Aaron Paul’s Caleb had previously joined forces with Maeve (Thandie Newton) to take down Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) before she overthrew the world’s humans. But as brave as his attempt was, his foolish impulse made it easier for Hale to gun him down and keep him as a lab rat to understand her enemy better.
After putting Caleb through Delos’ immortality procedure, Hale has made and remade nearly 300 artificial hosts to trap Caleb. But with each “regeneration,” Caleb’s determination to escape only grows significantly stronger, and unbeknownst to him, his past selves have made several failed attempts to escape.
In Episode 6 of Season 4 of Westworld, fans see Caleb #278 escaping and almost succeeding before being caught and dragged back to his cell.
But this attempt proved itself not a total failure since Caleb was able to transmit an emotional and heartfelt message to his daughter Frankie. But Caleb doesn’t know that he played right into Hale’s devious plans, endangering his daughter and all the other outliers.
We’ll go into a simple explanation as to what transpired and how it has altered the course of the remaining two episodes. We will explore every facet of the episode and compact it into three major lines: Caleb’s failed attempts before the almost escape, Hale’s masterplan, and Caleb’s future in the remainder of Season 4.
The cylindrical syringe found by Caleb was the key to his escape, using which he knocks himself out and tricks the guard android to believe he is dead and incinerate his cell. The fiery distraction gave him the time to escape using the vents, at which point he narrowly escaped burning to death with a clue on how to open the vents.
Two questions immediately sprang to the minds of the fans. Who left the syringe for Caleb to find? And who marked the arrow indicating the correct way to open the vents, aiding in Caleb’s escape?
The answer to the first question, to the watcher’s surprise, is Charlotte Hale. Tessa Thompson’s character had planted the syringe in Caleb’s cell and the fact that his daughter is alive in his head to make sure he’d devise a way to escape the prison. Why?
Hale gives him just enough time to get Frankie a message and ensure her plan reaches fruition, then drags him back to his “living” hell. Hale has deducted that following Caleb’s example, the outliers, including Caleb’s daughter Frankie, are infecting her android hosts with a virus, making them self-destruct.
She remains determined to uncover the truth and stomp out this resistance, starting with Caleb and his daughter. But when the interaction between Frankie and Caleb doesn’t provide her with the answers she desires, Hale destroys all the Caleb lifeforms stored in her prison.
Although Hale destroys every past creation of Caleb’s mind in the hosts, she still needs to figure out the path to her and her plan’s possible annihilation. So, she creates Caleb # 279, which now brings hope to humanity since Hale’s suspicion about Caleb holding the key to humanity’s saving grace is correct.
Caleb’s multiple bodies or hosts have all been like levels of a video game, except he doesn’t remember previous failed attempts but naturally develops a kind of instinctive direction as to how he should play the next level. The mysterious arrow confirms this fact along with the line Caleb #278’s cell neighbor says to him – “I only know what I told me.”
With previous models of Caleb’s host, viewers had not gained any insight into how they were built. But in #279’s case, we get a glimpse of how Hale has created multiple Calebs in the past 23 years. This solidifies the theories about Caleb being the deciding element of Hale’s success or failure.
Will Caleb #279 be the perfect copy of the original Caleb Nichols, or will #279 be the culmination of the numbers before him and the savior of humanity against Delos? The remaining two episodes of Season 4 will hopefully answer that for us.
About Westworld
Westworld is an American science fiction-thriller media franchise that began with the 1973 film Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton. It was followed by the sequel film Futureworld (1976).
In 2016 a new television series based on the original film debuted on HBO; the critically acclaimed series has broadcast three seasons, with a fourth currently streaming on HBO Max.
The series follows a dystopian world within the limits of Wild-West-themed amusement parks open to the elite to enjoy and are populated with human-like androids created for their enjoyment. But things take a dangerous turn when the robots malfunction and start killing the park’s patrons.
The TV Series follows the same universe as the films and features a star cast including Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Tessa Thompson, Jeffrey Wright, James Marsden, Simon Quarterman, and Aaron Paul.
Source: HBOMax
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