If you can’t tell, what’s the difference?
I think that was one of the points of the season and the entire series for that matter. The hosts are human, with all of our flaws and gifts. It’s the main reason that Halores can’t get them to her paradise. Some of them want to stay where they are. They are happy as-is.
This would be easier if so much of the drama on the current season didn’t revolve around action scenes.
Mad Men and Succession, for instance, are two shows with almost no physical violence. The drama comes from people either attempting to persuade other people to do things, or wrestling with their own insecurities. It’s still intensely compelling and the viewer really feels that something is at stake.
Or for something closer to *Westworld in scope, *take Black Mirror and the recent Severance. These shows also have very little physical confrontation (a handful of Black Mirror episodes are heavy on violence but some of the best are mostly mind games.) The drama comes from intriguing mysteries or confounding scenarios that the characters are struggling to figure out, which provoke questions in the viewer about the nature of reality and consciousness.
I found the first two seasons of Westworld to be more like Black Mirror, but sometime in the third season and continuing into the fourth, it seemed to become more action-oriented. And when that happens, it doesn’t matter to me whose head gets blown open or which characters survive the shootout or the explosion or whatever, because there’s always the possibility of those characters either not being “the real version” of the character, or “a new copy of the character is going to take over” or whatever.
Well, remember the cinematic sequel to Westworld with Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin was Futureworld with Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner 
.
…Caleb never felt like a “normal person” in the show because he was so important to everything that Charlotte kept him alive for 23 years. He’s a typical hero-protagonist who does typical hero-protagonist things.
By basically no “small scale worldbuilding” we are talking about the fact that we were told that the “age of humanity” was over through a few lines of exposition at the end of the show. Almost all the humans are dead and I don’t recall seeing a single child die. It didn’t feel like a global event. It felt like a handful of people killed each other in a small city block.
They told us that Charlotte had conquered humanity, and she told us that everyone was dead, but I didn’t believe it. When significant world-changing events happen entirely off-screen, it didn’t feel real to me. It reminded me of this classic Nathan Fielder tweet:
“I took over the world, and now humanity is over. They’re all just out of frame, quietly dying.”
One of the highights of this season for me was a small scene in the finale. The Man in Black listening to Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire.
Much like Mad Men and Succession, Westworld kind of feels like “rich people problems”. We never see much of how regular people experience the world because it all centers around a park for the uber-wealthy and various corporate halls of power.
They could have done with some more “large scale worldbuilding” in Season 4 as well. For all its faults, Season 3 felt like the characters were globe-hopping all over the place trying to dismantle Rehobahn.
Once Caleb wakes up in “not too distant future” New York, all we see of the world is host-controlled Manhattan and the rebel outliers in the deserts around Los Angeles and Hoover Dam. The rebels don’t seem particularly concerned once they are outside New York. I would think travelling across the whole host-controlled United States would be a major effort unto itself. Charlotte alludes to “other cities” so maybe that is that all there is left of humanity - a few tens of millions of people living in host-controlled “Matrix” cities around the world with the vast areas in between depopulated?
It maybe should have been made a bit clearer, but that would have been consistent with the themes of the show.
I finished it last night. Hmm. A disappointing end to a disappointing season. I watched it all, as I watched all of the earlier seasons, but it too often felt like a slog.
Too many questions, but I’ll just ask a few. Why not have massive security at the Hoover Dam server farm? Seems like anyone can waltz in and out of there whenever they want. Shut it down? Start it up again? Sure, knock yourself out. There’s no one to stand in your way.
Why would Caleb not go with his daughter on the boat from Manhattan, even knowing he was soon likely to die? I’d think they’d want to savor every moment together until he’s gone.
I noticed, at the very end, that the train to the dusty Westworld town appeared out of thin air on the track. I presume Dolores is still in a massive VR program with control over it (you may have noticed the computer display, after Charlotte inserted Dolores’s pearl, reading, “The Storyteller: Transfer Complete”). Will she find Teddy there, in the Sublime or elsewhere, in the next season? I kinda sorta want to find out… but not all that strongly after this season, truth be told.
And such a high body count! Of course anyone could return, their pearl or their stored-offscreen consciousness uploaded into a new body, but this season we lost Maeve, Bernard, Charlotte, Caleb, Clementine, William and Stubbs. Ouch.
Agreed. Dolores even says, in the final seconds of the last episode, “Sentient life on Earth has ended,” and I thought, Really? How can she, or we, be sure of that? It’s a big planet.
Ha! I should’ve thought of that. Good catch. Those two hosts who shot up his truck were astoundingly careless in approaching him, though, even as they talked about how dangerous he was. Yeesh.
This may also be of interest: How HBO’s Westworld designed its eVTOL aircraft (and no, they’re not flying cars) - Vertical Mag
And as for an S5: ‘Westworld’: Jonathan Nolan Drops Hint At NYCC About Fifth And Final Season – Deadline
Eh, don’t fight the hypothetical. If the show says that everyone’s dead, then everyone’s dead.
I just don’t get what happened to Jonathan Nolan. He made Person of Interest, the most humanist science fiction show ever made not called Star Trek, and then a couple of years later he creates Westworld, whose philosophy, inasmuch as it has one, seems to be “Humanity sucks, let’s replace them with robots, oh yeah never mind robots suck too.” What gives?
What annoys me most is that Season 1 was incredibly good, and then the quality just fell off a cliff immediately thereafter. It’s like they caught lightning in a bottle with S1 and were completely flummoxed about what to do with it.
I think there are shows, where they go into it either just planning 1 season or thinking if we can just sell the Pilot and get on the air.
Two good examples I think:
Once Upon the Time had a really well plotted first season and then became a Soap Opera for the rest of its long run.
Heroes had a pretty solid first season and then with some executive meddling got really lost. In this case, the showrunners/creator were originally suppose to have basically a new cast for additional seasons but the Execs said no, use the established characters and make this work.
Twin Peaks also had a terrific first season, but they just couldn’t keep up that same level of wacky inspiration and dread-inducing creepiness for more than that.
Westworld was cancelled today. No fifth season.
What a dick move.
Yeah, I believe they thought they might get to do a final season thing and wrap it up. Nope. Done.
Good.
Agreed actually.
Unexpectedly?
Who was not expecting this?
I thought they’d give it one more season. Granted, I could not see what they would do with that season, but I thought they’d get it.