Bernard and the human resistance search out in the desert to find the weapon while Christina meets a familiar face.
Tropes:
- Agonizing Stomach Wound:
- During their mission to destroy the last Rehoboam unit, Caleb is shot in the gut by a security guard. He can barely manage to stumble outside before the bombs go off. He's flown to a hospital in time for treatment, but it's a close call and it helps Maeve realize how fragile human life is, which is why she left so that Caleb could have a normal life.
- While attempting to escape the park with Hale, Caleb gets stabbed in the gut by a mind-controlled Temperance guest. With no medical care forthcoming, he has to power through the wound while also trying to resist the compulsion to turn on Maeve. He ends up being gunned down by Hale's men before the wound gets him.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Towards the end, Hale has finally succeeded with her plan to control humanity and eliminated both Maeve and Caleb. The only people who can stop her now are Bernard, Frankie, and the human resistance.
- Blood from the Mouth: Caleb spouts blood after getting shot in the stomach.
- Call-Back:
- Christina's first meeting with the man who looks like Teddy is similar to Dolores and Teddy's meeting in Sweetwater where instead of dropping a can of milk, she drops her lipstick, and then this Teddy look-alike picks it up and says the same line, "Don't mind me. Just trying to look chivalrous."
- Hale notes that she's gone through 278 copies of Caleb while trying to understand what makes him special. As established in season 2, human minds can't adapt to being in host bodies and break down over time, hence the huge amount of copies.
- Chekhov's Skill: In the previous episode, Maeve demonstrated that Hosts can perceive the sound produced by the Mind-Control Device thanks to their more sensitive hearing. In this episode, she exploits that by increasing its intensity to the point that Hosts are debilitated by the sound, while adjusting her own hearing so she won't be.
- Dead All Along: Caleb died 23 years ago when he was gunned down by Hale's men and all of his scenes happened in the past as part of a Fidelity test.
- Eye Awaken: The close-up shot on William opening his eye as he regains consciousness after Maeve's Loud of War attack.
- Florence Nightingale Effect: This is how Caleb first met Uwade, who was a nurse when he was injured from his mission on destroying the last Rehoboam unit.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In an audio form of the Logo Joke, the normal HBO sound effect at the end of the credits is replaced with the low-frequency sound used to control the infected humans.
- Glass-Shattering Sound: Maeve removes the safeties on the Mind-Control Device and cranks it up to max, destroying all the glass on the level and debilitating William and Hale, who can hear the sound it makes (Maeve dials her own hearing down so she won't be affected).
- Go Through Me: When the leader of the resistance group decides to drop dead weight and kill Bernard and Stubbs, Frankie steps in his way and declares she won't let this happen.
- Heroic Willpower: Caleb is able to resist the Mind-Control Device and shoot William instead of Maeve. Hale is shocked by this, so she keeps him around to figure out how he is capable of such a feat.
- I'll Kill You!: Line said by Caleb to Hale after watching Maeve going down in the explosion.
- Insistent Terminology: Caleb describes the people who visit the park as carriers for Hale's parasites. She prefers the term "hosts".
- Kill and Replace: Hale has Caleb killed by her forces and creates a host copy of him because she wants to understand why Dolores and Maeve find him interesting and how he was able to resist her commands despite being infected by her flies.
- Never Found the Body: Frankie was hoping to find Caleb's body in the quarry. When Bernard digs out the site, he only finds Maeve and sadly tells Frankie that her father's body is not with her.
- The Reveal:
- All of Maeve and Caleb's scenes in this season were memories of Host-Caleb who is undergoing a Fidelity test conducted by Hale, the 278th iteration of him she's tested.
- The woman named "C" who Bernard and Stubbs first met in the previous episode is a grown-up Frankie, Caleb's daughter, who wants to find her father.
- The weapon that Bernard is looking for is Maeve, who sacrificed herself to stop the Man in Black by causing the park expansion site to self-destruct.
- The strange tower drawn by people in Christina's world is a scaled-up Mind-Control Device, controlling the vast majority of humanity. Despite literally towering over anything else, they can't recognize what it is, no doubt because Hale makes it so.
- Christina's world is actually set 23 years later, at a time where Hale controls humanity. In fact, Hale is based at Olympiad Entertainment, where she works.
- Sequencing Deception: The reveal that the subplot with Caleb, Maeve and Hale is set 23 years before Bernard and Christina's.
- Slept Through the Apocalypse: Revealed to be the case with Bernard, who was in the Sublime for a few decades and woke up after Hale has taken over.
- Synthetic Plague: As Hale revealed to Caleb, the Temperance park is a superspreader event where the guests who are infected with her flies would go out and spread to the rest of humanity. Later on, Maya reveals to Christina that she had a nightmare about a swarm of flies infecting her and her parents when she was a kid.
- Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: At the quarry, Caleb shoots down Man in Black with his machine gun. Maeve turns around and smiles at him but then she gets shot in the chest by the Man in Black who turned out Not Quite Dead.
- Taking You with Me: After the Man in Black shoots her in the chest, Maeve remotely activates all the explosions around the construction site and embraces the Man in Black so she can drag him down with the debris, burying both of them.
- Time Skip: Played with. Bernard and Christina's arc has always been set 30 years after Season 3, but the narrative was deliberately vague about the timeline. Maeve and Caleb's arc, meanwhile, has been set about 7 years after the events of season 3. Once they lose to Hale, their arc skips ahead 23 years to join the others.
- Time Stands Still: Hale lets the people in the city stand still to demonstrate to Caleb that she is in full control of the environment.
- Unbroken Vigil: Maeve reveals to Caleb that she didn't abandon him after the coup seven years earlier but sat at his bedside for weeks. She only left after seeing the relation building between Caleb and his nurse.
- Underestimating Badassery: William senses Maeve reaching out with her technopathy and boasts that Hale's upgrades will protect his mind from her. He realizes too late that it isn't him she's attempting to manipulate, but the Mind-Control Device he's standing right next to.
- Villainous Face Hold: Hale likes to hold Caleb's chin up as a demonstration of her dominance over him.
- Wham Episode: Similar to the twist of the first season, this episode makes it clear that Caleb and Maeve's attempt to thwart Charlotte's plot to enslave the human species failed, and establishes that the plots focused on Bernard, Frankie, and Christina are set twenty-three years after their defeat, in a world that Charlotte has almost completely dominated thanks to her perfected symbiotic plague.
- Wham Line: Maya describes a recent nightmare to Christina in which she watches both of her parents being engulfed by a swarm of flies that seem to render them completely unresponsive, with her final sight being the flies coming for her just before she wakes up. With the reveal at the end of the episode, this seems to be a hint that she is subconsciously aware of what has been done to her and to almost all other living humans.
- Wham Shot: Two of them.
- As Caleb is escaping the building where he is being held by Charlotte, the camera pans up at one point to reveal that it is none other than the Olympiad Entertainment tower that Christina works in.
- Caleb makes his way outside and begins moving through morning traffic only for the mind control tones to sound over the entire populace and freeze them in their tracks as if they were all hosts, at which point he notices the gigantic transmission tower in the harbor.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The reveal establishes that Bernard and Christina's stories take place twenty-three years after Caleb and Maeve failed to stop Charlotte from enslaving the human race, and also that the woman who has been traveling with Bernard and Stubbs is an adult Frankie. However, her mother Uwade is nowhere to be seen in the 'present day', and her fate is unknown.
