Is HBO Teasing a Westworld Spinoff With Maeve?

Westworld‘s third season came to a close earlier this month, launching a whole lot of speculation among fans of the HBO series. With the sci-fi series not expected to return for a good chunk of time (especially given the current COVID-19 pandemic), that stretch of time is sure to spawn some pretty creative theories — and it looks like a new tweet has added fuel to the fire. Over the weekend, the official Westworld Twitter account tweeted that they need Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) to “finish what [she] started”. Newton then responded to the tweet by saying “okay, deal”. Given the TV world’s proclivity for spinoffs and sister series, a handful of people wondered if this could be hinting at some sort of Maeve-related offshoot.

So, is Westworld planning a Maeve spinoff? While stranger things have certainly happened, there’s certainly nothing concrete to hint at it at the moment.

If anything, the tweet seems to hint at the larger role that Maeve will realistically have in the show’s fourth season, given the events of the Season 3 finale. In a poignant scene, Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) reunited with Maeve in some sort of digital context, and called upon her to carry on her crusade after that version of her died. Maeve certainly seemed to follow that guidance, killing Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) and helping Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul) escape to safety. As Maeve remarked in the episode’s final moments, the two of them would be able to do whatever they wanted in the show’s slightly-apocalyptic new world.

“We are extremely lucky,” co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan told Variety after the Season 4 finale. “We have one of the most talented casts on TV. And 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.”

Westworld has been renewed for a fourth season.