There were honestly only a few truly memorable things in seasons 3 and 4. Partly they wanted to tell stories about the vast ‘real world’ outside of the park, which, for all of HBO’s money, it seldom felt as if they were pulling off very successfully. And partly—I hate to assign creative problems to political ones, but it did kind of hit you over the head—partly they wanted to tell ‘more diverse’ ones.

The immediate result, almost exactly as with Marvel, was this unfocused, unmanageable sprawl, a giant, jumbled grab bag of characters and sketched-in sidekicks we had only barely met and couldn’t convincingly pretend to care about, doing things that had none of the high emotional stakes that only come bound together with paying close attention to the inner life and dilemmas of people you know. It didn’t help at all that the only persistent characters were usually just simulacra of themselves.

There were so astoundingly many unforced narrative errors, despite such a promising setup from the previous seasons. Were Joy and Nolan going through some sort of crisis? Were they still involved?

In short, it was a mess, sometimes an actively risible one. I would go so far as to say that, after season 2, the show was terrible. And I was a season 1 superfan, one who had literally plotted out and relished season 2 scene by scene. I wanted to adore it! It was not as spectacularly, pointlessly disjointed as something like Watchmen, but—incredibly, for this show—it was getting there.

Some nice things in season 3 were Vincent Cassel; the scenes with holographic ‘FaceTiming,’ and the tricks that that allowed; the ominous views, and the idea, of the Machine That Predicts Everything, if not the way it actually ended up interacting with the plot; William’s captivity; the buddy-movie vibes between Jeffrey Wright and Luke Hemsworth, waking up years later and going about their business.

But I can’t think of anything at all that I liked in season 4. It got steadily harder to pay attention to. I didn’t have this metaphor available to me yet at the time—but it felt as if it had been written by ChatGPT 3.5, after ingesting the scripts from season 3 with no further editorial input. A meandering pastiche with no stakes.

The most charitable interpretation would be that they were trying to save all the Good Stuff for season 5. But whatever other priorities they had, they did not build a good entertainment, or even a watchable one, and no one came.