If Westworld season 5 happens, it’ll almost certainly be the last chapter – here’s how season 4’s finale sets up a delightfully violent ending. Westworld debuted in 2016 on a simple enough premise – a near-future wild west theme park populated by super-advanced robots, enjoyed as an anything-goes playground by the wealthy elite. Westworld season 2 then revealed the park’s deeper purpose as a facility researching the human mind, before season 3 shifted into the real world where humanity had been reduced to drones by the Rehoboam algorithm.
Westworld season 4 takes an even sharper left turn, jumping 23 years into the future to an era of host domination on Earth. To all intents and purposes, Charlotte Hale and her robotic pals have won, but her desire to dominate and control becomes the undoing of hosts as a species when exposure to humans begins making cyborgs kill themselves. William is especially triggered, deciding humans and hosts would be better off obliterating each other completely. Commanding the humans through Hale’s tonal control system, William triggers widespread violence. The flesh-and-blood folk kill each other, then turn on their robotic overlords who are too few to resist.
Westworld season 5 isn’t yet official, and while Lisa Joy (via Digital Spy) has confirmed she’s hoping for renewal, the co-showrunner also acknowledged a potential season 5 would be Westworld‘s last. Here’s how “Que Sera Sera” sets the stage for Westworld‘s grand finale.
Westworld Season 5 Returns To The Original Westworld Park
Westworld‘s endgame draws into view as soon as season 4’s closing moments introduce an eerily familiar setting. Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores recreates the original wild west theme park in the Sublime. Delos’ actual park is long since abandoned, decimated by the massacre of Westworld season 2, but by using the Sublime’s power to generate whatever the hosts inside it can imagine, Dolores has crafted a digital WestWorld. As the spacey farm girl herself describes it, this story will “end where it began.” Returning to the wild west after two seasons away is a sure sign that Westworld‘s end is nigh. It’s the only suitable setting for the fates of man and machine to be resolved, and even if Westworld season 5’s theme park isn’t the real deal, audiences still get to revisit Sweetwater, the Mariposa saloon, Dolores’ valley, and all the other stunning locations that made Westworld famous.
Westworld Season 5 Will Be One Last Test For Humanity
Westworld‘s season 4 finale relentlessly impresses the notion of one more season upon the viewer. Bernard’s video message to Hale references “one more game” while Dolores’ closing monologue promises both “one final test” and “one last game.” Westworld is virtually screaming for a fifth and final run to wrap up its story.
As for what this test entails, Dolores will use her extensive knowledge of humanity, collected through both the Forge data and the Tower, to “remember” humanity and create a simulation population within the Sublime. It’s the same principle as Dolores imagining Teddy, or Bernard imagining Maeve, but on a ridiculously large scale. Dolores will be testing whether humanity can somehow continue, though it’s too early to guess the criteria she’ll be measuring us by.
The stakes for Westworld season 5 are nothing less than permanent extinction, and if we assume Dolores doesn’t slap mankind with an F grade, the HBO series looks likely to end with Evan Rachel Wood’s character somehow bringing humans back online – not just in the Sublime, but in whatever’s left of the real world. That’s easier said than done, but the answer could lie in Dolores’ use of the word “test.” Both Delos and Charlotte Hale experimented with human-host hybrids, but every subject has failed the “fidelity test” and quickly deteriorated. Since man and host are both technically finished by the end of Westworld season 4, the show’s ending could see Dolores use her WestWorld test-run to succeed where Delos and Hale failed, creating a new race of human minds inside host bodies.
Westworld’s Season 4 Ending Teases Long-Awaited Answers
Unlike past seasons, Westworld season 4 doesn’t leave a deluge of unanswered questions or dangling mysteries in its wake. “Que Sera Sera” explains Bernard’s mission, unpacks the Sublime’s true nature, and addresses the fate of every major character (mostly with death). The only outstanding storyline Westworld truly hasn’t resolved is season 2’s post-credits sequence where William is put through a fidelity test by his daughter at the WestWorld park. Irrespective of whether Dolores’ “final game” is a fidelity test in Westworld season 5, that post-credits still requires explanation.
Fortunately, Westworld season 4’s ending promises an answer in season 5. Dolores building a simulation of WestWorld in the Sublime could explain why William and Emily are back in the park during season 2’s post-credits flashforward, despite its destruction. More pertinently, Dolores’ ability to generate whichever characters she chooses for her game of RollerCoaster Tycoon can account for the apparent miraculous resurrections of William and his daughter – two characters who are, by all accounts, dead. A TV series as notoriously enigmatic as Westworld having only one or two stones unturned by the time season 4’s credits roll is a sure sign that the HBO sci-fi epic has its end in sight.
