The Westworld Season 3 finale offered up a number of twists but also a number of cliffhangers, and now the show’s executive producers are shedding a little bit of light on what it all meant and what to expect from Season 4. Indeed, HBO has already renewed the series for Season 4, and reports suggest the series could continue through Season 6, so there’s still plenty of story to tell.

And yet, Season 3 felt like an endpoint in many ways. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) had her memories erased. William (Ed Harris)—or at least we think that was the real William—had his throat slit and was replaced by a host. Maeve (Thandie Newton) finally put her quest for her daughter aside to aid in Dolores’ effort to build a new world. And Bernard (Jeffrey Wright)… well, Bernard kind of spent the season on the sidelines but appears to be taking a very long trip for Season 4.

So what does this all mean for the future of Westworld? Here’s what the show’s executive producers Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and Denise Thé had to say.

Is Dolores Dead?

Dolores very much seemed to be gone at the end of the episode, but in Westworld is anyone truly gone? Well in speaking with Variety, Nolan said this version of Dolores is indeed dead:

“Dolores is gone. We’re not yet discussing publicly the direction the show is taking, but the fun thing about this show is, you know, from the beginning Lisa and I wanted to make a show that constantly reinvented itself, that could be a different show every season. I think it’s important with a show in which death can be impermanent — these are robots, after all — to mark the occasion with Dolores. That version of that character is gone. We love Evan Rachel Wood and we haven’t [sighs] started talking publicly about exactly what the show looks like going forward. But it looks very different.”

Is William a Host Now? And What About That Season 2 Credits Scene?

Speaking with THR, finale co-writer Thé confirmed that William’s story arc in Season 3 had been in the works for a while:

"These are discussions that have been ongoing for quite some time. As Jonah said, these are things he and Lisa have been talking about from the very beginning. MiB's whole journey this season was something discussed prior to even getting into the room, with all of the writers. It was something from the get go we were discussion: what's going to happen to this man who has prized above all things his free will, and his ability to make his own decisions?...

 

It was really important to see the evolution of that character. For him, going through this moment in time when we see him on the verge of losing his sanity and having to go into an insane asylum, and having a breakthrough moment with his therapist: owning up to the fact that he killed his daughter and that he deserves to be in a pine box, but in true kind of Westworld form, [his therapist] is not really there for him in this moment. It could have been a moment of redemption, but instead, she's dealing with her own crisis and she misses it. It leads to him having a very different epiphany: "I'm the good guy." It leads him on this path to trying to destroy the hosts. We thought it was important to see how this distorted version of the truth would be his downfall, and how in the end, it might be the thing that turned him into the thing he most wanted to destroy.”

Also speaking to THR, Joy confirmed Harris will indeed still be a part of the show going forward, and she’s excited to see him play a host:

“Ed is such a terrific and versatile actor. To be able to examine his humanity and his transgressions first from within the trap of a human character, doomed by his own blindness and his own rage and pain, and now to have Ed be able to examine humanity from that distanced eye of a host… it's just a fascinating and exciting challenge. I think Ed is always thinking so deeply about his characters and their motivations. He's going to bring so much to this character, not only playing a host, which allows for so many different microgestures and manifestations of behavior and performance, but also all of these philosophical elements he'll bring into it. These existential elements of 'what does it mean to be human?' will be all the more grounded next season.”

But what about the William we saw in the Season 2 post-credits scene, where he entered a dilapidated version of The Forge and conversed with a version of his daughter who was testing for “fidelity?” Speaking with Deadline, Nolan confirmed that scene takes place further into the future than we’ve seen thus far on Westworld:

“We like Ed Harris so much we’d figure let’s cast him in four different roles. There’s the Ed that we see at the end of the second-season finale which is very, very far in the future, further than where we’ve gotten elsewhere in the show. We lay out the suggestion to the audience that however this plays out, it does not play out well. Then you have the Ed who we’ve tracked through this season, until he’s not, and is struggling with this idea of agency, struggling with this idea of does he have free will.”

Where and When Is Bernard?

In one of the Season 3 post-credits scenes, we saw Bernard waking up from entering “the Sublime” but now he’s covered in dust—almost as if he’s in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Nolan was tight-lipped but did confirm to Deadline that this does not suggest a good outcome going forward:

“The suggestion with Jeffrey (Wright’s character) there is that some sh*t has gone down, and some time has passed.”

But Nolan went a bit more specific in discussing the Sublime, and how that fits into Season 4. Essentially, the “valley beyond” world that the characters went to in Season 2 has now been growing and evolving into its own alternate universe:

“We were interested in this idea if you created this sufficiently high enough simulation, then encrypted it, and threw away the key, you would have created an alternate universe. It’s a way of backing into an old science fiction trope, the idea of the alternate universe, which I think people think of, depending on how affectionate they are toward string theory, people think of alternate universe as silly. If you construct one from the ground up, you build a simulation that will be sufficiently detailed that feels lifelike. We’re already kind of there. Video games are almost there.”

Nolan confirmed in the same interview that Bernard is indeed interacting with these characters who are gone, like Teddy (James Marsden), and suggested they may return in Season 4:

“The whole season with Serac and Dolores, they’ve been vying to maintain the key to that alternate universe, and it turns out that Dolores has entrusted it to the one person she trusts the most, which is Bernard. And what he finds, when he accesses that alternative universe are several characters we know and love who have vanished into it during the second season. We’ll continue to explore that, and also ask questions about it in the fourth season.”

What Happens in Season 4?

So what can we expect from Season 4? Nolan told THR that they’ve been talking about their plans for the next season since they were working on the pilot:

“We discussed it from the very beginning. When we were writing the pilot, we had this glorious period where we felt we needed to come up with a plan. The story laid itself out very neatly into chapters. We have been talking about it from the beginning. We're giving everybody a bit of a break, and obviously it's a crazy moment right now. We haven't started the room yet. But we have been talking about [season four] for a long time.”

In the same interview, Nolan stressed that the idea from the beginning was that each season would almost feel like an entirely different show, so expect another “reboot” for Season 4:

“One of the fun things about me for the show, when Lisa and I were talking about it way back when, was the ability of this show to shift genres every season, and the invitation to do it. This season, we had an episode called ‘Genre.’ We had a movie in [the original Westworld film] in which Crichton was very deliberately playing with the notion of genre. We felt we had an open invitation to play around, especially in this moment where TV is reinventing itself constantly, to have a show that reinvents itself season after season. It essentially takes advantage of the established parameters of a genre. You have a western, you have a samurai movie, you have war movies, you have science-fiction. There are all of the different versions of the future you have seen over the years in movies. We get to play around with all of that, and make text of all of that. So the idea that next season will feel different and distinct in genre from the previous seasons? Yes, that's absolutely part of the structure of the show.”

Speaking with Variety, Nolan also teased that the ensemble cast will continue to get to play different kinds of characters in Season 4:

“Part of the fun of the show from the beginning is that one actor can play several roles and that the story shifts underneath them — shift genres, shifts time. One of the ideas of the show from the beginning is this idea of agency. The formal quality of what a person looks like versus who are they underneath is something very slippery in this world, something very complicated. We love that and we love the challenge. Obviously, it’s an astonishing cast, and giving all of them something extremely challenging is part of the fun of it. So I think we would anticipate seeing some or many of these faces in very different circumstances, and very different relationships.”

When Will Westworld End?

THR reported recently that as part of Nolan and Joy’s exit from their overall deal Warner Bros. (they set up a new deal at Amazon Studios), WB maintained a deal for them to produce six total seasons of Westworld. But in speaking with Variety, Nolan claims that they don’t quite know the endpoint for the series yet:

“I just want to clarify, you know, Lisa and I have never actually talked about a number of seasons. James Marsden mentioned five [seasons] in the first season when we were on hiatus, and more recently there’s been reporting about deals and other stuff like that. But we’ve never actually talked out loud about how many seasons we imagine this thing going, because I think you’d be foolish to. Things change, circumstances change. I think when we sat down to do the show, we didn’t quite realize how difficult it would be to make this show — [laughing] how many years it would take per season. So we’ve never actually talked about how many seasons that plan was, and indeed I think when we had the plan it didn’t actually map out to a specific number of seasons, exactly. It was a beginning, a middle and an end.”

The co-showrunner continued, saying that they don’t want to “overstay their welcome”:

“We’ve been very, very lucky to work with this cast, this crew, and now, partnering with Denise. When you have a show going like this, you want to stay as long as you’re telling a compelling story. We’re heading towards that end, but we haven’t completely mapped it out. At this point, part of the work is looking at the rest of the story we have to tell. It’s two impulses, one against the other. You don’t want to walk away from people who are as talented and cool as this. They’re all lovely, lovely people, and they love working together, we like working together. At the same time, you don’t want to outstay your welcome. You have a story to tell, and you want to go out without feeling like you’ve outstayed your welcome. So we’re trying to balance those things a bit.”

However long it lasts, we know there’s at least one more season’s worth of story left to tell, and the game has changed significantly.

For more on Westworld check out our complete chronological timeline of events and breakdown of the Season 3 ending.