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Welcome to watching Westworld, the official unofficial podcast for Westworld on HBO. I'm Jim. I'm Aaron and today we're talking season four episode eight, Case Sarasara.

That's my mantra coming into this episode, Aeron, Case Sarasara. Whatever will be with this show will be because I don't know if you're aware of this yet, but we're all the way through season four and there still is no renewal from HBO for season five.

Yup, how can that be?

I think that there is a good chance to show will not be renewed. I think that it probably would have been renewed with maybe a smaller budget and episode commitment, but like, you know, with the takeover by discovery guy, we alluded it out on the instant take podcast.

And they're there, you know, wanting to cut costs and pivot in different directions, this low rated.

And I know a lot of people have like, oh, look, a million people are watching. If you count piracy, it's just that, but like, I mean, just look, look, look at the actual stats, you know, look at those season one, look at season two, look at season three, the audience has fallen off by half. Well, not between season one and two, but from season two, season three, season four, the audience has shrunk.

Quite a bit. And I guess that's one of the things, like, as I was watching this, I watched this a couple more times. And, you know, I've always admired to show structure. I've always admired to show themes. And I think I was wondering, and I saw, I saw a lot of people other people online wondering too.

I wonder if the show runners themselves kind of felt a little bit of that heat. And it's like, you know what, let's in this series in a way that it could serve as a fully recursive simulation.

That like essentially Dolores is going to, you know, reboot everything and run a test, what she's done before and she can't remember and we're stuck on this loop permanently. There's something kind of interesting about that.

And I've appropriated to the themes of this series.

100%. You know, I'm a little bit bummed because I've been, I've been waiting the whole time. Like, well, what's your prescription? You know, you've accurately described a lot of problems with the world, a lot of problems with bringing AI, a lot of problems with automation and the way we structured society for humans.

But what do you think we should do about it? What do you think looks like a happy ending and they get to dodge that? But it's also open ended enough that they could, you know, come back and do a season five where it is a test that they run and it resolves and says something profound about humanity and all that.

It's just man, I keep thinking about what this show looks like if they ended last episode.

You know, like that was such everyone was so fucking hyped.

Well, you mean what this season looks like or what the show looks like because I think ending last episode would have been super dissatisfying if it's the series finale.

Oh, that's true.

The series finale, but you're not wrong.

I think yeah, last episode would have probably been a lot better.

You know, and you'd have to finagle it a little bit with the Christina stuff because there was no resolution there.

Yeah.

But I, yeah, I was not super satisfied with the way the season ended.

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