‘Westworld’ Season 4 Gets Lost Within the Maze: TV Review

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn the new season of “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood’s character describes the concept of the NPC — in video game parlance, the “non-player-characters,” the electronic background figures who exist to serve the person in control.

Going by Dolores, Wood’s character once lived such a fate herself, as a sentient “host” at a theme park; having long since freed her mind, she’s now known as Christina, living in an American city, working at a video game company where she’s the one telling stories.Well, stories on the margins, at least. “It’s not as high-profile as programming the lead,” she tells a near-stranger over dinner in the season’s first episode, “but it’s just as important.” Don’t most video-game players, her date asks, treat NPCs as “cannon fodder” — useless blips to be dealt with hastily? “I’m not doing it for the players,” Christina says, “I’m doing it for myself.” Wood’s character has always embodied the primary concerns of show’s creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.

It’s her awakening that jump-starts the action of the show in the first season; it’s her soulfulness that was the most urgent response to the show’s central question of whether there can be humanity within artificial intelligence in the superlative second.

And, now, it’s her vocation that suggests where the show is. The new season of often wayward drama doesn’t just treat many of the people onscreen as NPCs.