What was going to happen in Westworld season 5?

Season 5 of Westworld would have been the final season of the show and would probably have seen Dolores’s final “test” play out in the sublime.

Westworld was cancelled before its planned final season could be released as a result of a couple different factors.

However, the end of the fourth season did give fans a clue as to how the fifth season of the series would have played out, with Dolores’s final test in the form of a simulation of the original Westworld Park.

Why was Westworld cancelled?

It is always a sad day when a formerly popular series such as Westworld is cancelled before the show’s creators can give fans a suitable ending.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened after the announcement on 4 November 2022 that HBO had cancelled Westworld after its fourth season, even though the creators of the show had always planned to end it after its fifth.

It seems as though there were many reasons, including a hefty production budget, declining viewership, and an all-round restructuring of HBO and HBO Max, which were to blame for this decision.

What was going to happen in Westworld season 5?

In the end, Westworld was cancelled just before the release of what would have been its grand finale, which has left many long-time fans of the series with unanswered questions about what the creators had in mind for its fifth season.

Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, the co-creators of Westworld, both confirmed after its deadline that they had always planned to give the show a fifth season in which the narrative would circle back to the West.

Even though Westworld did not end the way its creators originally intended for it to, the season four finale episode “Que Será, Será,” does offer the series some kind of conclusion. Even though that conclusion is the almost total destruction of the humans and the hosts.

However, by the end of the episode, Charlotte Hale decides to put all of her trust in Dolores on account of Bernard’s advice and puts Dolores’s consciousness (her pearl) into the Sublime.

From what Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy have explained about their plans for the fifth season that will now never air, this is the first real building block for the main plot of season five.

This next season would have followed Dolores as she set up the next “test” to see whether sentient life was worth saving at all.

To do this, she would have rebuilt the original Westworld in the sublime in order to see who and what would have survived her version of the game.

Which characters would have returned in season 5?

Long-time Westworld fans will already know that they should not assume that a character cannot return to the show just because they have died or been killed.

This means that although there was so much bloodshed in season four, it is very possible that some of these characters would have made a comeback in the fifth season. Except for Hale, who crushed her own pearl at the end of the fourth season.

Some of the characters who fans expected to reprise their roles include Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores, Aurora Perrineau as Frankie Nichols, Angela Sarafyan as Clementine, and Anthony Hopkins as host creator, Robert Ford.

What would have happened in Dolores’s test?

It is evident from the way that Dolores started her simulation in the original Westworld Park that she was giving the game another chance to play out differently, with her in charge.

Dolores had seen the good and bad in both humankind and hosts throughout her many different lives and reboots, and she definitely had a more optimistic outlook than William had.

Thus, it would have been interesting to see how this simulation would have varied from the previous one, as both of them started out in roughly the same place.

Theories about what season 5 could have revealed

Throughout its four seasons,Westworld definitely posed some important questions about the true nature of humankind and the endurance of sentient life.

However, some wild theories have emerged regarding how the show could have answered such important questions in its final season.

After Dolores basically restarted the entire show from the beginning at the end of the fourth season, many fans have wondered whether the fifth season would have revealed that Dolores was just running through an endless amount of simulations searching for answers.

Or whether the sublime and new simulation were all just part of an even bigger game, orchestrated by Anthony Hopkins’s character – Dr. Robert Ford – which Dolores knew nothing about.

Unfortunately, fans will now never find out whether these theories were close to the truth.