The following contains spoilers for Westworld Season 4, Episode 1, "The Auguries," now streaming on HBO Max.
Dolores has undergone many major transformations throughout the first three seasons of Westworld. The series' first season followed her slow journey to self-awareness, skipping throughout time and showing her slowly reaching the center of the "maze" Arnold had designed as a metaphor for the steps required to achieve sentience. Once she does, she's transformed into a killing machine, executing Ford and leading a violent revolt to try to escape the park. This escape coincides with absorbing Westworld's library of user data, which she uses in Season 3, laser-focused on her mission of robotic liberation.
Her fate at the end of Season 3 was unclear, having sacrificed herself to slip a virus into the godlike machine Rehoboam and transfer control of it to Caleb Nichols. But Season 4 finds her in a strange, unnamed city with brown hair and a new name: Christina. "Christina" is unaware of her previous identity, and believes she's a human like anyone else. Her only hints at something being wrong is a strange sense of ennui she feels, which she channels into her work at a gaming company, Olympiad Entertainment.
Dolores mentions on a date that she writes primarily for background characters, the ones players might only interact with for a moment or so. She explains how she takes great care in doing so, which makes perfect sense on a subconscious level -- she herself was a background character in Westworld. There's also a single example of one of her full stories, that of a young man who "loses everything, drowns his sorrows and stalks some girl," before "everyone dies." It's a sad story, made even more tragic because it's really happening.
Dolores receives an odious amount of spam calls throughout the episode, all from Peter, a man who pleads her to stop, telling her that her game ruined his life. He even shows up at the end of the episode, attacking her with a knife before being pulled off by an unknown savior, the pair vanishing a moment later. Dolores doesn't seem to know what to make of this, and is further confused when he shows up again the next morning, asking her why she wrote his story the way she did before jumping off a rooftop and committing suicide.
All of Dolores' strange experiences point to one conclusion -- she's in a new park. Several parts of "The Auguries" are shot as intentional callbacks to the show's first episode. Shots of Dolores waking up in bed are almost identical, and her roommate asking, "Which would you choose, white or black?" is a direct nod to the cowboy hats from Westworld. She sees a chalk drawing of the maze on her balcony, and Peter's behavior is spot on for a host who's become self-aware and is trying to break their loop.
If all of that circumstantial evidence wasn't enough, Dolores even stumbles upon a group of guests early into the episode, who exclaim that "this place is fucking wild," while another one can't believe it's their friend's "first time." These are exactly the sort of quotes one would expect from rich guests exploring their time in the high-fidelity sandbox world the Delos parks provide. Dolores is back in the same prison from the first season, once again trapped and unable to even see the bars of the cage that surrounds her. The only difference this time is her name and her role, as she dictates the fates of those around her and locks them in to loops just as tragic as her own.
New episodes of Westworld premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.