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Seven years have passed since the Westworld season-three finale, both in the show and in the real world. (Just kidding on the latter. Season three aired in 2020, only two years ago. But if you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?) That said, Westworld has played with secret time jumps and flashbacks before, so time vigilance is recommended. If you’re iffy on where we left everyone at the end of season three, give our breakdown of where the seven major characters are headed a read. All good now? Ready to decipher the new mysteries in store for season four?

The season opens with a shot of what appears to be the Seattle skyline. But a key element of the Seattle terrain as we know it is missing: water. It’s a dry and rocky desert as far as the eye can see. A man looking out at the Space Needle from afar, played by Arturo Del Puerto, goes to a business meeting with William, who, as you may recall, is now a host.

William gives the businessman an offer he can’t refuse: Sell him his land today, or he’ll take it for free tomorrow. The man inadvertently chooses the latter, turns William down, and returns to his black-and-white home. There, a swarm of scary and loudly humming flies attacks him. The next day, seemingly under William’s control, the man kills his co-workers, signs over the land to William, and slices his own throat. That’s all we see from William in the episode, living out his seemingly dead human counterpart’s Western outlaw dreams in the real world, so let’s focus on the other storylines one by one.

First, we are reintroduced to Evan Rachel Wood, who is now playing a character named “Christina.” She works at a video-game company called Olympiad Entertainment, where she creates games based suspiciously on Westworld storylines. Her former lover (James Marsden) waits in the proverbial wings for an inevitable meet-cute. We learn that Christina mainly writes/programs non-playable characters (NPCs), which some players might consider “cannon fodder,” at least according to a middling blind date. She also lives in futuristic New York City with a roommate named Maya, played by Academy Award–winning, Tony Award–hosting, Schmigadoon! school marm-ing quintuple threat Ariana DuBose. Maya so far seems like she dropped into the narrative right out of a romantic comedy. She’s supportive, upbeat, and a little too concerned with her BFF’s love life. Given the nature of Westworld, I trust that this trope will be deconstructed and explored.

But as idyllic as her apartment and friendships seem to be, more than a few off-kilter things happen in Christina’s day. She gets threatening calls. Someone’s on the fire escape knocking over plants. Various people rumble about “the Tower” in hushed tones. Finally, a man named Peter stops her on the street, accuses her of controlling people in the world, and asks to be set free. Christina has no idea what he’s talking about. “All these people do what you want them to,” he says.

What’s going on with Christina’s storyline? When is it? Also, who is Christina? This host has Dolores’s body, but not necessarily Dolores’s mind pearl. If she’s living a modern adaptation of Dolores’s loop in the park, why? What purpose does that serve? Is it some punishment? When she walks to work, some men say, “This place is fucking wild; I can’t believe this is your first time” just like the guests would at the park. Is it possible that New York City has become an isolated robot theme park? Seems unlikely, but Christina does find an image of the maze from season one on her fire escape.

The other two storylines in the season-four premiere — Maeve’s and Caleb’s — converge, so we know for sure that they’re taking place at the same time. We first check in with Maeve, who is living off the grid in the woods. She searches through her brain internet, flipping through memories of her daughter, memories of Hector, and some post-season three adventures with Caleb (Aaron Paul) that we are not yet familiar with. Her isolation in this episode is short-lived, however. A man working at the general store, the type you’d expect to warn teenagers in a horror movie about what lies on the road ahead, tells her that men are looking for her. She beheads one of them with a hatchet (!) and determines that William sent them.

Maeve then goes directly to Caleb, who we learn throughout the episode is back working construction in Los Angeles. He has a wife named Uwade (Nozipho Mclean) and a daughter named Frankie (Celeste Clark). Caleb’s wife and coworker allude to the end of a war, seemingly the one started by Dolores when she leaked Rehoboam’s data seven years ago. Frankie has a violent streak, and Caleb is ready for the war to return to his door anytime. It does, first by way of one of William’s men and then Maeve. Caleb leaves with Maeve to finish what they started. Given that we don’t know what William and “Christina” are up to in their respective storylines, it’s nice that Maeve and Caleb have a crisp and clear call to action.

At the end of the episode, Christina opens a new pitch about a girl searching to fill the emptiness in her life, tying the women we’re following (Maeve, Frankie, and Christine) together. But she gets discouraged and tells herself that nobody cares about that kind of story. (This hits unexpectedly hard as a woman in the world and as a former screenwriting student who wanted to write female protagonists! We’re programmed, forgive the pun, to believe that stories about women just aren’t interesting or important.) Now, does this hint at where the story is going, given we don’t even know if this version of Dolores is a hero or a villain? Not really! But this sad sentiment, paired with Marsden’s shining face in the moonlight, is the kind of beautifully tragic/tragically beautiful imagery Westworld loves. It’s a return to something, even if we don’t know yet know exactly what.

• Where is Bernard? The last time we saw him, he woke up from the Sublime in a dusty hotel room with Luke Hemsworth’s character, Ashley Stubbs. Show us the dusty boy!

• Evan Rachel Wood’s new name references one of the early inspirations for the character design, Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World.

• Huuuuuuge shoutout to Murphy beds.

• The book that Caleb reads to his daughter is My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett — one of my personal favorites! It is about a young boy named Elmer who runs away to rescue a captive dragon and uses ordinary household items like lollipops and hair ribbons to trick and cajole the creatures of Wild Island, keeping the baby dragon chained up. As the title suggests, it is also narrated from the future by the protagonist’s child.

• “Peter” shares a name with Dolores’s father in the park, who was decommissioned after he started bugging.

• Christina is, notably, one of the only characters in the entire episode to have any color on the spectrum in her wardrobe. The blues in her pajamas and suit are muted but blue nonetheless, just like Dolores’s dress in Westworld. Pretty much everyone else wears black, white, or gray. The other exception? Maeve, who has her signature hints of red.