HBO renews Westworld for season 4

Westworld has gone through a few movements in its time. The first season showed us what happened when the robotic “hosts” of the titular futuristic theme park slowly gained sentience and ended up turning on their human creators. The second season showed us the park at war, as the host Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) fought to free her robotic brethren from the under the boot of the human oppressor. Now, in season 3, Dolores and a few other hosts have escaped into the “real” world — our world — and have found that it’s not so different from the park they left behind.

We don’t know how the third season will wrap up, although Dolores has something big in mind for humanity. “Let’s just say the characters spend more time in the underworld in the future episodes,” supervising locations manager Mandi Dillin told NME. We’ve seen some of that underworld already, mainly through the human Caleb (Aaron Paul), who moonlighted as a petty criminal before joining with Dolores to usher in the robot revolution. “We’re trying to talk about the city of our future,” Dillin continued. “This beautiful city where we have fantastic architecture and plants are growing off the buildings and it’s very illustrious and feels very elegant. But then you realize it’s only accessible to a handful of people in society, where the rest of us live in the underbelly.”

But after the climax of season 3, whatever it is, what comes next? Well, we’re gonna find out, since HBO just announced that it’s renewed the show for a fourth season. “From the western theme park to the technocratic metropolis of the near future, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every twist and turn from the minds of master storytellers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy,” said HBO programming president Casey Bloys. “We can’t wait to see where their inspired vision takes us next.”

This show has been pretty hard to predict, so I won’t bother trying to forecast what season 4 might bring. I do suspect it may be the last season, though. When Variety talked to Nolan and Joy right after the third season premiere, it reported that they “hope to make at least one more season.” That implies there could be more than one, but Westworld is a very expensive show to make, and it’s never brought in the ratings of something like Game of Thrones to offset the cost. I’m happy they’ll conclude the story, but I’m better that season 4 will be it.

Of course, I could be wrong. We probably won’t know one way or the other for a while. There were long breaks between seasons 1 and 2 and then between 2 and 3, and there will likely be another between seasons 3 and 4. In the meantime, there are two episodes left in the current season. Catch the next one, “Passed Pawn,” this Sunday on HBO!

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