Violent Delights is an aftershow podcast where hosts Andrew Sorcini, Dwayne DeFreitas, and Tosin Onafowokan discuss HBO’s Westworld, and the larger questions this ambitious show hopes to tackle.

On this week’s podcast, Andrew, Tosin, and Dwayne deconstruct the fifth episode of Westworld‘s fourth season, “Zhuangzi”, as they ask: What is “transcendence”? What’s the nature of Hale’s false relationship with Christina? Is Teddy real, and who sent him?

Connections

• Marvel villain Kilgrave had this sort of control over humans and it was agitating to see.
• Leda & The Swan
• The Matrix
• Hancock(?)

Next Episode on Westworld

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Recap

• William is in New York where he reveals to a couple that the Hosts now control the humans. He is interrupted by Clementine because a 2 year old host named Hope has been slaughtering humans and thus disrespecting the New York setting. William disciplines Hope and then finds Hale the next morning toying with the humans on the streets of her fiefdom. She reveals that not only is she bored, but that they have two systemic problems.
• 1st— her hosts seek to remain corporeal rather than transcend to a higher, virtual plane. the in that the human appetite for vice is infecting the hosts.
• 2nd — It turns out that Hope had been a host who volunteered to find an outlier, which is a person for whom the sonic control suddenly stopped working. The breach in the sound control makes these humans go mad. We learn that the homeless man Christina had been walking past was that outlier. When Hope found the houseless man and killed him, she was infected with something— some thought from him that Hope couldn’t manage. So Hope killed herself.
• Hale sends William to kill the outlier. As he approaches, he notices that Stubbs’ team is also in pursuit of the outlier. William tasks the humans in the area with stopping Stubb’s team. The team leader gets through the humans and goes upstairs, where William has found the Outlier. She manages to share that her husband was an outlier as well, and that he was so alone before he was killed. William is unnerved by the woman and moves to kill her but is shot by J, who manages to abscond from New York with her. Host William reanimates Human William and tries to ask questions that will help Host William understand who he is.
• Christina wakes up early. Her date with Teddy went well. She goes to her office to work and she creates yet another narrative that reflects her life as Dolores. Her boss shows up to shut it down and yet he allows her to tell him rather than write it into the computer. Teddy calls Christina to the pier and she meets him. He challenges her to see something she has never seen before. Christina understands that she is controlling the narratives of the people. Christina realizes that she must pretend and go through the loops and narratives built for her until they find a way out. Christina leaves Teddy for a meeting with Hale who is pretending to be her college roommate. Feeling that the meeting with Hale is problematic, Christina uses her narrative changing powers to create a distraction so that she could leave the meeting with Hale. She goes back to work after hours and checks for the presence of Hale and Dolores in her computer. Neither are there but they cause an alarm that brings her boss Emmet to her desk. She manipulates him into helping her see the truth. She finds a room where the computer shows her that all of her narratives correspond to real people in New York. When he finds Teddy that evening she asks him who set this up. His response is that she did.

Podcast

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