Dolores ventures far off her loop in this episode, and that seems like a problem to the operators, but then again, “the boss is disrupting so many storylines with his new narrative, it’s hard to tell,” as one of them says. The dissonance is throwing off the park administrators, too. Is there a plan, or is the plan to ignore the plan? They have not yet been brought into harmony. So maybe the “dissonance theory” of the episode extends beyond beliefs and ideas and into the rules that govern the Westworld universe itself - rules we’ve barely had time to grasp before they start changing on us. “I adapted it from a scripted dialogue about love.” Leaving the “cognitions” off that title may be significant: Can the Hosts have opinions and beliefs, or are they stuck with their programming? In the episode’s first scene, after Dolores ( Evan Rachel Wood) delivers a short, moving monologue about the importance of the pain she believes she’s feeling after her parents’ death, Bernard ( Jeffrey Wright) says, “That’s very pretty, Dolores. And a lot happens in this episode.īut that swirling would also explain the title of episode four: “Dissonance Theory.” Presumably, it’s named for the cognitive dissonance theory, which posits that people tend to seek consistency and continuity among their beliefs and opinions - their cognitions - and that when a person discovers their own beliefs and opinions are in conflict, something will have to change. After all, there are a lot of ideas swirling around in the show right now, many of which don’t seem to cohere with one another. It could be that Westworld is more like a painting than a photograph, and the show is just applying strokes to the canvas right now we have to wait a while before we see what the picture is. The truth is, we have no idea what it’s about yet.
I know that because I’ve fought the impulse myself. I know the impulse is to try to say what HBO’s Westworld is “about,” four episodes in.