Evan Rachel Wood's Delores seeks vengeance in Season 3 of HBO's Westworld.HBO / Crave
For a show fascinated with the concept of memory – what is real, what is imagined, what has been manipulated by evil geniuses to feel both real and imagined, etc. – it is damn hard to remember what exactly went down on the previous season of Westworld. Ahead of the HBO series’ Season 3 premiere this Sunday night, I’ve tried so very hard to recall where things stood in the fantastical theme park populated by robot hosts, and their sometimes benevolent minders and slimy corporate overlords, and come up empty. Even HBO’s official Season 2 finale recap reads like absolute gibberish.
Thanks to Westworld’s fetishization of abundant and often needless questions with no answers, sometimes achingly slow pace, characters specifically engineered with the capacity to be narratively and mechanically rebooted over and over, and the insertion of multiple, deliberately confusing timelines – I’m fairly certain Season 2 featured one chronology that was only 45 minutes ahead of another – Westworld lost the plot last season in spectacular, seemingly self-destructive fashion. Yet, I still watched as if it was appointment viewing, and as soon as the first four episodes of Season 3 were made available to media, I devoured those, too. Why?
Probably because I cannot resist a good mystery box show – the kind of series in which its producers lean into ambiguity with an obsessive glee, dropping plot hints such as Easter eggs and deriving immense, arguably perverse pleasure in toying with audiences’ ability to guess where the storytelling might be heading. J.J. Abrams pioneered the modern-day version of the serial mystery box with his early-aughts series Alias and Lost, although the genre can be traced back to the heyday of 1960s head-scratcher The Prisoner through David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and, a personal favourite, the underseen and half-forgotten mid-1990s UPN puzzler Nowhere Man. Which is why the only thing that makes sense about Westworld is seeing Abrams’s name atop the credits as an executive producer. Series co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy undoubtedly bring their own sensibilities to the series, but it is obvious that the pair worship at the altar of Abrams’s mystery box more than any other idol.
So even though Season 2 developed and then teased so many plot points that ended up either maddening or looping around to becoming completely insubstantial, I stuck with the series. I was captivated by all its many questions – who is really running the park and what is their end game? What is “the Door” that everyone keeps talking about? Or “the Forge”? Is Ed Harris’s the Man in Black character a human, a robot or some sort of sexy human-robot-Harris mash-up? Am I a robot? What time is this scene taking place in? What time am I taking place in? Agh? Agh! – even though every episode made it increasingly clear that there were no real answers, or satisfactory ones, on the horizon. I was binging against my better judgment, not terribly minding that anything was adding up. And who among us cannot cop to the same mistake? (Looking at you, Love is Blind viewership.)
Season 3 moves the action to a near-future Los Angeles.HBO / Crave
But I also kept coming back every Sunday night for the sheer HBO sheen of the thing. The show simply looks impressive: as pristine and perfect as possible, with every one of the many millions of dollars the network threw at it evident onscreen. Despite the series’ frustrating nature last go-round, it still felt like an event that could not be missed.
The same is mostly true for the series’ new season, which is still confounding, but in a more user-friendly manner. Sensing that Season 2′s half-dozen timelines threw everyone off except the most hardened of Redditor zealots, Nolan and Joy have streamlined Season 3 into a single straight-ahead narrative (although who knows what will happen or be revealed in the latter half of the season, which I’ve yet to view). The timeline decision helps reorient anyone (re: everyone) puzzled by all that Forge/Door business in Season 2 or even those who stopped watching after Season 1. We’re now outside of the deadly South China Sea island housing Delos’s various “world” attractions (sayonara, Shogun World) and into the “real world” of a near-future Los Angeles, which looks like a cross between Blade Runner 2049 and what might happen if iPhone designers were given architecture licences and little bureaucratic oversight.
It is in this shiny hellscape that vengeful robot Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) is executing her plan to burn humanity to the ground as punishment for the various traumas inflicted on her by the Man in Black and his Delos lackeys. Meanwhile, the more compassionate android Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) is hatching his own scheme to stop Delores, and corporate shark Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), responsible for so much of the misery inside the titular theme park in Seasons 1 and 2, is, well, dead yet still walking around the boardroom of tech behemoth Delos as if she owns the place – although it is something of a question mark as to which robot’s consciousness is operating underneath her skin.
Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul, left, joins the Westworld cast in season 3.HBO / Crave
HBO has been characteristically mindful about reminding critics not to spoil any plot developments, although the first four episodes only contain a handful of minor twists. And all of them, mercifully, make some kind of narrative sense. The writers still raise myriad mysteries – who is the new villain seeking control of Delos? Which robot allies are assisting Delores? How much does the outside world know about the deadly robot uprising inside the parks? Is there, um, a Game of Thrones-like park, too? – but a good portion are asked at the beginning of an episode and answered almost immediately thereafter. Best of all, by escaping the physical confines and tropes of Westworld the theme park, Westworld the show can now focus on what has clearly been Nolan and Joy’s ultimate fascination: life in the age of zero privacy and how humanity will always sell itself out to the highest bidder.
Not every Season 3 addition, or subtraction, works. Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul joins the cast, but his character – an army veteran who can’t get ahead in life – so far seems superfluous. Some plot lines – notably what Bernard and fellow host Maeve (Thandi Newton) are up to – feel like they could run their course in half the screen time allotted. Harris seems just as unsure as to where his character’s arc is heading as anyone else, especially after that final, still-unexplained moment at the end of last season. And I’ll put a wait-and-see reservation on what Nolan and Joy have planned for Vincent Cassel, who shows up as a smooth man-behind-the-curtain type, even though the series has already presented enough string-pullers to fill Delos’s board of directors three times over.
Still, the series is as slick and excessive as you might remember and sometimes that’s enough to help forget about everything else.
Season 3 of Westworld premieres on March 15 at 9 p.m. on HBO and Crave.
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