Westworld showrunners on that finale twist and what the future holds

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

SPOILERS, obviously. The second season of Westworld came to a conclusion yesterday and the HBO series answered questions, posed new ones, and set the stage for a third season which will be quite different from what we've seen so far. Westworld showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy took the time to break down the season finale while speaking with THR and Entertainment Weekly.

The conclusion found Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), and another host with the likeness of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) escaping into the real world, while many of the other hosts finding refuge in a digital realm called the Sublime which is free of human influence. With Dolores still intent on taking the human world for herself and Bernard determined to stand in her way, that conflict will likely become a major focus in the upcoming third season. Lisa Joy elaborated while speaking with THR:

I think one of the lessons Dolores learned this season is that she had a goal, and her goal was noble in nature. She wanted to save her kind. She knew the stakes. She lived so many lives in the park and died so many deaths, and above all she wanted to spare others that pain by finding a way to let the hosts fight back and own a piece of [the humans'] world. The problem with her plan is that somewhere along the line she started exhibiting some of the same traits she was rallying against. She became almost paternalistic in the ways she made decisions for other people, taking away their own choice and how to live their lives. There was an ironic defeat of her own goals in the execution of how to reach those goals. In the end, the lesson she learned is that she can change. She's changed her mind. She's changed her philosophy. She realizes she has but one path to potentially securing the hosts' safety, when she helps see through Maeve and Akecheta's plan by securing the sovereignty and safety of the Sublime, to which many of the hosts have escaped. It's an acknowledgment that there are paths other than hers that she needs to be tolerant and accepting of and can't stand in the way of. It's much like how she tells Bernard that she understands they will likely be at odds. They will likely come into conflict. They may even kill each other. But she's come to understand that true freedom isn't something that arises from a lack of dissent, from a dictatorial or totalitarian rule of one set of ideologies. It's something that has to happen with a plurality of ideas, sometimes coming into conflict. Because she's learned her lesson, she's bringing Bernard back into this world to be a check on her own power, in some ways.

While it may seem a little sad that we'll be leaving the Westworld park behind, Joy teases that we probably haven't seen the last of it, or the other parks. "I don't necessarily think that we've seen the last of these artificial worlds that are central to the concept of our series as a whole," Joy said. "But the major lens that we will have is going to be the real world. If the park does emerge and come back, we would plan on explaining how that could be, and why."

Jonathan Nolan added that it's been a long build up to get outside the park, telling EW that they're "incredibly excited about what that looks like and sounds like and what exactly our hosts discover out there." Exactly what that is naturally remains a mystery, but Joy claims it will be like a whole new world.

It's going to be a whole new world. And we technically have three [hosts], because Hale is out there, too, or someone who certainly looks like Tessa Thompson! We'll come to see who's really there and what that character is in the future. This series is about reinvention and scope. The first season was a more intimate look at the park from within the loops. In the second season, the hosts broke out of their loops and were able to explore more of the park. In the third season, they've broken out of the park itself. We're in terra incognita. From the beginning, when Jonah and I were thinking about the series as far back as the pilot, we knew we wanted to explore other worlds in the park, and we also knew the one world we would start to see little glimpses of throughout the first two seasons was the real world, and that we would get there eventually — and when we did, it would be a whole new experience.

One of the many twists which the Westworld finale delivered was found in a post-credit scene, which takes place in the "far, far future" and found the Man in Black (Ed Harris) coming across his daughter, Emily, or at least something in her form. It also implied that the Man in Black may be a host, but Lisa Joy clarifies that they "don't necessarily say he's a host. A host refers to a creature like Dolores, someone who is pure cognition, someone who is made up of nothing and has a fabricated body as well. It's definitely a sequence that's indicative of a direction we're going to." Joy added that this future world is "dramatically different. Quite destroyed, as it were. A figure in the image of his daughter — his daughter is of course now long dead — has come back to talk to him. He realizes that he's been living this loop again and again and again. The primal loop that we've seen this season, they've been repeating, testing every time for what they call "fidelity," or perhaps a deviation. You get the sense that the testing will continue. It's teasing for us another temporal realm that one day we're working toward, and one day will see a little bit more of, and how they get to that place, and what they're testing for." HBO has already renewed Westworld for a third season, but Jonathan Nolan says that there's no firm release date just yet. "We’re still talking it through, honestly, with our friends at HBO, and with the cast and the crew," Nolan said. "We want to take the time to make every season as exciting as possible. And we have an enormous challenge going into season 3 with the worlds that we’re building going forward. We want to make sure we have the time to do that right."

How did you feel about the second season of Westworld?