There are some pretty wild theories circulating about Caleb on Westworld Season 4. One of the most fascinating is the idea that Caleb is secretly a host now, even though he was genuinely a human in Season 3.
Fans Think The Truth Was Revealed in Maeve’s Memories
In Season 4 Episode 1, just before William and Charlotte’s hosts tracked down Maeve, she had a flash of memories when she was reaching out through the airwaves to try to find her daughter somehow.
Among those memories were some strange scenes with Caleb that we most definitely had not seen before.
We saw Caleb attaching an explosive to a Rehoboam outpost, making it look like telling Rehoboam to shut down in the Season 3 finale wasn’t the end of the war. From the timeline we’re given, where Caleb has a daughter who’s seven, it appears that Caleb and Maeve fought in the Revolution for about a year before settling into a peaceful life. It seems they won, since Rehoboam no longer exists (as far as we know.)
But there were a few moments in Maeve’s memories when she saw Caleb appearing to die, with a bad gunshot wound.
Here are a couple of screenshots.
Here’s another photo from those memories:
Some fans have wondered if Maeve is in a future timeline and these are actually her present-day memories as she thinks back to things that happened to the past. But I don’t think that’s the case. Notice that Caleb’s haircut in these flashback photos matches his haircut in Season 3. In Season 4, he has a different hairstyle. That alone points to these memories legitimately taking place in the past.
But we’re left with a question.
Did Caleb almost die in the past, but Maeve saved him? Did it happen just before their Revolution battle ended?
Or did Caleb actually die in their last battle, and Maeve somehow remade him into a host?
The “Caleb is a host” theory would jive better with why we were even shown this memory of Maeve. But the last we heard about the human-to-host experiments, they were never able to achieve fidelity. So why would Maeve achieve something that no one else could? And for that matter, Caleb’s wife would have needed to get pregnant with his daughter before his death, making for a pretty tight timeline.
Is Caleb’s Family His Cornerstone?
But still, some fans think it’s true.
TheBlueBlaze wrote on Reddit: “There’s no way Caleb’s not a host. He died at the lighthouse and Maeve brought him back. What I wonder is if Caleb already knows.”
However, u/ElderRoxas thinks maybe Caleb is a human-host hybrid of sorts. They wrote, “My guess is: Caleb is still mostly human, with a human brain, but whatever ‘happened at the lighthouse’ nearly killed him, and Maeve helped him survive by planting him with machine parts. And he’s actually the first android with a human mind.”
And u/K_Marcad added, “The way he talked about her daughter and wife sounded like a classic Westworld cornerstone. I may have to check if is the exact same line that Peter Abernathy used when he talked about Dolores and his wife in first season.”
"It's their cornerstone." – Elsie
Relive the third episode of #Westworld today: https://t.co/FZUzFy78oP pic.twitter.com/RnpfgndU00— Westworld (@WestworldHBO) October 18, 2016
According to the Westworld wiki, cornerstones are backstories that “anchor the hosts… The rest of their identity is built around it, layer by layer.” Elsie shared this tidbit of information. Dolores was her dad’s cornerstone, and Bernard’s son was his, for example.
So is it possible that Caleb is a host after all, and his family is his cornerstone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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