Westworld went on a weird wild journey: when the show premiered in 2016, it was a mega-hit for HBO, a twisty sci-fi story about artificially intelligent robots that threaten humanity. But the show kind of petered out over the course of the next few years, and HBO cancelled it before a planned fifth and final season.
Weirdly, Westworld was cancelled literally the year before ChatGPT came out and got everyone talking about generative AI, which you figure may have restored interest in the project. Aaron Paul, who was introduced in the third season as Caleb Nichols, is still holding out hope that they may get to make that final season one day.
"I do have kind of a sense, and there is a world where maybe we get to tell the rest of that story," Paul said at SXSW, per Collider. "I'm not going to say anything, but give it time. I'm still holding onto the idea that we will be able to complete that story. It was very well flushed out. I knew sort of the broad strokes of it all, and it was really cool. But we'll see."
Westworld did indeed end in a way that directly set up one final leg of the journey, with humanity dying out and the robotic host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) entering one last simulation designed to find out if something of humankind can be salvaged. It's unclear what role Aaron Paul would have in that; he started the series as a human being, but eventually he died and was resurrected as a robotic host. And his host body was ailing by the end. But in theory, his robotic consciousness could take part in Dolores' final simulation.
Paul isn't the only one who wants to finish Westworld. Other members of the cast and crew have expressed similar hopes:
- Showrunner Christopher Nolan: "We’re completionists. It took me eight years and a change of director to get Interstellar made. We’d like to finish the story we started...[T]here’s still very much a desire to finish it."
- Evan Rachel Wood: "[M]aybe somehow, someway, in some iteration we’ll get to finish it, but I still don’t know. It does still keep me up at night.”
- James Marsden (Teddy): "[W]ho knows, maybe there’s some world where it can get completed somehow. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, because I know we had plans to finish it the way we wanted to."
Will a fifth and final season of Westworld actually come to pass? From where I'm sitting the outlook seems pretty grim, but in TV, anything can happen:
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