Westworld's non-ending keeps Evan Rachel Wood up at night

HBO canceled the AI-centric series after four seasons in 2022

By Emma Keates | January 30, 2024 | 6:08pm

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Westworld's non-ending keeps Evan Rachel Wood up at night

Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld Screenshot: HBO

“These violent delights have violent ends.” The Shakespeare quote plays a major role in the plot of Westworld, but, like hundreds of multi-layered symbols that used to populate the series, it also contained a key to the show’s ultimate fate. Namely, that it would not only be abruptly axed by HBO but also disappeared from the streamer altogether—quite violently, in this writer’s opinion!

After decades of war between humans and A.I., Westworld’s fourth and final season saw its sentient robot “hosts” finally eliminate humanity—and eventually themselves—after flipping the script between who’s in control and who’s being controlled. It’s all very convoluted, but the season essentially ends with a version of Dolores—the park’s original host played by Evan Rachel Wood—preparing to launch “one last game” in a digital realm called the Sublime to see if any aspect of humanity can be salvaged to start yet another brave new world.

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Sadly, because the show hemorrhaged so many viewers between seasons two and three, we’ll never know if her quest would have been successful. (Or, more importantly, whether the Radiohead-heavy show would have finally just done what they should have done from the beginning and popped “Paranoid Android” in there somewhere.) The cast doesn’t know either, a fact that still causes Evan Rachel Wood a great deal of pain.

“It was devastating in a lot of ways because, first of all, [creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy] don’t tell us where the show is going. We were just always told, ‘We know how the show ends,’ when we started,” Wood recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “They weren’t writing it as we went along. They had an idea, and we were all just on a bed of nails waiting to see and hear what the conclusion of this was. What it all meant.”

Previously, Joy had stated that she and her co-writer “have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach.” “We didn’t get to have that,” Wood lamented. “After building an arc and a character for almost 10 years and not getting the payoff at the end to see where it was all going—I think for us and the audience, it was awful in a lot of ways.”

The actor, of course, did what any of us would have done and simply asked her bosses for the ending, but she says they wouldn’t spill—likely so they could still finish the show in some other format in the future. “It does still keep me up at night,” she said, which… relatable. If it’s any sort of backward solace, The Peripheral, which Nolan and Joy went on to executive produce, also got canceled prematurely (by Prime Video this time), so it definitely won’t be using Westworld’s mystery ending. Maybe now is a good moment for Wood to question the eventual nature of Dolores’ reality one final time.