Warning: This article contains BIG spoilers for all 10 episodes of Westworld season 2
These confusing delights have confusing ends. Yes, Westworld just wrapped up its second season with a mind-bending finale, one that shook the HBO series to the very core of its programming.
Any third season will have to be a radical departure from what came before, so here’s everything we know so far about the Hosts’ future. (At least, we think it’s the future – time is kind of a sketchy concept ’round these parts…)
Westworld season 3 episode 1: What will happen next?
Let’s start with a recap of what happened in season two’s finale, ‘The Passenger’… *deep breath*
– Bernard, Dolores and William / the Man in Black arrive at the Valley Beyond. William attempts to betray Dolores, but she’s sabotaged his gun, which explodes, seriously injuring him. (He survives, though, and is later seen being evacuated from the island.)
– Dolores and Bernard enter the Valley where they find the Forge, a more advanced version of the Cradle, which has digital records of every human guest to have visited the park.
– Bernard opens “the door”, a giant system transfer device which allows the Hosts to transfer their personality into “the Sublime” – a virtual world inaccessible to humans (essentially Host heaven).
– Many of the Hosts are able to pass over into the Sublime, where Akecheta is reunited with his wife, yay!
– Lee Sizemore sacrifices himself to allow Maeve and her gang to reach the Valley Beyond. *sob*
– Maeve reunites with her daughter and convinces her to cross over into the Sublime, but Maeve herself is then shot and killed by Delos security. (In the aftermath, though, it’s hinted that Felix and Sylvester might still be able to bring her back.)
– Dolores rejects the Sublime and wants to take the battle to the outside world. Bernard refuses to let her go on the rampage… and kills her! But wait, there’s more…
– In the past, Elsie confronts Charlotte Hale about the true nature of Westworld and is killed by Charlotte. Shocked by Elsie’s death, Bernard – with the help of an imaginary Ford – builds a Host version of Charlotte and installs Dolores’s control unit. Dolores then kills and replaces the real Charlotte.
– In the present, Dolores reveals her true self in Charlotte’s body and kills Strand and his men while they are trying to recover the guests’ memories from the Forge. She reconfigures the Forge to transmit the Hosts’ data, including Teddy’s, to a new Sublime stored at a place only she knows.
– Dolores then kills Bernard(!) and (still disguised as Charlotte Hale, remember) joins the evacuation team, taking several Hosts’ cores with her as she leaves the island.
– Arriving at Arnold’s home, Dolores is apparently able to restore her consciousness to a body identical to her original form. She also creates a new body for Bernard, warning him that they’ll be enemies in the outside world if he attempts to stop her Host revolution.
– A final post-credits scene jumps forward to the far future, with William in a Forge that’s fallen into disrepair. He’s interviewed by someone or something resembling his dead daughter Emily, who reveals she’s there to test his “fidelity”.
– Clear as muck? Good.
So what next?
Westworld’s showrunners have described the third season as a “radical shift”, with episodes that feel like they’re from a whole new show.”It really is like repiloting,” co-showrunner Lisa Joy said.
This shift is something that’s been in the works for a while, though. “The great thing about season 3 is, when we were writing the [original] pilot, the major storyline for season 3 was already something that we had talked about nonstop,” Joy added.
“We’ve been waiting to get to this place and now that we’ve arrived here, we already have a very strong idea of exactly where we want to go and we can’t wait to go there.”
“One of the things we’re excited about is, the third season is our world,” showrunner Jonathan Nolan has said. “We get a chance to see what that world looks like [after] 30 years.
“The story to this point has taken place in this artificial reality and for the story to move forward, we now have this fun / terrifying challenge for the third season of filling out what the real world looks like, and what Dolores and the others will find out there.”
That doesn’t mean that we’ve seen the last of the parks, though, with Joy adding that there are “absolutely” plans to explore the as-yet-unseen parks that exist alongside Westworld, Shogun World and Raj World.
As for that baffling post-credits sequence, the version of the Man in Black will see in this “very different timeline” is apparently a Host, but that doesn’t mean that the version we’ve been following in the series thus far wasn’t human.
© HBO
“It’s not his original incarnation,” Joy told The Hollywood Reporter. “That version of him that was ‘human’ would be somewhere lying dead [by this point in time], and this is some other version of himself now. He doesn’t quite understand what.”
Joy also confirmed to The Wrap that the original version of William’s daughter Emily is dead, and the person he’s speaking to in this sequence is a Host.
‘The Passenger’ also hinted that Stubbs could be a Host, as he allowed Dolores to escape the island and referred to his “core drive”. The episode’s director Fred Toye told Vanity Fair that, as far he’s concerned, Stubbs is a Host, while Joy elaborated, “Doesn’t it make sense if you are Ford and designing a park and you have a whole master plan about helping robots that you would keep one Host hiding in plain sight as a fail-safe? Maybe the Host who’s in charge of quality assurance?”
Speaking of Dolores, Nolan promised that the third season will answer one big question left hanging by the finale: if Evan Rachel Wood’s character is now back in her own body, who is in the ‘Charlotte Hale’ Host form that’s accompanying her at the end of the episode?
“The question of who’s who and what we’re looking at is something we’re excited to play with,” he told Entertainment Weekly. (For her part, Tessa Thompson has admitted she isn’t sure whose mind was inside the Hale host body that we saw in season two’s moments.)
Westworld season 3 cast: Who will be in it?
“It’s a large ensemble cast and sadly we’re saying goodbye to some people at the end of this season,” Jonathan Nolan told Entertainment Weekly.
“But as always with this show, who remains and who doesn’t is something we’re having a lot of fun with. There’s going to be a bit of a wait for a third season but we want to surprise and hopefully delight people with the way things progress.”
Given where we left off, the following cast members are certain to be back:
– Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores
– Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe
– Ed Harris as older William / Man in Black
– Tessa Thompson as Charlotte Hale(?)
– Luke Hemsworth as Ashley Stubbs
– Katja Herbers as Emily / Host Emily
Beyond this central six, things are less certain. Maeve looked pretty non-functional by the end of ‘The Passenger’ but there is a hint that she could still be restored… and surely Westworld wouldn’t really write out Thandie Newton?
Plus, Newton appeared to confirm that she was negotiating a deal for the third season back in April, while discussing equal pay. “[Talks are] all happening right now, and yeah, we’re all equal across the board,” she said.
Don’t forget, Dolores left Westworld with five orbs, each containing the consciousness of a particular Host, which means a number of ‘dead’ Host characters could be revived.
This, plus further plot twists, could conceivably allow for reappearances from Hector (Rodrigo Santoro), Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), Logan (Ben Barnes), Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr), Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum) and Clementine (Angela Sarafyan).
Oh, and the possibility of further flashbacks mean we shouldn’t rule out more from Jimmi Simpson (young William) and Peter Mullan (James Delos), either.
Jonathan Nolan has confirmed, however, that Elsie (Shannon Woodward) will definitely not return for a third season.
One other character we can probably strike off the list for good include the late Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), as well as Teddy (James Marsden) and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon), both of whom crossed over to the Sublime.
As for whether we’ve really, really, seen the last of Anthony Hopkins after Ford was expelled from Bernard’s consciousness, Lisa Joy has insisted that character is “gone” – but then, that’s what we thought after Dolores blew his brains out.
Westworld season 3 release date: When will it air?
“It’s an ongoing conversation with our friends at HBO, and for us, with a show of this scope and scale, we’re not interested in doing the compromised version,” showrunner Jonathan Nolan said in April after being asked when the show would return for a third season.
“We want the show to get bigger and bigger and more ambitious and this takes time. We want to take all the time we need to get it right.”
Delivering an update in June, Lisa Joy said: “We haven’t nailed anything down yet. We don’t know our release date. But we’ve definitely started breaking the story.”
Given that it took 18 months for season two to arrive, we’re looking at a late 2019 launch at best, possibly even a 2020 premiere. Fingers crossed for sooner rather than later, obviously.
Westworld season 3 trailer: When will we see it?
We got our first season two teaser some nine months before new episodes launched in April 2018. So we’d anticipate that the earliest we’ll see new Westworld footage will be mid-2019.
At least we’ve got ‘The Passenger’ to rewatch and (attempt to) unpick until then.
Source: Read Full Article