Westworld's fourth season

 Co-creator Lisa Joy talks about the Man in Black's motivations, the hosts' fight, and writing "Roommates, Banter, and Bad Dates."

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It's a whole new Westworld, and since Maeve and Caleb killed the big-thinking AI computer Rehoboam last season, it seems so peaceful. Dolores even helped, giving up her own life to do so.

So, let's give everyone an update on what happened tonight:

—Ed Harris’ The Man in Black, aka William is acting like he has his own mind and a lot of power. But don't forget that in the season 3 finale, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) killed what seemed to be a human version of him and sent a host of him out into the world. MIB wants to buy a dam from a group that makes drugs. He makes them an offer they can't say no to, but at first they do: MIB tells Arturo Del Puerto's cartel point guy, "Sell it to me today or give it to me for free tomorrow." "It already has what I want. MIB tells him, "I can't encrypt it. It was stolen from one of my facilities eight years ago, and I know you were paid a lot to store it. I don't want it moved or messed with, so I'll take it all."

Westworld's fourth season starts with an episode that makes a lot of sense.

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One thing that stood out to me about this episode was, how do I put this, how well it fit together? Westworld has probably made us think that each of its stories is a Rubik's cube of a puzzle, with many different timelines that we have to figure out (or get lost in). But not here. William, Christina, Caleb, and Maeve are all in different places, but it looks like we're all in the same time period (with or without Christina? Okay, maybe some red-yarn-wall conspiracy art will help us figure it all out in the future.

But for reintroduction to these characters, the quiet, almost studied the way in which we got to know them all was surprisingly refreshing: sure, we don't know who Christina is (though let's hope we get more of her roommate, played by Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose), but watching Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) go wild in the snow-capped mountains as she's hunted by William's men, and then seeing Caleb (Aaron Paul, Maybe a calm before the storm.

There's also that annoying guy who keeps bothering Christina because he thinks the stories she's writing are having some kind of effect in the real world, or in whatever world she and he are in. Who tells whose stories and who controls our own narratives ("I want to write a new story," Christina tells herself) seems to be the guiding philosophical idea for the violent thrills we've come to expect from Westworld, just as it was in previous seasons. We got a taste of it, but I'm sure there will be more.