Although HBO has been pretty tight-lipped about Westworld's upcoming third season, they've
still released a couple of tidbits to keep fans tided over until the show returns to
screens.
Here's a round-up of everything we know about Westworld Season 3.
While the first two seasons of Westworld have been told mostly from the points of view of
Dolores and the Man in Black, if the first teaser is any indication, season three seems
to be taking a sharp turn into something new.
This intriguing glimpse at Westworld's new season follows a brand new character, played
by Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul, through a series of events that take place in what appears
to be the "real" world outside of Delos' park.
From Paul's narration, it sounds as though the world he inhabits isn't much of an improvement
on the park, as he talks about his sense that, although things may look nice on the surface,
that beauty is masking something darker.
Sound like something you've heard before?
"Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world.
I choose to see the beauty."
Paul's character laments that somebody has made an attempt to smooth over the world's
rough edges, making it all little more than a "lie," and expresses his hope of finding
something "real," at which point the trailer finally shows us a familiar face.
Of course, as you probably know from previous seasons, the men who fall in with Dolores
are rarely all that they seem…nor do they ever get what they expect.
Although HBO has yet to announce a premiere date for season three, don't hold your breath
on seeing Westworld return to TV screens in 2019.
HBO programming chief Casey Bloys told The Wrap in early 2019 that production on the
series' third season was set to begin in March of the same year.
While it's possible that showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy will race to turn the season
around before the end of the year, a 2020 premiere date seems more likely.
This would be a slightly longer gap than the one between the first two seasons, which lasted
nearly 17 months.
Season one wrapped up in early December of 2016, while season two premiered in late April
of 2018 and ended in late June.
Since season two began filming in the summer of 2017, that left around 10 months between
the start of production and the show's premiere.
If the series remains on a similar production schedule, we could expect to see season three
as early as January of 2020.
But given the increasingly vast scope of the series from season to season, it wouldn't
be a huge surprise if the wait turns out to be even longer.
"It’s a f------ nightmare.”
The end of Westworld's second season saw the park undergo a heap of significant changes,
with a number of important characters dying, escaping, or transitioning into another reality.
Such seismic developments are bound to ripple out through the show's third season, and if
the trailer is any indication, the new episodes will look and feel very different from what's
come before.
"We have to be smarter than them, or they will find us.
And they will kill us."
However, not everything will seem strange and new when Westworld returns for its third
season, as several main cast members have already had their returns confirmed.
These include the damsel-turned-revolutionary Dolores Abbernathy, host creator and unwitting
Arnold replica Bernard Lowe, the mysterious Man in Black, head of security Ashley Stubbs,
the host that looks like Charlotte Hale, and, somewhat surprisingly, former madam Maeve
Milla, who sacrificed herself at the end of season two in order to allow her daughter
a chance to escape the park and enter the digital utopia of the Sublime.
Of course, everyone knows that death is merely temporary for the hosts of Westworld, and
Newton confirmed that she'll be back for season three in a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair.
"You think I'm scared of death?
I've done it a million times."
While a number of familiar faces are returning for season three, the end of season two marked
a definitive farewell for several others.
Anthony Hopkins' park creator Robert Ford has been dead since the end of season one
too, and although he has continued to appear regularly in flashbacks and visions, according
to series creator Lisa Joy, he's now gone for good.
"Like I said, I built all of this."
Meanwhile, Jimmi Simpson's character, William, will still be very much alive in season three,
but will be portrayed exclusively by Ed Harris, as Simpson revealed to the Television Critics
Association that he hasn't been asked to return.
In previous seasons, Harris played the older William, while Simpson portrayed his younger
counterpart.
Shannon Woodward's determined truth-seeker Elsie was tragically murdered at the end of
season two, and Jonathan Nolan has confirmed that, while "there's never any real saying
goodbye" in Westworld, Elsie is truly gone…for now, at least.
Less clear is the fate of James Marsden's stalwart cowboy, Teddy.
Introduced in the pilot episode, Teddy spent the majority of his time on the show as Dolores'
most devoted protector and ally, until he realized that she had altered his programming.
Teddy killed himself near the end of season two, determined to die rather than become
a monster, but Dolores left his brain pearl in the Forge, leaving his consciousness free
to cross over into the Sublime.
Nothing has yet been said one way or another about Marsden's return, but since this is
Westworld, you should know better than to rule anything out.
Beyond the addition of Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul to the cast as a series regular, Westworld
season 3 will see a number of new faces join the show.
These include include Lena Waithe, Vincent Cassel, rapper Kid Cudi, and former NFL running
back Marshawn Lynch.
"Hey you.”
“Haha.
What's up with it?
Boy what is it you got on that thing?
I don't know about that, where I'm from, we don't wear those."
Judging by the trailer, it seems as though Waithe and Lynch will be playing Paul's accomplices
in some sort of bank heist, while Cudi's character, who also seems to have some sort of tie to
Paul's character, will be spending at least some of his time in prison.
At the end of season two, most of the hosts either traveled into the Sublime or were destroyed
and reclaimed by Delos, but there are still a mysterious few whose fates remain undecided.
In "The Passenger," Dolores, in the guise of Charlotte Hale, took five pearl-shaped
control units with her out of the park, each housing the consciousness of one host.
Just which hosts are represented by each of those control units remain to be seen, and
according to Jonathan Nolan, not even the writers had fully decided who was in Dolores'
purse at the end of season two.
Nolan explained to Entertainment Weekly:
"We've had some interesting conversations, but as always with this show, who remains
and who doesn't is something we're having a lot of fun with."
Nolan went on to say that, when the inhabitants of those pearls are eventually revealed, the
goal of the writers is for their choices to "surprise and hopefully delight" their audience.
While you can probably rule out any of the hosts who crossed into the Sublime, that still
leaves a large number of hosts to pick from, so place your bets wisely.
"There is beauty in what we are.
Shouldn't we too try to survive?"
While the earliest episodes of Westworld took place almost exclusively within the park,
as the series has progressed, so has the scope of its setting, with much of season two venturing
into the outside world.
Now, with each of the show's principal host characters all living on the outside, the
showrunners are eager to see what sorts of storytelling opportunities this vast new setting
opens up.
Joy told The Wrap:
"It was always the plan to explore the real world.
There are three Hosts out in the world and next season will really be an exploration
of what they find and who they become."
Given that Dolores and Bernard were two of the most central characters in season two,
it's probably safe to assume that since they're both on the outside, season three will wind
up spending a lot more time outside the walls of the park.
Add to that the first teaser, which seems to take place exclusively in the real world,
and it would be reasonable to wonder whether the Westworld-centric days of Westworld might
be over.
Although a few main characters have managed to escape Ford's world, there are still others
left on the inside, with several theme parks remaining unexplored.
In addition to Westworld, season two introduced viewers to Shogunworld and The Raj, but the
show's official Delos Destinations website teases three additional parks.
The site lists no details about them, but Nolan and Joy have previously hinted that
the show may eventually visit the Roman and Medieval Worlds from Michael Crichton's original
1973 movie.
As for the sixth world, it could be Futureworld, which appeared in the 1976 sequel, although
Nolan and Joy could just as easily create something brand new.
In fact, the identity of at least one park seems to have been confirmed by the Comic-Con
trailer.
Although Maeve was last seen shot to death outside the entrance to the Sublime, the trailer
finds her looking as good as new, in a place that looks a lot like Nazi-occupied Europe
during World War II.
This may very well be a glimpse at one of the remaining three parks.
Although World War II doesn't exactly seem like a prime vacation spot, if there's one
thing that's clear about the elite clientele of Delos' theme parks, it's that they're drawn
to violent settings, and how much more violent can you get than history's deadliest war?
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy revealed a few
details about Aaron Paul's previously mysterious character, hinting that he may be a little
different to the executives, scientists, and socialites who make up Westworld's cast of
human characters.
Paul will be playing a Los Angeles construction worker named Caleb.
According to Nolan,
"[He'll be] the type of person who doesn't get to go to Westworld."
Westworld's first season made it clear that only the extremely wealthy are able to afford
the hefty $40,000 per day price tag that allows them to partake in the violent delights of
Delos' themed parks.
Because of this, the only humans that the hosts of the parks have encountered, up until
this point, have either been employed by Delos, or have all belonged to the same super-elite
social class.
But now that Dolores is outside of the park, it sounds like her horizons will become significantly
broadened, and according to Nolan, Caleb will, quote, "challenge Dolores' notions about the
nature of humanity."
Although artificial lifeforms are nothing new for Westworld fans, season 3 will nonetheless
introduce a different type of robot to the hosts who have appeared so far.
Shown hanging out with Aaron Paul's construction worker Caleb in HBO's initial teaser for season
three, George is a standard construction robot, Delos model G-267.
Built to serve as a helpful co-worker for Caleb, George doesn't speak, and likely won't
have much in common with his mechanical counterparts from inside the park.
In his Entertainment Weekly interview, Nolan said:
"Part of what our hosts find [is that] they're caught in between, they're fashioned to look
like human beings and act like them, but they have more in common with the mechanical pieces
in our world."
Robots like George and the other real-world worker-bots glimpsed in the full season 3
trailer will play an important role in the upcoming season, contrasting the human-like
traits of the hosts with their mechanical origins.
While the hosts have been designed to act as emotional mirrors to human guests in Delos'
parks, these more utilitarian robots have been designed with specific uses in mind.
"Yeah, science!"
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