Canceled Westworld Season 5 Wouldn't Have Been Any Better, According to Reddit
With the news about HBO cancelling its dystopian sci-fi series Westworld due to poor performance and shrinking viewership numbers, the show's former fans believe there's literally nothing that could have saved it.
It looks like Westworld was doomed after the writers turned their back on the original ideas that made Season 1 so popular.
Redditors think Season 5, which actually never happened, would have been no better than Season 4 – and for some watching that was a bit of a torture. The pace of Season 4 felt off towards the end, and fans suggested the writer's room made last minute changes to rush to a pseudo ending in Season 4 in case there'll be no new seasons.
A lot of comments show people's disappointment with the series after the first two seasons and they believe this is exactly when Westworld became hopeless.
"Season 4 was like the moment I decided if there was Season 5, I wouldn't watch," one of the comments reads.
One redditor made a long post with all the reasons why he thinks the whole series ended up with such poor numbers despite a promising start. "The whole Wild West setting was relatively fresh and unusual," Literated wrote. Compared to that the "outside world" of the later seasons felt like very generic and bland sci-fi but there are other shows, which do sci-fi way better.
The redditor also noted that having Westworld as an actual created world offers great storytelling opportunities. You could have people come back for decades exploring the park, you can hide as many and as intricate secrets and puzzles and places and narratives to discover as you want without it feeling out of place. But once the showrunners started introducing other parks and areas Westworld simply lost a lot of its magic. Once it moved into the real world the show failed to capture the scale of what it was trying to convey.
"Westworld felt like everything was happening in a tiny corner of the world and only involving a handful of characters. Which was fine for the park but didn't work for the later seasons," Literated believes.
Admittedly, it took quite some time for the series to get cancelled. The reason? HBO might have given Nolan and Joy a chance to pitch Season 5. They might have even run the plot by some test audiences to make sure it works. It turns out Season 5 storyline was not compelling.
So, judging by Reddit, the bottom line is that based on Season 3 and Season 4 one could be sure no matter whatever HBO had in mind for Season 5 it would not have been great.
Westworld is HBO's Emmy-winning sci-fi series created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. The show follows visitors of a futuristic Wild West themed amusement park where robots suddenly start malfunctioning. It is based on the book by Michael Crichton and the 1973 movie of the same name.
Westworld season 1 was released in October 2016; six years later, HBO announced its decision to cancel Season 5 in early November.