One of the big surprises of the Westworld finale is we still don’t have confirmation on the location of the park. The deep tunnel system, disconnect between below and the surface, deep underground location of the abandoned welcome center and difficulty in taking data out of the park all point to the answer not being as simple as ‘Utah.’
The most common fan theory is the location of the park is offworld. It could be a terraformed Mars, a terraformed asteroid, or maybe it’s actually under a dome that is removed with Augmented Reality. We have little access to what year it is or what the general tech level outside the park is so all of these seem possible. Well maybe not the Mars one – FYI for anyone who hasn’t tried it themselves, terraforming a planet is super hard and takes a long time.
Although the answer wasn’t revealed, I’d argue that the finale did give us some significant clues in our never ending quest to guess every mystery of the show. The reveal of Samuraiworld, means that multiple parks could either be in development or operating concurrently with Westworld. Since the development facilities are linked, we also know that they are relatively geographically close to each other.
For me, this is a game changer, and not just because now we can riff on other possible parks. The climate of Westworld and the climate of Japan are very very different. The fact that both parks are close enough to each other to share development space means that the location of the park must be somewhere where the operators have distinct control over the climate of the region. They have the ability to put the climate of the American West and the climate of Japan right next to each other.
Given everything else we know, this makes me even more confident in the offworld theory. It also makes me think the hidden dome structure is the most likely. Even on a terraformed Mars, it would be very hard to shove these two disparate climates right next to each other. I think the hidden dome theory is most likely. This could be done on Earth but if you’re going to build massive Domes you might as well build them offworld. Moon, Space Station, Asteroid? Hopefully Season 2 will give us the answers we need. Also, I can’t wait for Maeve in a spacesuit...
