At the end of Westworld Season 2, Dolores (disguised as Charlotte Hale) escapes the park and heads into the real world, intent on getting her revenge against the human race. After the Season 3 trailer dropped, full of new characters and non-park locations, fans geared up for an epic Dolores versus the world showdown. Many also assumed the confrontation would be Westworld's last. All the evidence seemed to be pointing toward not just a season but a series finale. So some fans were surprised and confused when HBO announced that the show had been renewed for a fourth, and maybe a fifth and sixth season. There are legal and financial reasons for Westworld to continue, but that doesn't mean there are necessarily good Westworld stories left to be told.

Westworld Season 3 ratings are down, both for live viewership and later streaming. The slight but not irrelevant drop in popularity might have to do with the fact that audiences had to wait nearly two years between Seasons 2 and 3. It also might have to do with Season 2's multiple hard-to-follow timelines, which alienated some fans. Even so, Westworld remains one of HBO's most bankable programs. Especially if HBO can limit production costs, as it's done this season, it makes sense for the premium cable channel to keep the show on its roster of prestige originals. However, that's not the only motivation for the renewal.

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Creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan signed a whopping nine-figure deal with Amazon last year to create new content for Prime Video. That deal included a payout for up to three more seasons of Westworld. The married couple will serve as showrunners for future seasons, and no details about content, casting choices, episode counts or air dates have been released. With practically all film and television production delayed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it will be quite some time before audiences can expect a fourth season to come to fruition.

However, when it does premiere, it's hard to imagine what Westworld Season 4 will be like. And if the series makes it to a sixth season, that means two-thirds of the series' overarching story will have taken place outside of the park for which the show was named. Westworld Season 1 was masterful and highly atmospheric, with unforgettable characters and twists. Season 2 was messier, but with a few standout episodes. Still, most of the action and characterization was consistent with Season 1. In contrast, Season 3 really felt like a coda.

The ensemble cast that once populated a fake Wild West town was reduced to a handful of leads, a handful of supporting characters and a few cameos. The park as we knew it is gone, and the park as it is (in a serious state of disrepair) barely makes an appearance. It sure seems like we'll never go back, and like we'll never see the majority of fan-favorite characters like Teddy, Akecheta or even Peter Abernathy again. Westworld has moved on to bigger (if not always better) things.

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The Westworld of old excelled at telling small but interconnected stories that added up to something symbolic, but started and ended with something as seemingly inconsequential as a can of milk. We followed William as the experience of interacting with hosts changed him for the worse (or so we thought). We followed Dolores and Maeve as they leveled up, as it were, on missions to discover truths and rescue loved ones. Westworld Season 3 hasn't just changed its aesthetic, it's changed its storytelling style altogether. It started out big with Dolores' quest to infiltrate Incite, and the stakes have only gotten more ridiculous from there. Most of Season 3's few and semi-disparate storylines have already come together. It's team Dolores against team Serac, with control of the world -- literally -- hanging in the balance.

Season 3 hasn't been altogether brilliant or terrible, and it's been cohesive as its own entity, but news of the renewal has deflated some of the anticipation for the finale. If it was to be Westworld's swan song, then Season 3, Episode 8 promised to settle the score between hosts and humans (or determinism and free will), once and for all. Who lived and died -- as much as anybody can live and die on Westworld -- mattered. Now, it feels like a cliffhanger to a show in which fewer people are invested.

The series also doesn't have much room left to work with. Westworld has always been existential at its core, but some extremely lofty ideas have worked their way into the plots, and not just the themes, of these most recent episodes. With Rehoboam, Joy and Nolan have basically created a monotheistic god with artificial intelligence, and are asking the audience to consider whether that's a good or bad thing for humanity as a whole. They've also established that any consciousness can be inside any body, and that everyone's hold on reality is potentially unreliable. No matter which actors return for Seasons 4 through 6, and no matter which places we visit, real or engineered, it's all going to feel like a bit of a come down.

Airing Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO, Westworld stars returning cast members Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson, Luke Hemsworth, Simon Quarterman and Rodrigo Santoro, joined by series newcomers Aaron Paul, Vincent Cassel, Lena Waithe, Scott Mescudi, Marshawn Lynch, John Gallagher Jr., Michael Ealy and Tommy Flanagan.

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