It really does. The ending wraps everything up perfectly. The seasons after are basically just "and then they went to theme park B and did it again". There's nothing lost by only watching the original season.
I mostly disagree on the "they went to park b and did it again" bit, but only mostly. Shogunworld was just a detour and it's unclear if any of their Hosts achieved sentience. Season 2 mostly focused on the rebellion happening in the first park. The third and fourth seasons are absolutely going to another park and doing it again, but with the twist that the new park is the real world and reversing the roles of hosts and humans, comparing the hosts' loops to human behavior (which they undermined with Rehoboam, in my opinion).
Yeah man someone else on here turned me on to it and it's most of my viewing now. I've had a few hiccups with it pulling up something wrong or not finding a video, but I'd say 80% of the time it pulls up what I'm looking for within seconds in a solid quality
It feels to me like the writers of westworld slowly forgot what the show was about or something as it goes on. Like when you come up with an alt universe for a story that ignores the point of the original, like a version of Star Wars where Luke joins Vader that abandons the themes of family and redemption.
SPOILERS AHEAD IDK HOW TO DO SPOILER TAGS By season 3 it just felt like they plopped characters into the plot and wrote them to logical/"cool" conclusions, like "ooo wouldn't it be fucked up if Halores took over the world and made the humans the hosts in her game" they just really lost the plot later on imo
I'm pretty sure the writers admitted they lurked forums and got really self conscious about how some people predicted the entire plot from like the first episode and wanted to really shake things up but lost the plot themselves.
Any sci-fi series that starts messing with time-travel or random time frames is when it goes really bad. You stop caring for any of the characters and any major death scene is not as convincing as before