you: every question answered raises another ten.
Westworldairs on Sundays, on HBO. Episodes are available to stream on HBO Max.
