Westworld Season 4 Embraces Humor in the Face of Horror

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 3 of Westworld.If you had told me a year ago that this newest season of Westworld would not just be quite good, but also the most fun it has ever been, I would have had a rather hard time believing you. Yet with a well-timed jump into the future that still allows it to wrestle with the past, the show’s first few episodes have achieved just that and more. This continued to be the case in the show’s third episode, “Années folles,” which took a turn into some interesting new territory for the series. Specifically, we got to see the return of Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) in rare form as he came back from what is known as The Sublime which has given him foresight of all future outcomes. In practice, this turned him into a wisecracking badass who is making his way through a desolate world with the snarky Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) in tow to team up with a resistance movement searching for some sort of weapon in the desert. Alongside that, the dynamic duo of Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul) continued to infiltrate the new park. The episode, quite refreshingly, made plenty of genuinely funny and self-referential jokes about itself that also were intermixed with a solid heaping of broadly humorous situations. Whereas the show had been deathly serious in prior seasons, often to its detriment in the last one, this episode stood out for how gloriously yet subtly comedic it all was.