This story contains detailed spoilers for Westworld.
Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) is arguably the emotional core of Westworld. She’s the character who guided audiences between the multiple timelines of season one and her transformation is what pulled support from audiences as she shifted through personas. It’s through her that we come to better understand the work of the park’s creators, and through her that we experience the Host’s revolution. So it’s difficult to imagine the series without her. But that’s what Wood and showrunner, Lisa Joy say they want you to do.
At the end of season three, Dolores is erased. Hunted by Maeve (Thandie Newton) and Serac (Vincent Cassel), Dolores and her duplicates are (mostly) eradicated, and Dolores Prime is erased at the feet of Rehoboam. And of course, like for any good series with stakes, that means it’s time to let Dolores go. Or is it?
For Season 4, Wood is back, this time as the mysterious brunette, Christina. Speaking to Inverse, Wood insisted that Christina is “a completely new character.” Joy and Wood have spoken about how the characters might be similar, while holding firm that Christina is a new character experiencing a very different life than Dolores. But they have a lot in common. Both seek, “beauty and romance and poetry in this mundane world,” and both wake up every morning in the same position, a glance away from an easel. When we meet Christina, she’s immediately coaxed into a decision by her roommate, Maya (Ariana DeBose — who is also a bit suspect if we’re being honest, feeling a bit like fake Francis from Season 3), asking her to select black or white heels. She then participates in her repetitive life, needing encouragement to branch out into social situations, holding desperately on to a romantic view of the world she longs to discover.
If they really are one and the same, this wouldn’t be the first time Dolores was more than one character. Firstly, Dolores is the original A.I. Host and her programming was used to create all the Hosts who came after her. Even as Dolores Prime, she was also known as Wyatt, a character seeming quite separable from the rancher’s daughter introduced early in season one. Later, her copied consciousness lived in multiple Hosts, with five Dolores duplicates running around in season three. And though we’re meant to believe Dolores has been erased, there’s the potential there are some unaccounted-for pearls, and the copy of her that was used to create “Halores” (Tessa Thompson, whom we’ll from now on refer to as “Charlotte Hale” or “Hale”) is still up and running. So while we’re meant to believe the real Dolores has been wiped from existence, it’s near impossible to not suspect she might live on in the mysterious Christina.
We can pull apart Christina to decipher just how her and Dolores might be related. Christina is a full-time writer at Olympiad Entertainment. She writes NPC characters for video games. Cheeky. (She’s, in fact, offended when her date refers to NPCs as “canon fodder”). And while Olympiad Entertainment is a brand-new mystery, keen eyes will notice that their logo is a mirrored duplicate of Delos’.
To promote the show, HBO released an employer brand video for Olympiad Entertainment that boasts working there being, “a dream come true,” a parallel to Dolores’s repeated line, “I’m in a dream.” This line is often accompanied by other dialogue expressing that she fears being trapped within dreams.
Westworld seasons tend to have core themes, and Christina could be living in a mirror world (perhaps one that’s like a dream) not existing on our same plane of existence. One where Olympiad is creating videogames as opposed to Delos creating video game-like IRL experiences. There are a few major clues that Christina is at the very least not existing on the prime timeline (like her world having no graffiti or references to the anniversary of the revolution), the largest being the long fades to black. In Season 1, Dolores was experiencing two different timelines shown simultaneously. Her memories (or reveries) were getting mixed up and she was experiencing flashbacks and two very different experiences. It was later revealed that these stories happened in succession, and audiences were being fed them the way her AI was experiencing them- jumbled up and at the same time. To denote the separation in the timelines, cuts between them were marked with long fades to black. These same fades sandwich all scenes featuring Christina.
Then, there’s the presumption that Christina’s writing is affecting people in her world. She is stalked by a man who is obsessing over the presumption that she is writing the terrible things in his life. Christina also raises alarm bells by writing characters that resemble the Man in Black (Ed Harris), and even Dolores, the woman seeking a happy ending.
Next, there’s the reappearance of James Marsden presumably as his original character, Teddy. Teddy was Dolores’s great love (unless you count young William), believed to have had his physical Host self decommissioned and his consciousness uploaded to the Valley Beyond (aka The Sublime). Though we can’t know if he’s Teddy just yet, we do know someone else was stalking Christina (as someone left a print of the maze on her fire escape), and that someone protected her from the stalker. At the end of episode one when Christina begins to write the new character that sounds like the original Dolores, and she mentions the happy ending, the shot pans to Marsden gazing lovingly up to her fire escape.
So what does this mean for who and where Christina is? Trailer clues suggest the Man in Black himself or the Host controlled by Charlotte Hale, will face the breach of the Valley Beyond. In the opening of the first episode, William (or more likely, the Host copy of him under Hale’s control) visits the servers which presumably house the Valley Beyond, and he threatens and murders his way towards access. Though this scene opens the series, we can deduce it happens later in the timeline, since we see Hale working on her mind control flies with the politicians in Episode 2, which is likely how she successfully weaponized the mind control seen in episode one. Trailers also show Hale standing on the streets outside Christina’s apartment, suggesting she appears in the area.
There’s not much to go on at this point, but it seems that Christina’s story is either in a parallel mirrored and non-corporeal universe happening simultaneously to the prime timeline, or she exists in a Delos infiltrated version (as a result of the work of Hale and her MIB Host) of the Valley Beyond. We don’t have many clues about what the Valley Beyond looks like for the hosts, and there’s no real reason to expect it’s the green pastures where the Host minds are all living on the land. A Dolores descendant of sorts could be living in her own “dream come true,” creating and writing the world around her, this time, being in control of the “NPCs” as opposed to being a controlled NPC in a world not unlike the one in WandaVision. The word “Doloris” is Latin for “grief” or “sorrows,” and the idea of a grief ridden redhead creating a world where she controls the NPCs seems incredibly fathomable.
Perhaps the Valley Beyond is truly impenetrable, but episode one suggests that the servers service more than one entity. It’s possible Olympiad Entertainment is leeching off the same space and using a new generation of Dolores AI that’s just close enough to the real thing to be familiar. Teddy’s consciousness has been festering without his love in the Valley Beyond, and perhaps Christina, a later generation of Dolores’s consciousness, is now in a shared space where Teddy is able to reunite with her. Maybe each of their conscious mind’s chosen worlds are ones where they both exist, and Teddy is visiting a lasting Dolores in her digitally created space. One where familiar things that live in Dolores’s reveries, like a backwards version of Delos and choices between black and white, still exist.
A consistent theme in the series has been Delos’s great plan to understand and map human behavior. Season two ended with the revelation that human minds were being cataloged as a means of predicting human behavior. Season three followed the work of Incite and Rehoboam being used not just to predict human behavior, but to interrupt and influence it. Though this season takes place seven years after the tear down of Rehoboam and the AI control, Hale and William are very much still in play, attempting to replace powerful politicians with believable Hosts, and to penetrate the Valley Beyond. Perhaps Christina writing NPCs (mirroring old Delos human data) for Olympiad Entertainment is part of their success. Alternatively, perhaps Christina is in living in a self created nightmare in the Valley Beyond that’s slowly fracturing around her.
The first episode of season four is entitled, “The Auguries.” “Augury” refers to an ancient Roman practice of interpreting omens from the behavior of birds. And as Christina begins to, um, question the nature of her reality, she sees images of a tower and stumbles across a dead bird. The omen, as it were, could be yet another attempt to shake Dolores out of the loop in her fantasy, and force her to see the world around her. This time, hopefully not the same world that corrupted Wyatt and Hale.