Futureworld was the 1976 sequel to Michael Crichton’s Westworld. In the sequel, Delos Corp. uses hosts to replace world leaders, and has re-opened a new park after the mess that was Westworld gets cleaned up. If you’ve watched Episode 2 of Season 4 of HBO’s Westworld, does any of this sound familiar? Big *spoilers* to follow.
Futureworld
I had speculated during Season 3 that the show may be setting up a Futureworld plotline, but it looks like that guess was one season premature. However, by the second episode of Season 4, titled “Well Enough Alone,” Futureworld is absolutely happening.
First, we learn that Halores has replaced a California senator and his wife with hosts. Then we see Host William and a repurposed Clementine kill the U.S. Vice President and his secret service detail, only to replace the Veep with a host. This is done partly so that the government will support Delos’s opening of a new Westworld-like park. One built on the desert land near the Hoover Dam that we learn Host William had been buying up in the season’s prologue.
According to the host senator, who tells Caleb and Maeve that he’s “an emissary of the new world order,” there are 249 more hosts like him, many of whom have undoubtedly replaced influential individuals whose support Halores needs to further her plans.
We know part of the plan involves the new park, which Maeve and Caleb soon find themselves on the way to in a series of scenes designed to mimic young William’s first trip to Westworld in Episode 2 of Season 1. The original Westworld was designed to collect data on the guests. This new park, which appears to be a replica of the Roaring Twenties, may have a similar purpose. But I think there’s more to it, and our best evidence of this comes from Halores herself in the season’s biggest surprise so far – showing that human William is still alive.
“You were as close to a god as a man gets,” Halores tells William shortly before putting him back into cryogenic sleep (fittingly, trapped in the Vitruvian Man-type pose the hosts were in during their creation). “You and your associates created a world and ruled it absolutely. Controlled our every move. And now, I’m going to do the same to you.”
That sounds pretty ominous. Suffice it to say, nothing good will come from this new park. Though it will be fun watching Maeve, who knows about everything there was to know about the original park, maneuver her way through it.
What Is Halores Doing to the Humans?
The episode’s two most disturbing scenes involved the senator’s wife and the DOJ agent, Jim Navarro. Halores called the senator’s wife an “experiment,” and by the time Caleb and Maeve find her, she’s slaughtered all the horses in her barn and turned into some type of zombie. She even asks Caleb to “free” her before trying to kill him. After Maeve puts a bullet in the zombie’s head, she remarks: “She was already gone … She wasn’t like any human I’ve ever seen.”
In the scene with Navarro, we get confirmation on how this is happening – through the use of host flies, just as I suspected was the case in the last episode’s prologue. We even witness the host fly crawl up inside the agent’s eye. So somehow, Halores is using the host flies to control people’s minds and turn them into zombies. But exactly why remains to be seen. Maybe this is how Halores plans to deal with the human race? But it doesn’t explain why Delos needs a new park.
Where is Delores?
Episode 2 delivered a heaping of new mysteries surrounding Delores, who is now named Christina. First, we have another encounter with the homeless man raving about the Tower, which makes a “song with no sound” that only he and the birds can hear. Next, she sees a bunch of dead birds outside her workplace that no one else seems to notice. And finally, she concludes that she, in fact, has written the story of her stalker, Peter Meyers, who killed himself last episode.
Even more, Peter left all his money to The Hope Center for Mental Health. But when Delores goes there, she finds it has been abandoned for years. Nonetheless, Peter has a wing dedicated to his memory – even though he died just three days ago. None of this makes sense, and Delores starts questioning her sanity.
On top of that, there’s a room containing a bunch of drawings of the Tower, just like the homeless man is making. So what the heck is going on?
My first thought was that Delores might be in a new park. But I don’t think that’s the case. The park would have to be so massive it recreated New York City and parts of New Jersey. It would have cost gazillions of dollars to build and would have to be populated with millions of hosts. That doesn’t seem practical unless … Delores’s scenes are taking place in the future. Perhaps in a world Halores now controls, where everyone living in it are hosts or mind-controlled humans.
That’s my best guess for now, but it remains to be seen how this storyline ties in with Maeve and Caleb’s. Or whatever is going on with Bernard, who we have yet to see, but who looked like he had survived some type of apocalypse at the end of Season 3, suggesting he too is somewhere far in the future.
One final thought: Futureworld the movie was not well received. But my hope is that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are masters enough at their craft that the story will be much better the second time around.