The Moment Westworld Went Off The Rails Happened Back in Season 2
They should have stopped after Season 2; this is what most of HBO's Westworld fans say about the series, which started as a great show with an interesting idea that attracted millions of viewers and was later cancelled due to poor ratings.
Season 2 finale worked perfectly well with both Dolores and Maeve escaping to freedom from the park, which was sort of a jail for them. They rise against the oppression, i.e. their programming and get rewarded.
Still, it is an open ending because their fate is unclear and it is up to the viewer to make their own conclusions about the future of the hosts. This kind of an ending would have posed a lot of questions like the ones about the differences between humans and robots, humanity and what 'identity' in fact is.
Inspired by the success of the series, HBO decided to renew the show for Season 3, and that was exactly the moment Westworld went off the rails to never recover.
Its production took so much time that the army of Westworld's devoted fans simply forgot what Season 2 was all about. It is very hard to keep people interested for some 2 years. Fans echoed this opinion saying that the original idea of the plot developing within the perimeter of the Wild West-themed amusement park did work well but once it was no longer confined to Westworld, it all changed. As some redditors put it, the series failed to deliver the scope it was trying to convey.
Of course it can be up to a debate but the figures speak for themselves. Westworld which opened to a rather good start with some 12 million viewers had three times less in Season 4. So, HBO management just looked at ratings vs production costs for Westworld (which was quite expensive) vs House of the Dragon.
The series failed to build a viewership audience. No wonder why HBO which is not only about making good movies but is also about making money announced there will be no Season 5. This is a lesson to be learned.
Westworld sci-fi series is about a futuristic amusement park where all of a sudden robots artificially intelligent robots start an uprising. The show released in October 2016 was created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and is based on the book by Michael Crichton and the 1973 movie of the same name.