Are We Getting ‘Westworld’ Season 5, Or Was That Supposed To Be The Series Finale?

Last night, Westworld had its season 4 finale, the culmination of a shocking, and shockingly good season that brought many back into the world after checking out during seasons 2 or 3.

But with the way things ended, there seems to be an open question as to whether or not Westworld season 5 is actually coming, or if what we saw last night was meant to be the series finale.

Spoilers follow.

At this point, the show has murdered…almost all of its cast. By the end of season 4, Bernard, Maeve, William, Charlotte, Stubbs, Clementine and probably Caleb are all dead. But of course, the idea presented in the finale is of some great rebirth through Dolores, who has gone to the Sublime and simulated one final game, going all the way back to Westworld itself, for some last test of whether sentient life can, or deserves to survive.

There are effectively two ways you can read this. In some ways, this does work as a series finale, because you can take the position that Westworld is a flat circle. As in, this entire series has just been a loop, and the original Westworld was also a simulation by a previous Dolores attempting to see how humanity and hosts would deal with each other over the long term. It ended in disaster, but maybe not the next time. But how many times have there been? Are we just looping through alternate world after alternate world, running endless simulations? I think you can view it that way if you try.

Or, you can get less metaphysical with it, and take what Dolores says at face value. This would mean that everything that’s happened thus far was not a simulation, but instead, this is something wholly new that Dolores is created.

That would lead to a season 5 that is a modified version of season 1. Some sort of rework of the original concept that maybe does not end in human abuse of hosts or hosts slaughtering humans, if that’s even the goal of Dolores’ game. It’s also kind of a perfect way to resurrect the entire cast that has just been killed off. We don’t know exactly what’s in “Storyteller” Dolores’ database, but presumably at least the data for all the hosts, which at this point, is 95% of the cast. I have to believe William will be simulated as well, as it would be odd to head toward the end of the series without him.

There are indications that Westworld season 5 is indeed happening and no, this is not the end of the series. There may be more post-finale interviews about to go up, but we have Ed Harris saying back in July of this year that there’s one more season coming that starts filming in spring 2023. So that seems pretty definitive, even if HBO has not officially announced season 5 yet.

On the one hand, WB has been making pretty huge cutbacks, and these days, Westworld is a very expensive show with declining viewership, even if this season was better. On the other, HBO probably does not want to leave one of their most prestigious stories unfinished, even if technically you could interpret season 4’s ending as a series finale. I strongly believe season 5 is indeed coming, it’s just not official yet. Stay tuned.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.