Westworld Season 4’s New Timeline Twist Just Changed The Game

Spoilers ahead for Westworld Season 4, Episode 4. Heading into Westworld Season 4’s fourth episode, viewers had just seen a host version of Caleb’s daughter Frankie splitting apart, unleashing Charlotte's parasitic mind-control flies to infect his brain. Though she was successful, Caleb and Maeve — who’d been battling the host Man in Black elsewhere — still managed to take Charlotte hostage and escape, but not without some serious battle wounds. After Caleb suffered a gunshot to the abdomen, Maeve rushed him to a demolition site at the edge of the Roaring ‘20s park to dispatch his rescue team. Following a tragic turn of events though, the timeline once again started to become unclear.

First, Maeve and the Man in Black both died after the park construction site exploded. Still safely inside with Charlotte, Caleb — still infected with the fly parasite— began to lose his grip on reality. After he asked his prisoner where he was, Charlotte’s reply set up the latest Westworld timeline twist. “The question you should be asking isn’t where, but when. How long have you been here?” she said, explaining that her questioning was part of an interview to establish a baseline of “fidelity.”

Horrified, Caleb looked down to see his bloody gunshot wound had disappeared, and realized he wasn’t really himself. “Well, you’re certainly a version of you. I believe the 278th?” Charlotte told him before filling him in on what he’d missed in the time jump. As she told it, Caleb “died in that park” 23 years ago, and in the meantime, her mind-control parasite had successfully worked on adults initially, but their developed brains were too resistant to change. So she began infecting children and let the parasite grow “in perfect symbiosis” with their minds. “It took a generation for those children to mature, for me to gain complete control of your world,” she explained.

Suddenly finding himself in the Olympiad headquarters rather than the park where he apparently died 23 years earlier, Caleb ran out of the building and into the same New York City-like world that Christina (Evan Rachel Wood’s new character) has been living in this season, complete with a giant sound tower to control humanity. After he accidentally bumped into a stranger on the sidewalk, all the pedestrians froze, and as Charlotte made her way through the crowd, Caleb understood what had happened. “You won,” he observed, and Charlotte replied, “Welcome to my world.” Cue two men putting a bag over Caleb’s head and dragging him away.

That information also solved an earlier mystery about the female resistance fighter Bernard teamed up with in the previous episode to find a weapon needed to save the world buried in the desert. So far referred to only as “C,” the woman explained to Bernard that she had her “own reasons for digging,” even if the other members of her group might not believe they’ll find the weapon they’re seeking. “You’re looking for your father,” he told her. “C” insisted that her father was dead, but Bernard replied that she’s never really believed that since she was a child. Her reply? “They say it happened here. If it’s true, there will be a body.”

They did find a body, but it wasn’t her father’s. “Caleb isn’t here,” Bernard told her, revealing C to likely be a grown Frankie. “But the weapon I promised you is.” There, buried in the sand, was Maeve’s body.

That means that Bernard’s journey to The Sublime — where time exists on a different plane — was much longer than the seven years that passed between the events of Season 3 and the Season 4 premiere. To break down the timeline, Westworld Season 4 begins around 2060 — something the Man in Black hinted at when he referred to World War I ending 150 years ago (even if the math doesn’t match up perfectly). That’s when the Roaring ‘20s scenes take place. But given Frankie’s age and the information gleaned from Charlotte’s speech, there’s also a timeline happening around 2083.

Now that Bernard and C, aka Frankie, have found Maeve’s body, her resurrection is surely imminent. That means that the 2083 narrative is where she’ll return to once again try to save the world and restore free will to the masses. Though the HBO series has yet to explicitly confirm that Christina — who finally went on a date with James Marsden’s new Teddy Flood lookalike character — is also in that timeline, it’s more than likely they, too, will be involved in the season’s second-half heroics.