Westworld has been canceled by HBO after recently concluding its fourth season in August. Besides being a blow to loyal fans, co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have both said in interviews that they had always planned on wrapping up the sci-fi drama’s story after five seasons. “We had always planned on ending the series next season,” Joy told The Wrap. “You know, we always thought that Westworld should kind of come full circle and back to the West. But with Dolores, who was just a player in other people’s games, finally getting to write her own.” Indeed, Season 4 set the stage for Westworld to return to its titular futuristic theme park after expanding the story to the outside world in season three. “There’s time for one last game, a dangerous game with the highest of stakes,” s...
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Westworld, “Que Será, Será.”] The 2022 television landscape feels, sometimes, a little bit like the Wild West, as the chaos being experienced by the rest of the world trickles into the business decisions being made by men in Patagonia vests. This is why it’ll be exceptionally ironic if, after consistently keeping viewers on their toes for four seasons, Westworld never gets a chance to bring its cyberpunk Western story to its planned conclusion. The twisty mindfuck of a show, a riff on the 1973 Michael Crichton film created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, wrapped its fourth season this month by literally ending the world — or, at the very least, the end of humanity. Advertisement Season 4 began with most of human...
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Westworld, Season 4 Episode 6, “Fidelity.”] Daniel Wu is no stranger to strange genre tales — the veteran actor has been working constantly over the past few decades on a mix of Hong Kong and American productions, notably starring in the bonkers AMC martial arts drama Into the Badlands for three seasons. Thus, he was more than ready to take on a significant role in Season 4 of Westworld, playing Jay, the leader of a group of human “outliers” who are scrambling for survival in a world now controlled by the robotic “hosts.” As Wu explains to Consequence via Zoom, there was no question of him turning down the job, when Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy asked him about it after the two of them worked together on her directorial debut, the 2021 fi...
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Westworld, Season 4 Episode 1, “The Auguries.”] The return of Westworld for its fourth season means a whole new set of challenges for series composer Ramin Djawadi, who’s been with the series since the beginning, and thus responsible for the soundtrack’s compelling blend of classical and electronic sounds (not to mention its always exciting covers of pre-existing tracks). “I feel like the show always pushes forward,” he says, in the first of a series of episode-specific conversations with Consequence this season. “With the characters, musically speaking, we always talk about, ‘Okay, do we need new themes? Or are we staying with old themes, and should we arrange them differently?’” Advertisement The season premiere, “The Auguries,” a...
HBO’s Westworld is set in a seemingly far-off future, one where a disaster at a high-tech theme park ends up having massive society-wide repercussions. The third season of the series focused on one-time “host” Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) attempting to bring down a malevolent artificial intelligence that’s using peoples’ personal data to determine the course of their entire lives, and Season 4 takes place in the aftermath of that struggle, in a world which thinks itself free of technology’s control… perhaps quite foolishly. In essence, like all stories about the future, it’s really about the present. Specifically our present-day relationship with the technology that helps us and connects us every day… but with its own costs. Speaking with Consequence during a recent virtual press event, the ...
The closing night HBO/HBO Max-hosted Westworld panel at the ATX TV Festival provided a glimpse into what’s coming in Season 4, set seven years after the chaotic conclusion of Season 3. The new season includes the return of Evan Rachel Wood as a new character, and James Marsden — who played Dolores’ love interest Teddy Flood in Seasons 1 and 2 — will also be back in a new incarnation. The panel featured Lisa Joy (Co-Creator, Writer, Director, Executive Producer), Alison Schapker (Writer & Executive Producer), actors Wood, Jeffrey Wright (Bernard/Arnold), Luke Hemsworth (Stubbs), Angela Sarafya (unforgettable and perhaps unkillable Clementine), and Aurora Perrineau (a Season 4 addition as an as-yet-unnamed pivotal character). When asked about the future of the series, Joy replied, “We ha...
HBO is about to welcome us back to Westworld, and the theme park is not looking good. In the newly released trailer for Season 4 of the sci-fi drama, officially premiering on June 26th, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and her fellow Hosts continue to deal with their Human feelings — and as all humans know, it’s a pretty rocky ride. Perfectly set to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” the cinematic Season 4 trailer begins calm enough — Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) takes a casual stroll, Caleb (Aaron Paul) drinks Sangria in the park (so to speak) — but chaos quickly ensues as the song swells. The Man in Black (Ed Harris) and Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) come closer to death, and as allegiances blur, Reed’s hex seems inevitable: the characters are all going to reap just what they sow. Watch the trailer for...
Amazon Prime Video is opening the Vault on a new TV series based on the hit Fallout video game franchise. The project is being spearheaded by Westworld co-creators/executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy as part of their overall deal with Amazon Studios. Originating from a turn-based role-playing game in 1997, the Fallout series has stretched eight games over the course of two decades, as well as the mobile game Fallout Shelter. The games’ story thrusts American ideals and visions of the future from the 1940s into a post-nuclear apocalypse in the 2100s and 2200s. After international war over natural resources turned the world into a nuclear wasteland in 2077, the games’ protagonists are forced to wrestle with previous generations’ failed hopes of nuclear energy while surv...