What Would Westworld Season 5 Have Looked Like?

Westworld die-hards will recall that The Sublime is the machine that I can’t stop referring to as “robot heaven.” Westworld creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) created the server space as a sort of afterlife for host data to enter when they gain sentience and choose as to whether they want to live in the physical world or not. Many hosts abandon their robot forms and enter The Sublime (also known as The Valley Beyond) at the end of the show’s second season.

Now, some thirty years after that first upload to the Valley Beyond, how shocked must the Valley Beyonders be that the rest of host-kind has elected to join them in the Sublime. Could have saved the world a whole lot of trouble if everyone just uploaded in 2052, but I digress. Now that all of the remaining characters of Westworld are in the Sublime, it only stands to reason that Westworld season 5 would have taken place entirely within the Sublime. How, exactly, did the show plan to pull that off? Westworld was often criticized as being too confusing to begin with, and adding a full layer of “virtual reality that is not technically virtual reality but now more reality reality” on top of it would be even more challenging to explain.

Thankfully, the Sublime appears so real that it might not have even registered as virtual for viewers. We’ve gotten to see the Sublime a few times throughout Westworld‘s run. When Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon), the rest of Ghost Nation, and several stragglers head into The Sublime in season 2, it just looks like the rest of Westworld pretty much. Then, in seasons 3 and 4, Bernard spends some time in a version of the Sublime that looks like any other office room or laboratory behind the scenes at Westworld. Essentially, the Sublime can appear how ever one wants it to appear, which is kind of the whole point.

Why then even bother with a whole season set in robot heaven if you’re not going to make it as trippy and psychedelic as that concept sounds? Well perhaps Joy and Nolan were preparing to dig even deeper into the concept of the loss of the tangible world than any of us realized. In a post season 4 finale interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Joy had a fascinating response to interviewer Abbey White’s observation that the episode felt like a series finale. Joy said, in part:

“This is very personal. I think it’s because of COVID that I’m going to answer this more honestly than I maybe should, and more personally. I’ve always had this fantasy of humans not having to be humans, of being able to just be an orb of light. If we could all be orbs of lights and you could shine different colors and resonate, or sounds like beautiful notes, and you can make a sound together. So much about our physical forms, about the weight of society and its gaze upon us — we inherit a lot of things from the outside world that are impossible to shake off and that sometimes make connection difficult. That sometimes I think is even knowing oneself. You have to strip down beneath all of that and really hold on.”

While Joy says she is answering this “more honestly than (she) should,” I don’t take it to mean that she’s literally revealing the plot of Westworld season 5 and that there would be no actual actors, just balls of light floating around serenely in an empty space. I do, however, intuit that they were ready to go to some pretty extreme places in season 5.