This post contains frank discussion of Westworld season three, episode eight, “Crisis Theory.” If you’re not caught up, now is the time to leave.

Last month Westworld star Thandie Newton was just a week ahead of the rest of the world in discovering her HBO series had been picked up for a fourth season. The always-welcome news of renewal hit a little differently in the midst of a global pandemic. “It was more than just Westworld got picked up for another season,” she told Vanity Fair just hours after fans had seen her character, Maeve Millay, watch the human world burn and start to rebuild itself again in the season three finale. “It’s like, the world is potentially going to be okay enough for us to do this again. Let’s hope.” Newton broke down her character’s season-long journey toward a reawakening as well as her hopes for a season four in the latest episode of Still Watching: Westworld.

Fans impatient to see their favorite Mariposa madam wriggle out from under the thumb of Vincent Cassel’s villainous Serac might have rejoiced in Maeve’s last-minute rally to Dolores’s side. As Newton herself admits, Maeve being on the wrong side of the fight has been tough at times: “I loved her agency in season one. I loved how uncompromising she was. It’s been strangely frustrating, certainly, for the character. Well, I guess for me too in a way. But all with a purpose. In a way, Maeve’s agency starts again in the season three finale. I’ve spent basically, pretty much [seasons] two and three floundering. Learning some katana skills and creating a path for the audience to better understand what the hosts have been dealing with.”

If any of that sounds negative at all, that’s not Newton’s attitude in the slightest. When it comes to talking about Westworld, she’s glowing. “I really trust these guys,” she says of the Westworld writers. “I think they’re master storytellers.” Because when Maeve does need to act in the finale in order to help complete Dolores’s plan—boy, does she act. Her katana flashing out of the dark with a vengeful fury, and we finally see a Maeve we haven’t quite glimpsed since season one. Newton slathers on the Mariposa sass as she, and not her fallen comrade Dolores, takes Caleb into the chaotic future he has helped create and repeats one of her earliest lines: “This is the new world, and in this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want.”

It’s Maeve, not Dolores, who gets to strike a familiar Fight Club pose with Aaron Paul’s Caleb as Los Angeles skyscrapers collapse around them because, like Moses, Dolores might lead the humans and hosts to the Promised Land of free will, but she will not join them. Given that a renewal wasn’t a certainty when the Westworld creators set about making this season, they gave the Dolores we’ve followed for several seasons a conclusive ending. A real death. “I have died many times, but there is only one real end,” Evan Rachel Wood narrates over the opening of the finale. “I will write this one myself.”

Does that mean that the Dolores that Maeve tearfully held hands with as her memory was wiped clean is gone for good? Series creator Jonathan Nolan has suggested that she is, and Newton agrees: “Dolores as we know her is gone.” But that doesn’t mean it will be the last of Evan Rachel Wood. Death is a very slippery concept in a world of synthetic bodies and virtual spaces. “She has populated the world with versions of herself,” Newton points out. “So maybe there’s a version that’s in a little cupboard somewhere that’s still the old Dolores.”

But if Evan Rachel Wood comes back as some version of Dolores next season, Newton is confident it won’t be a cheap trick just to keep the audience on its toes. She points out that Simon Quarterman’s return as a virtual version of Lee Sizemore was a fun twist for fans who assumed that his character was gone for good. “Yes, characters do come back,” she says. “But they’ve always been coming back in really interesting ways. It’s not lazy. It’s not like Dallas when Bobby Ewing came back. I don’t know how many seasons they decided to make a dream just to get Bobby back. I don’t feel like that’s ever going to be anything that Westworld will do. With all due respect to bloody Dallas, man, ’cause that was gold.”

Original Dolores isn’t the only player permanently taken off the board this season. In typical star-crossed-lover fashion, the original Dolores and William died one right after the other. It’s tempting to think William’s post-credits demise was set some time in the near future, but the bloody wound around his mouth in Delos’s Dubai offices matches one he had earlier in the episode. Very little time passes between Dolores’s sacrifice and William’s death at the hands of a robotic Man in Black. It seems absolutely certain that Ed Harris, like Newton, will be getting to play something closer to his season-one self in upcoming seasons of the show.

Newton isn’t worried about Maeve—who was an early favorite with audiences—going anywhere anytime soon, though she is a little worried about keeping herself in ageless, robotic shape for the next however-many seasons: “I look at my little boy—he’s six. He was six months old when we started shooting this show. Then I look at myself in the mirror, [and I see] this exhausted woman, and I think, Bloody hell, man, you gotta get your shit together.”

Whatever exhaustion Newton may be feeling personally worked well for Maeve’s why-am-I-even-here attitude for much of the season. Between Serac pulling her strings and Dolores’s failure to communicate her plans, Newton says: “No wonder Maeve was just like, ‘Give me a sherry and get me the fuck outta here, man.’” Season four, she posits, is the season of Westworld in which the show needs to convince Maeve she wants to be in this fight after all: “I feel like that would be a good guide for the next season. Make me give a shit about what she’s doing.”

But Newton herself is all in for whatever twist the next chapter in Westworld holds for her. Unlike some Westworld fans who short-circuit their brains trying to solve the puzzle box of the show, Newton says she prefers to “to just sit back and be taken on a journey. It’s like trying to put brakes on a roller coaster. So are you going to put all your effort into trying to put brakes on this roller coaster? Like with anything, it’s less painful if you just surrender.”

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