Westworld almost went the distance. Before it was cancelled, it just needed one more season to finish telling its complete story. The fact that it didn’t get to tell the story it wanted to tell - and got so close to doing it - will always leave the show feeling like a big “what if?” Sure, the season 4 finale was a decent place to end things on. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) decided to try and save the spirit of humanity, even if she couldn’t save humanity in its entirety.
In doing so, she restarted a new simulation: one meant to tell a new story from the beginning of the old. Audiences can imagine that the series is now one big loop: an AI creating endless simulations until the right story gets told. Maybe Dolores eventually gets it right. Maybe she never does, and there’s an endless cycle of simulations lasting in perpetuity. There’s a certain beauty in it. But now that Westworld is cancelled, there were some unanswered questions left in its wake.
Why is Maeve in the tower, and what makes her a weapon?
This is an unanswered question that could feasibly be called a plot hole. It’s entirely possible that it’s a result of reshoots. Watching the finale, there’s a definite sense that things were rewritten at last minute in case the show wasn’t renewed. Throughout the final season, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) constantly tells his companion Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) that he has to retrieve a weapon in order for humanity’s story to have the best possible outcome. As it turns out, that weapon is Maeve (Thandiwe Newton).
Come the final episode, though, Maeve doesn’t actually do much. She temporarily incapacitates Hale/Dolores (Tessa Thompson), but ends up getting shot in the head by a host designed after William (Ed Harris). It’s possible she got shot in her pearl, which functions as a host’s brain, and died for real there.
But if that’s the case, why did Bernard need her all this time? She essentially served as a five-minute distraction. And if audiences look closely in the final episode, they can see that Maeve’s body is suddenly in the tower, lying not far from Bernard - a completely different location from where she was last seen. How’d she get there? Again, the answer could potentially be reshoots, but given that Westworld was prone to non-linear storytelling, it’s possible Maeve’s story wasn’t done yet.
How many times around the bend?
In the final moments of what turned out to be the series finale, Dolores sets off on “one last loop around the bend” - her hope is to save humanity’s spirit by finding a way to make humans overcome their fatal flaws. Maybe then, she reasons, humanity’s legacy does deserve to live on.
But just how many times does Dolores do this? The series finale can be taken at face value: that is, Dolores truly did mean she was just going to do this one more time. But she’s also an immortal AI in a simulation that can pass time much quicker inside than in the outside world. She theoretically has all the time in the world to run her simulations until she saves humanity.
And the show ends with the possible implication that Dolores is reliving the series in its entirety. If that’s the case, is she conscious of that? Have the tables been turned, and do hosts now remain conscious while the humans are tied into their loops? Does this new simulation Dolores continue down the same path, ending up where the other Dolores did, meaning she ends up running a simulation of her own? Is the entire series just simulations on top of simulations?
Does Dolores find Teddy in the Sublime?
Teddy (James Marsden) and Dolores were made for one another. The series continually reminds audiences that the two are a matching set. Poor Teddy was never meant to get the girl, though. When he was first designed, he was always supposed to be someone for guests to beat - someone for guests to savor victory over as Dolores’ affections are won.
While Dolores goes on to live in the real world, Teddy isn’t meant to follow her there. He ends up in the Sublime, where the hosts can live in their own artificial Eden. Fans had hoped the two would reunite in Westworld season 4 when Marsden returned to the show, but as it turns out, this was just Dolores trying to reawaken herself through memories of Teddy. She promises to find him someday, but for now, she has to finish her own duty.
It’s beautiful to imagine them finding each other in the Sublime one day. Who knows how long that might be? It may be right after the credits roll. It might be decades later. It might feel like millennia to Dolores. Maybe they never do meet, and they live on eternally just outside of the other’s grasp.
Does Maeve find her daughter in the Sublime?
Not to steal from the previous entry, but one of Maeve’s cornerstones is her life as a mother. Her daughter (Jasmyn Rae) is her motivation. Maeve makes peace with allowing her daughter to live in the Sublime and never getting to be with her.
There’s no doubt she’d jump at the chance to reunite with her, though. And if Dolores’ experiment succeeds, she just might have her chance. While it’s true she might have had all her files wiped when she’s shot in the head, the nature of the hosts means they never truly die so long as they remember one another. They can be built and replicated perfectly from the ground up.
Some might argue that’s not the same Maeve, which means she’d never actually reunite with her daughter. On the contrary, Westworld's hosts don’t seem to make a distinction between a replica and any sort of “original”. Bernard’s pearl was wiped clean in the season 2 finale, only for Dolores to perfectly replicate him. He doesn’t seem to see a difference, nor does anyone else.
How do the other humans go extinct? Do they even go extinct?
Dolores’ final monologue is a bit confusing. It seems to gloss over some plot developments that presumably would have been fleshed out more in season 5. She claims that sentient life on Earth has gone extinct, and that flesh-and-blood humans are gone for good after William activated a kill sequence that lead its mind-controlled remnants to kill each other.
As she says this, though, the show focuses in on Caleb (Aaron Paul) bidding farewell to his daughter Frankie (Aurora Perrineau) and her girlfriend Odina (Morningstar Angeline). The two are outliers - humans who can’t be predicted by AI. They’re off to live somewhere they claim that outliers can live away from any host’s prying eyes and away from the mind-controlling flies that Hale/Dolores developed. Dolores herself appears to have trouble predicting where these outliers go and what they’re going to do next earlier in the season.
If that’s the case, can Dolores truly know that humanity is doomed to extinction? Odina and Frankie are the last two known, living humans the audience sees on the show, it’s true, but they clearly aren’t the only outliers, and they’re certain they know of more. Sure, it’s possible that there aren’t enough outliers to make up a stable population, but the show never says so. Westworld also doesn’t explain much about the interim between seasons 3 & 4, where Hale/Dolores took over the human world with those flies. There’s no certainty that humanity was enslaved to such a degree that the outliers would have trouble repopulating.
What happened to the host Caleb?
Caleb’s life as a human comes to an end, shockingly, midway through the season. It turns out that Hale/Dolores remade him as a host and is just trying to use him to figure out the key to understanding outliers. His body doesn’t last because host replicas of humans just can’t seem to survive for long after finding out they’re not the original person.
The audience sees his body start to deteriorate throughout the season, but he lasts much longer than expected. That appears to be due to Frankie, who he’s determined to protect. Perhaps she provides the key to making human hosts: a cornerstone to devote their mind to. Something that’s not just immortality for immortality’s sake. A genuine connection to latch on to.
The last the audience sees of Caleb, he doesn’t look to be in good condition. But if there’s one thing Westworld - and television in general - has established, it’s that a character isn’t dead unless a body is shown. See also: Stubbs and Elsie (Shannon Woodward). The latter disappears from season 1 after a very precarious situation, only to appear in season 2 (where she does meet her demise and the audience does witness it on screen). The former has many instances of surviving an off-screen ordeal.
The Man in Black Season 2 Post-Credits Scene
This is the biggest unresolved plotline. At the end of season 2, a post-credits scene reveals that William is undergoing a test for fidelity to see if he’s anything like the real one. A person or persons unknown has made a host out of William and the audience sees the farthest into the future they have seen thus far.
In fact, this scene takes place, chronologically, even after season 4. Someone is using the image of William’s daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) to test a new host version of William. She tells him that this is the far future, long after the park has shut down for good.
The hows and whys of this scene were clearly going to be explained in season 5. Someone’s clearly still working on making humans into hosts, and for some reason, they want to make a perfect replica of William. Interestingly, this would probably indicate that Dolores did succeed in her quest. When she retreats into the Sublime at the end of the season, she appears to be certain that there’s no other hosts or humans lurking around in the real world. But her abilities aren’t infallible. What purpose would making William into a host serve?
A series as cerebral as Westworld deserved to finish telling its story. There’s speculation that the Warner Bros. acquisition by Discovery might’ve played a part in its cancellation - CEO David Zaslav has been canceling many projects like Batgirl. Viewership had slipped, but it had been taken for granted that Westworld - once one of HBO’s flagship series - would get to finish its fifth and final season. Maybe a movie can be made some time down the line to give fans closure and wrap up the series and its loose ends.
Westworld is streaming on HBO Max.