The senator-turned-host Maeve interrogates confirms as such. He’s part of a new world order, designed to make the world a better place for hosts with the addition of Hale’s experiments to make human beings into better neighbors. That triggers a solid Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) quip, and then it’s off to the races to chase down leads and figure out just what is going on, and just what the opera Don Giovanni has to do with anything. At least this season is significantly more straightforward than previous seasons; there are still a few unanswered questions from Season 3 that remain, but a lot of them have been ticked off in this episode, and the connections between Charlotte Hale’s plot and the mysterious Christina are beginning to take shape.
It’s interesting stuff, and perhaps deliberately there to plant seeds in the minds of viewers to make them/me connect dots that aren’t actually there. Are Charlotte and Christina both working towards Dolores’ grand vision? Is there still an original Dolores out there somewhere, making her puppets dance? The performances of Tessa Thompson, all cool malevolence, and Evan Rachel Wood, both curious and troubled by the violence around her, don’t give anything away, but the script from Matt Pitts and Christina Ham seems to lead towards some connection between Charlotte’s likely mind-control program involving flies going into people’s eyeballs (in a scene Lucio Fulci would be proud of) and the way Christina’s sadder and more violent scripts seem to be playing out in the lives of real people.
Director Craig William Macneill makes great use of Ed Harris, both when he’s the Man in Black hunting down Clementine, when he’s selling investors on a new Delos theme park not too terribly long after the last one ended in tragedy, or when he’s the captured William being held in carbonite for Charlotte’s amusement. He’s so great at subtly adjusting his cadence and body language to play these various roles; just him sitting in a chair in the dark, or wearing a suspiciously Stetson-like golf hat is enough to create a feeling of tension. That tension is only ratcheted up higher when Maeve and Caleb (Aaron Paul) end up getting on a train ride that takes them from a speakeasy beneath the Angeles Arts Pavilion and into the heart of Delos’ newest theme park.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, yet again. Maeve spent her time out of the park either chasing a killer or trying to avoid them, and now she’s back in the same old loop. No wonder she tried to disappear off the face of the earth. Caleb might have made a noteworthy attempt at moving on with his life, but given the way his life looked prior to the revolution, Maeve is correct when she says that improvement is a low bar to hurdle. Caleb is tired of war, but clearly war isn’t tired of him.
