Westworld

Ultimately, Westworld hasn't gone back to the place where it all started, and continues to expand its scope far beyond the borders of the park, but rather than this resulting in more disarray, what plays out are the exciting twists, turns, and surprises through time that will make anyone sit up and take notice.

It is still dense and intense – and yet remains hugely rewarding, provided you’re willing to expend your grey matter to keep up. In particular, it displays a refreshing determination to not repeat itself and it is great fun watching familiar characters adapting to changed circumstances.

It has its cake, it eats it, and you may as well enjoy the spectacle.

The polarizing drama about cowboys, robots, and free will is finally good again. Even the handful of flaws in the first four episodes HBO made available to critics, while irritating, don’t distract from that familiar one-two punch of puzzlement and shock.

Now the fourth run takes some of the best of each season to deliver a cocktail of apocalyptic drama, baffling mystery and a nice dose of body horror.

Beautiful, baffling, and bonkers. A welcome resurgence for Joy and Nolan’s box of violent delights, and one that firmly dispels any hint that Westworld might have gone south.

The initial cool shock of Westworld has passed, and now, six years since the show’s premiere, we can just settle in for more of the comfortably familiar. Albeit with a few new tweaks that approximate, ably enough, the thrill of true innovation.

There are some truly fascinating choices and parallels sprinkled throughout this first half of the season that shift and muddy the show’s narrative perspective, leaving me genuinely excited for what the back half of this season could look like.

Led by strong work from Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, and Aaron Paul, the sleek visual aesthetic Westworld works with allows it to coast on its own cool weirdness whenever the plotting starts to chase its own tail.

One misses the way earlier iterations of the "Westworld" operating system kept us guessing. Now that we know how the show works, it's easy to bird-dog the secrets hiding in plain sight. ... Regardless of the slack in other plotlines, [Maeve and Caleb's] propulsive force is sufficient reason to stick around and see where this season is going.

Taken on their own, then, the first four episodes of “Westworld’s” fourth season are often fun, with spiky and interesting moments sprinkled amid other elements that feel like filler. As a serious fan of the show’s early going, I will settle for “often fun.” But it’s hard to imagine that “Westworld’s” two creators — writers who set out, thrillingly, to investigate what it means to be human and who now are losing us within the maze they keep complicating — can.

If it all sounds like “Westworld” is still ridiculously narratively divided and convoluted, it undeniably is, and the show continues to have a frustrating habit of over-writing itself into ridiculously long passages of exposition. ... But it’s encouraging to see actors like Harris, Wright, and Paul have more fun than they were in the drag of a third season.

There’s still so much more room for “Westworld” to break its icy tension with clever levity, or just enjoy the bizarre nature of its wild reality. (This is still the show with replica robots and cloning, yet it never duplicates the fun of a “Mission: Impossible”-style mask reveal.) Instead, it’s resolved to do what its done before to the best of its abilities, like a piece of A.I. tasked with replicating the human experience, but tapping out after it learns “excitement” and “deception.”

The fourth season of Westworld is business as usual. It’s two episodes of comically elongated resetting of the pieces on this futuristic chessboard, followed by two episodes in which some of the ideas are provocative or at least amusing.

It’s feeling small. Dull, even.

"Westworld" returns, featuring several familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, while extending aspects of a third season that creatively sailed off the rails. While there is surely intelligent life out there eager to see where this goes, at this point it's not so much a question of not being able to follow the series through its convoluted maze as simply not feeling as if it's worth the energy to try.