There are a lot of questions about what happens in “Westworld” following a shocking season 3 finale and now the creators behind the series as well as Evan Rachel Wood are opening up…
SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE “WESTWORLD” SEASON 3 FINALE
“Westworld” has re-invented itself through every single season of the show but following a shocking season 3 finale this past Sunday night, it’s almost impossible to know the next direction the show will take.
After starting a revolution following her escape from the park, Dolores decided to go up against Engerraund Serac, the co-creator of an artificial intelligence machine known as Rehoboam that predicted and strategized the future for every single person on Earth. Rehoboam essentially mapped out everyone’s future, which meant some people were deemed successful while others were never allowed to break free of the predictions the computer set forth for them.
All season long it was suspected that Dolores wanted to eradicate humanity in order to make a new world for the robot hosts but it turns out she didn’t have extinction on her mind after escaping Westworld. Instead, Dolores wanted to destroy Rehoboam and allow humans to regain their own free will in order to burn down the existing world in hopes that a better one could be built in its place.
While she was successful in stopping Rehoboam, Dolores ultimately gave her own life in the process and her entire memory was wiped clean as Serac attempted to access secret files he believed were hiding in her head. Considering Dolores’ fate at the end of the “Westworld” finale, many began to wonder if that was the last time we’d see Evan Rachel Wood on the show after she served in the leading role for the first three seasons.
Following the episode, “Westworld” creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy confirmed that Dolores is dead and buried — that character will not return for season 4 but that doesn’t necessarily mean Wood’s time with the series is finished.
“I fucking hope not,” Nolan told Variety when asked of Wood was done with “Westworld.” “Let me clarify. Dolores is gone. We’re not yet discussing publicly the direction the show is taking, but the fun thing about this show is, you know, from the beginning Lisa and I wanted to make a show that constantly reinvented itself, that could be a different show every season. I think it’s important with a show in which death can be impermanent — these are robots, after all — to mark the occasion with Dolores.
“That version of that character is gone. We love Evan Rachel Wood and we haven’t [sighs] started talking publicly about exactly what the show looks like going forward. But it looks very different.”
While “Westworld” was already renewed for season 4 on HBO, Nolan and Joy have no plans to reveal any plans for what lies ahead and that includes any plans for Wood, assuming she returns to the show.
“We love Evan Rachel Wood,” Nolan told the Hollywood Reporter. “She’s a terrific, terrific actor. It was a real journey with the character. You do have to be careful in a show where these are robots, and death is a different deal. We’ve gotten a sense of what it would take to completely kill a host. Because of the impermanence of some of these things, you have to be careful. But that character is gone.
“We love working with Evan. But we’re a long way out from talking publicly about what that fourth season looks like.”
For her part, Wood was just as coy when asked about her future with the show while making an appearance on “The Tonight Show” on Monday.
“I think a lot of things are still unknown given how the finale ended,” Wood said. “I think obviously it’s been proven it’s quite hard to get rid of characters but I do think that certain things are final. I’m being very cryptic. I’m curious about what happens in season 4 as well.”
Judging by the comments made, it’s hard to imagine “Westworld” moving forward without Wood taking up some kind of role in future seasons. The only thing that’s been confirmed is that particular version of Dolores has been destroyed but don’t forget she had cloned herself several times over when season 3 began. An alternate version of Dolores already exists in the Charlotte Hale clone that’s still very much alive and a second clone dressed as Musashi was killed but the memory pearl inside its head survived.
There was also another clone living in the body of the Westworld outlaw Lawrence, who we briefly saw during the season 3 finale but again that’s technically not the same exact Dolores as the one who was deleted.
Obviously, Nolan and Joy don’t plan on giving too much away before season 4 gets underway — and it’s highly unlikely the show would return before sometime in 2022 — but the husband and wife duo definitely mapped out ideas for where “Westworld” was going to end up before the pilot episode was even filmed.
“We discussed it from the very beginning,” Nolan said. “When we were writing the pilot, we had this glorious period where we felt we needed to come up with a plan. The story laid itself out very neatly into chapters. We have been talking about it from the beginning. We’re giving everybody a bit of a break, and obviously it’s a crazy moment right now. We haven’t started the room yet. But we have been talking about [season four] for a long time.”
One thing Nolan did confirm is that there are no plans set in stone for how many seasons of “Westworld” it will take to tell the entire story.
There had been reports that Nolan and Joy planned “Westworld” as six-season arc but they’ve now shot down that rumor while adding that there’s no exact timeline for when the show will end.
“I just want to clarify, you know, Lisa and I have never actually talked about a number of seasons,” Nolan said. “James Marsden mentioned five [seasons] in the first season when we were on hiatus, and more recently there’s been reporting about deals and other stuff like that. But we’ve never actually talked out loud about how many seasons we imagine this thing going, because I think you’d be foolish to.
“Things change, circumstances change. I think when we sat down to do the show, we didn’t quite realize how difficult it would be to make this show — [laughing] how many years it would take per season. So we’ve never actually talked about how many seasons that plan was, and indeed I think when we had the plan it didn’t actually map out to a specific number of seasons, exactly. It was a beginning, a middle and an end.”
For now, “Westworld” season 3 is available on HBO and there’s no word yet when production on season 4 might begin but with a lengthy filming schedule along with post production, it’s not likely the show will return for at least another year if not longer.
