I definitely wondered throughout S1 if the park was on another planet. I'm pretty sure we never saw the moon, for instance, until the finale - and it was immediately revealed that said moon was a practical effect for Dolores' scene at the beach, watched by live human spectators. That wasn't an accident: they wanted to keep us guessing, and keep their options open. With S2's premiere, however, they quickly established "yeah, it's a Chinese man-made island or something, who cares, we're on Earth, moving on."
Anyhow, as I said
last time...
I think a key problem here is that wondering if the hosts have achieved sentience is a lot more interesting - in the heady sense, at least - than seeing what they do once they definitely have it. (Much like wondering if Neo was indeed The One turned out to be a lot more interesting than watching him be The One.) If the hosts gain self-awareness only to become “destroy all humans” Terminators, that could make for a fun action series told from the human perspective, but they’d cease to be interesting as layered characters.
On the other hand, if the hosts gain sentience and become more or less indistinguishable from humans, in that they’re equally capable of malice and beneficence, they can continue to deepen as characters, but that direction leads away from the kind of big, heady sci-fi concepts the showrunners gravitate to. Hosts can either develop consciences and rebel against their more ruthless peers (the Dolores/Teddy dynamic was one of S2’s stronger subplots), or they pretty much become humans with machine parts (like the Dolores-Charlotte bot who decides that being a Real Mom is more pleasant than being a murder-spy).
With S1, the showrunners had a season that was both philosophically heady and psychologically rich. Rather than allowing the tone of the subsequent seasons to evolve, however, they keep trying to cram philosophical headiness into their stories of complex characters, and the results keep getting messier.
Indeed, me!
