The third season of HBO’s Westworld represents such a drastic change that its first episode feels less like a premiere than a pilot. It introduces interesting new characters whose lives, at least initially, have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the events of the show’s first and second seasons. It abandons the remote theme parks that were its self-contained setting, instead taking place in a near-future Los Angeles that is breathtakingly well-realized. And, most crucially, while it continues to pose serious questions about how technology and humanity intersect, it poses them more briskly and energetically than ever before. Less brooding, more moving — this is Westworld Season 3.
It’s hard to overstate the effect of these changes on the character and tone of the series. It really does feel, moment to moment, like a different show, one more interested in mood than mysteries, more focused on psychology than plot. If you were irritated by Westworld because of its tendency to revel in its own cleverness, you will find Season 3 more direct, more exciting, and more straightforward. Even if you gave up on Westworld, bored of its endless digressions, Season 3 wants to win you back. Unanswered questions still abound, and, Westworld being Westworld, things that seem simple now could prove rather more complicated as the season proceeds. But the show has found the right style for its philosophical musings, and the action unfolding scene after scene is finally as satisfying as the answers that might eventually be revealed.
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Other than some glass-walled laboratories, sterile underground control rooms, and lavish homes, Westworld has rarely had occasion to show us what the outside world of the future actually looks like — it was the nature of the conceit that the show’s aesthetic would be primarily borrowed from westerns, not science-fiction. So aesthetically speaking, leaving Westworld for the real world entails a change of genre. Gone are the spurs and six shooters and ten-gallon hats; instead, we get self-driving cars and robot construction workers, mini AirPods and super-advanced smart homes. A near-future Los Angeles has been imagined on screen a hundred times, but Westworld’s conception doesn’t draw much from obvious inspirations. From bright urban vistas to pristine subways, it isn’t exactly Blade Runner. Of all things it made me think of Her, the Spike Jonze movie in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the Artificial Intelligence system on his phone.
As in Her, we see Westworld’s neo-Los Angeles through the eyes of an unhappy, melancholic loner stuck in a serious rut. Caleb, played with great morose intensity by Aaron Paul, is a traumatized veteran struggling to find a place in the world. Automation has stranded him without anything useful to do, and he spends his days in construction and his nights on an app called Rico, which is sort of like Uber for petty crime — making illicit deliveries, orchestrating minor robberies, and so on. The Rico app is a really ingenious creation on the show’s part, and one of its best efforts so far to dig into the hypothetical side of science-fiction.
Westworld has always been about the nature of artificial intelligence and what it would mean for an AI to develop consciousness. But the introduction of Caleb is the first time the show has really explored what you might call the psychological toll of these advancements — what it means for everyday people when computers can do most of our jobs better than we ever could. The show’s vision of a future in which even crime is at the mercy of the gig economy, meanwhile, is nothing less than brilliant. As everything from taxis to takeout are arranged by app, why not larceny? “Make money, motherf---ers,” declares the Rico app upon opening. It’s extremely bleak that in the future even delinquency has a star rating.
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It’s while completing one of these nightly jobs that Caleb eventually collides with our story: he encounters Dolores, out of the park and on an adventure of her own in the real world that revolves around a mysterious, powerful device that is shaping up to be the season’s central MacGuffin. It isn’t clear what Dolores is ultimately after, nor Caleb’s significance to her ambitions. So far she’s only dipped a toe into some corporate drama that faintly resembles the Cillian Murphy company-dissolving arc at the heart of Inception.
What’s already abundantly clear is that Evan Rachel Wood is a star. Across the first two seasons, Dolores was often difficult to pin down, her identity confused by conflicting programming, hopping timelines, and reset memories — and though Wood did her best, the character never quite felt coherent. In Season 3, Dolores has been wisely recalibrated, and even while her intentions remain ambiguous, she looks, sounds, and acts like a more three-dimensional person, one whose well-being we’re invested in and whose success we root for. It helps that Wood plays her with such steely poise, and that her mission finds her in kick-ass shoot-outs, car chases, and fisticuffs. Somewhere between Scarlett Johannson in Lucy and John Wick, she’s Westworld’s slick action super-hero, and unmistakably the star of the show.
Dolores isn’t the only returning character capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm on anyone foolish enough to cross her. Jeffrey Wright is back as the soft-spoken, ever-thoughtful Bernard, working as a farmhand in a remote rural area and attempting to lie low. (Blamed for the massacre of Delos board members at Westworld, he’s all over the news as a fugitive at large.) We don’t see much of Bernard in the first episode, but when two coworkers figure out his identity and demand to be paid off or else, he goes full Logan Marshall-Green in Upgrade and wipes them out with ruthless android efficiency. As we last see him he’s bribing a fisherman to bring him to Westworld. Will we be spending much time going forward at the park?
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We do get a brief glimpse of the park, in a post-credits stinger. But it isn’t Westworld. It’s what’s being referred to as War World, and it’s a recreation of a Nazi-occupied village during World War II. There we find Maeve, as bewildered as we are. Whether War World will remain a major location as the series develops, or whether she will leave shortly to join Dolores et al in Los Angeles, is hard to say. On the one hand, Charlotte Hale (or whomever is occupying Hale’s reconstructed host body) insists to a boardroom of Delos execs that the company’s theme parks should continue operating despite the bad press entrained by the mass murders, so it makes sense that the parks will play a role. On the other hand, War World seems a bit silly, and I hope the action mainly unfolds in California.
Of course, for all the strides the show has made in fascinating new directions, this is still Westworld, and there is reason to be skeptical of change. The series has never had a hard time with intrigue — its best quality has always been the suggestion of tantalizing depths, and its worst quality has been its refusal to properly explore them. What’s promising about the Season 3 premiere is the newfound emphasis on the fundamentals. The series has never looked better; the premiere is a marvel of lighting and art direction. The fight scene toward the end of the episode, in which Dolores annihilates her kidnappers in an extended one-take that pans between the view out of a car window and that same car’s rear-facing video screen, is beautifully choreographed and superbly well-directed, on the level of a top-tier action film. If as the season proceeds the mysteries don’t pan out or totally gratify, there’s at least a great deal to admire on the level of production value and filmmaking. That shift in emphasis, on the whole, represents a positive change.
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