Unless there is some huge payoff in the last two episodes, I think this season is a big miss. I'm not surprised the ratings are down. We're only in the third season and already we're far removed from the theme park setting the show was built on. How did we go from exploring the agency of the hosts to the free will of mankind outside of the parks? Having the parks exist inside that kind of system in the rest of the world seems problematic.

They should have just kept the show within the theme parks and had each season explore a different park and use that park's themes to explore different ideas. They care too much about preventing people from guessing where they're going and not enough on making the journey enjoyable. Now that the show has expanded to worldwide behavior control of humans, what can they do? Reveal that space aliens were controlling humans all along?

Shows like this and recent star wars movies make me wonder if there's such a thing as peer review processes when investing in such large budget productions.

This is a show that might work better if they dropped the whole season at once. When they make so much of it about noticing small details that call back to brief moments that aired several episodes before or years before, it's too hard to follow unless you have the time to review before and after each new episode. It feels like homework.

I went from "I can't wait to see what they do next" to "they should probably stop after this season."

Season one had that added layer of an interesting concept of a theme park where there were no consequences and you got to think about what you might do there yourself, and what it all meant. You sort of took that journey with the theme park guests and realized along the way how messed up it was. There hasn't been anything relatable since the first season. It's all future problems now, and it's all so far removed from reality that it's hard to care about what happens.

Wow. That was awful.

I feel the same way about season 4. Before this season I definitely looked forward to new seasons and now I could not care less. I almost stopped watching this episode halfway through. My wife made the call to finish it.

Season 1: Fun to watch and satisfying.
Season 2: Fun to watch if not satisfying.
Season 3: Hard to watch.

I admit I didn't feel like giving this season the brain power that maybe it needs to be appreciated, but didn't all the free will debate seem ridiculous with all the manufactured dichotomies? "You have a choice: Do what I want because you have no free will, or don't do what I want because you have free will, but you're only making that choice to avoid not having free will, and therefore, being forced into the choice, you really have no free will either way."

By the way... I love how society is collapsing into disorder and people are rioting and you can still find crime mercenaries willing to die for you for the right price.