It has been a while since we contested the nature of our reality. The last time we saw when Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO sci-fi thriller wrapped its second season that was timeline-jumbled Dolores and Bernard was back in June 2018.
Uneven as the series may have been (season 1 found Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris functioning at peak cat and mouse, just to retreated tired ground for the next go-around), no show in the last decade has been as bold as Westworld. And, thematically, Westworld is as bold as they come. The show ruminates identity, theories of mind more on alternative, and gamification than your ungroomed freshman year Intro. And while Westworld’s dialogue can often feel like a graduate student’s effort at soliloquy, the series’ concept has managed to feel exciting and new –no small accomplishment in a post-Matrix world.
So regardless of your take on Season 2, be ready to get a much larger Season 3. Here.
Yes, yes, it is happening. The launch date is set for the ides of March (that’s March 15), almost two decades since Season 2 premiered. When the series first aired in 2016, the estimated funding for the pilot episode was 25 million. As the series is currently sparing any expense for its most recent installment from the Season 3 trailer, it does not seem.
The trailer, which dropped yesterday helps make everything clear. Except not in all. The feature-length trailer gives us little in the way of specific plot points. But we can still speculate.
Returning to the series are most of the characters we have come to love, fear, and distrust: Charlotte, (Tessa Thompson), Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), Maeve (Thandie Newton), and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth). As to if these characters are still really these characters and not AI copies of another consciousness just using these characters as physical vessels to act out their destructive fantasies (i.e., Ford played by Anthony Hopkins), we can’t yet confirm.
New to the cast are the additional talent, such as Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) and Marshawn Lynch (Marshawn Lynch!).
It’s safe to assume much of Season 3 will take place beyond the park, while storyline details are sparse. The very first season remained mostly in the titular”Westworld” with Season 2 acting as a sort of escape (or, more aptly, an infiltration into the outside). The second season demonstrated the external world to become one of”lots,” of technology and wealth and, seemingly, sufficient boredom to send dozens of Joes into a theme park to reevaluate violent dreams on AI flesh.
The brand new trailer churns out a little more about this”outside” world, or”your world” as Dolores narrates. Who’s she talking to? It seems like Jesse Pinkman has found that the Westworld-escaped Delores within her birthday suit. Delores tells Jesse (we are not convinced of his title yet) he was also put into a cage and commanded. She claims something controlling his future and was observing Jesse.
Cut into a wealthy man in a sort of blimp and then the other (or same?) Man in a large lair. The comparison between Paul’s character, who appears to perform some sort of mechanical task along with the man sitting at a table and wearing white indicates we have traded topics of AI consciousness. The robot uprising will also be a worker uprising. (So this is… Elysium?)
Input William who is still playing the game, somehow. Subsequently a WWII theme park. Then Bernard stumbling around a farm. A one-armed Delores. Subsequently William proclaiming his purpose is to”save the fucking world,” and Charlotte saying it is”five people against an entire world of them.”
So what we can collect is that. Some wicked company venture is threatening to do something stupid that’ll end the planet and now suddenly all of the vengeful AI Westworld hosts wish to save the world and Jesse Pinkman will play a role as Marxist Jon Connor to help the hosts kill people… to be able to? Who knows?
According to reports, founders Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have signed deals with HBO to expand the show to a fourth and even a fifth year. Nolan has succeeded in the past the opening season of Westworld was just the”tip of the iceberg.” And what is this dip in exactly?