So Happy To Be Back

Published June 17, 2022 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hello shat crew, long time no talk.

So thankful you guys started the season off right with a deep dive into the shows titles. I had been looking them over when I started to think about the connection the titles have with each other. Specifically:
4X3 – Annees Folles
4X4 – Generation Loss
4X8 – Que Sera Sera

I could be grasping at straws here. So no big deal if this is considered “tin foil” and therefore a spoiler-ish territory. Its more wishful thinking.

Anyway, the three episode titles jumped out at me because of their relationship to France and the period of time between WW1 and WW2.

As explained wonderfully by you three, Annees Folles is the “Roaring 20s” of France. During that period, artist writers and creatives flocked to France. One particular artist of interest thrived in this period, Gertrude Stein. Now, we know Westworld has referenced Gertrude before (I believe it was Dr. Ford who mentions her in the first season). But what did Gertrude do? Coined the generation of men and women born between 1883-1900 as “The Lost Generation”, which she felt was the “disoriented wandering directionless spirit of men and women who survived WW1”. Hemingway took the phrase and ran with it (typical man running away with the woman’s idea) but it was from Gertrude herself.

Generation Loss, which again as perfectly defined by you three describes the loss of quality between subsequent copies. But it also is the name of an art installation (or performance?) by Alvin Lucier, who recorded himself speaking in a room, and then rerecorded himself playing back that dialog over and over until there were no more recognizable words. But the fact that this episode is preceded by “Annees Folles”, and the fact that there was an art performance named the same thing, could it also be a nod to “Lost Generation”/Gertrude Stein (there is also a poem by Jonathan Reed titled “Lost Generation” that can be read both backwards and forwards, poetry seems to be the love language of Nolan and Joy so just the more ya know the better armed youll be type of thing)

Que Sera Sera, again the French term “whatever will be will be” but more specifically, its a song sung by Doris Day in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1953). Now Hitchcock made a movie with this exact title in 1934 (that period again!), and decided to redo it later on. The two movies are similar in the overall plot devices used, but they do have their major differences. However, one of the main elements in both movies (spoiler) is they both have a French Man named Louis Bernard, who is a secret French Intelligence Agent, who warns the couple prior to his death about an assassination. After his death, the couple must avoid the killers who are looking for them as they know about the assassination. In the 1956 version, Doris Day’s character sings Que Sera Sera to distract the killers and save the day, and gets her kidnapped child back.

The Long of It:
In past seasons, Westworld has the weird ability to be relatable to re-world events/technology. Specifically last season, a rebellion of the human race against the ultra rich and powerful taking down a technology that has been spying on them? We just needed to turn on the news to get basically the same story, only it wasn’t set in the backdrop of a futuristic LA. We currently find ourselves right now at a weird period of time, basically reliving the events of 1919-1939 (hopefully with no uprising of Hitler, but hey those Proud Boys look an awful lot like Nazis). Our “Great War” in the middle east was winding down, the world felt like it rid itself of the “big bad” “terrorists” (purposefully using quotes there), then a pandemic hit putting our world into a lockdown, and now that pandemic has become less of a threat (if you listened to science), yes we thought we’d get a little more fun before a total financial collapse but hey, in the 2020s we do shit faster I guess, so all we need now is a communist/dictatorship to surprise us with the cleansing of a race and…wait a second…..oh wait we got Russia Ukraine! And no one is paying attention to that because America is burning itself to the ground because Facebook fucked our country in every way imaginable!

When we left Westworld, the big bad AI controlling all of humans was taken offline, or has been somewhat crippled, and its clear from looking at InciteInc.com that the company was exposed and shut down. So the world rejoices thinking they have taken down the big bad, and they can let their guard down. Much like the period of time between WW1 and WW2, people were over war, wanted to party, and didnt pay attention to what was brewing in the area of the world that was just handed its ass. Because no one was looking for the next war, no one saw it coming, and it gave Hitler 20 years(ish?) to raise his army, convince his people, and begin his destruction to wipe out a race of humans, we know that Hale is relatively unknown to the big wide world (in fact, do we know anyone who knows shes Dolores other than Dolores?) so no one is paying attention to what shes been doing in the 7 years since Dolores was wiped at the end of Season 3.

Again I could be grasping, but looking at his previous work (Person of Interest) and the first 3 seasons of Westworld, its hard to not see that the show runners are warning us the viewers that if we dont learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. I for one would love for this show to be a true dark warning of what happens when we take our eyes off the world, when we celebrate too much because we’re tired of fighting the bad eggs of society.

The Short of It:
In the 7 years that passed between Season 3 and where we will be Season 4, there is some evidence to substantiate a notion that this season will be the cautionary tale of how after you think you’ve won the great war, if you stop looking for the burning embers, they will find a way to start a new fire, even worse than before.

Also, just a quick note, we’ve seen two ways Hosts pearls are “destroyed”. One is where they are given a lobotomy (of sorts) leaving the pearl in-tact, but essentially wiping it clean. We also saw Pearls crushed. When you delete a file off your computer, even when you empty the trash bin on your desktop, the information from that file is still somewhere on that hard drive. While your computer only deleted the path to get to that file, the file is still there, waiting to be written over. If it is never over-written, and you never take a hammer to your hard drive, that information is still, in essence, recoverable. Hector’s pearl was crushed by Hale-lores and Hector died. Hector can never come back (unless Maeve were to try and remake him from memory, like Bernard and Dolores have done but we wont get into that). Dolores’ pearl was not crushed, that we can tell, meaning they didn’t show us a pearl being crushed. We saw files deleted, not over-written. Therefore, all this hubbabaloo of “The Real Dolores is Dead” and “Christina is just a writer girl in the big city trying to figure her shit out” its all misdirect and bullshit and the like. Whether or not “Christina” has that pearl that was taken from Dolores Prime, or if that pearl is sitting somewhere, unless we see it crushed, the old Dolores is recoverable in some sort of way. It feels like an episode where the main character has amnesia for a period of time and then suddenly smells a smell and can remember everything. While Dolores may not be able to be 100% the consciousness she was at the end of season 3, she has the ability to be as close to that Dolores Prime as possible, she just needs someone to jog her memory…..is that Teddy Flood I see coming?! hmmmmmmmmmmm

Well this is way longer than I anticipated, because I dont know how to keep it brief.

As always, thank you all for your valiant service to us, the Shat fans.

Gillian

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