How The Flies Work

July 4, 2022

Hello. I’d like to remain anonymous if possible.

First, thank you for doing the podcast. Doing one podcast a week would be a lot of work, let alone 3. I appreciate the community you have worked hard to develop around this great show. It definitely adds to my enjoyment of Westworld.

I have a couple of thoughts I wanted to share about Season 4 in general.

1. The flies in the show this season remind me of parasites that infect and control an animal’s behavior. For example, the fungus that infects the brain of carpenter ants and controls them in a way that ensures the fungus’ survival over that of the ants survival.

https://askabiologist.asu.edu/plosable/zombie-ants

Another, less direct example would be toxoplasmosis, which cats spread. While it can have an effect on people, it has been shown to make mice less afraid of cats, which makes it easier for the cats to catch the mice.

The flies in S4 crawl into the eyes of people and then those people are controlled by what I assume are the hosts. Either the people can be controlled on the fly (pun intended), remotely and in real time, by the hosts or the desired behaviors are programmed into the fly ahead of time, so once they infect a person, that person immediately acts according to that program.

The opening sequence shows a fly being created. My theory is that the hosts (most likely Charlotte) are creating the flies to control people.

2. We keep seeing inversions this season. Certain callbacks are made to previous seasons, but in a way that seems inverted from when they were originally used. For example, in E2, the MiB is told his purpose is to be the loser, an inversion of what he told Teddy back in S1. If my theory above is correct, that’s another inversion (the hosts are programming the behaviors of humans).

In S2, we learn that the hosts were being used to decode humans. I get the sharp impression that is being inverted in S4 and that humans are being used to decode the hosts.

Enter Christina. She is a host that is in a park for hosts, populated with human npcs, to help her discover who she is or who she could be as a human. (Note: This park may be a simulation and not exist in reality.)

Westworld was used to boil people down to their programmable essence. In a way, it made humans more like hosts. In S4, the park Christina currently inhabits is boiling hosts (or just Christina) down to their human essence and is making hosts more like humans.

Tin Foil Hat:

Charlotte mentions in S4E2 that it wouldn’t make sense to start populating the world with her kind just yet, since people had become so good at killing hosts. I think Charlotte’s plan is to better understand how hosts can live amongst humans without being detected or attacked.

Christina is creating the narratives or loops for the humans inside her park and, intentionally or not, is trying to find what behaviors work for allowing humans and hosts to coexist.

The hosts will take that knowledge from the park that Christina is in and use the flies to adjust human behavior (controlling and/or programming them) and evolve host behavior (helping them be more human) in such a way that humans and hosts can coexist in the same world.

I’ve been wrong plenty of times and will probably be wrong again, but just wanted to get your thoughts on these ideas. Thanks for giving me an outlet to share.

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