Last we left our robotic heroes on Westworld, Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) had smuggled herself out of the titular park, finally free of the influence of her human creators and ready to unleash hell on their world. Basically, it sounds like she wants to wipe out humanity and install a new age of cold hard metallic dominion. Will she succeed? Do we want her to?
That’s the question the third season of HBO’s bleak sci-fi epic will have to confront. The second season may have been a bit of a jumble, but now that the characters are out of the park and ready to mix it up with us meatbags, things could turn around. Watch the trailer and decide for yourself:
“I was born into this world, and my first memories of it are pain.” I see Dolores hasn’t lost her gift for portentous speechifying. It also looks like she’s seducing human construction worker Caleb (Aaron Paul) into seeing things her way. “You and I are a lot alike. They put you in a cage, decided what your life would be. They did the same to me.”
So it sounds like Westworld will draw comparisons between the slave life lived by hosts like Dolores and her fellows and toiling workers like Caleb, which is definitely a timely theme. It looks like Caleb is all in on Dolores’ crusade, helping her put whatever plan she has into motion. And if it fails, she has a backup. “I kill everyone.” Yep, that’s Dolores, all right.
#Westworld b*tch. pic.twitter.com/nSjuSkx4lZ
— Westworld Gifs (@WestworldGifs) February 20, 2020
Helping Dolores will be Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson)…or at least, the host version of Charlotte Hale that Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) made at the end of the last season. This show can be confusing. As for Bernard himself, it sounded like he was against Dolores’ kill-all-humans attitude at the end of last season, so he may oppose her. It looks like he’s revisiting some of his old stomping grounds in Westworld in the trailer.
Also opposing Dolores: Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), who’s straight-up ordered to kill Dolores (!) by a new character played by Vincent Cassel. And she confronts her on a bridge with a samurai sword, a callback to Maeve’s time in Shogun World last season! That should be good.
The Man in Black (Ed Harris) is also still in the game, after his fate was left up in the air at the end season 2. “I finally understand my purpose,” he says. “I’m gonna save the fucking world.” Lot of room for ambiguity there.
And of course, we get an eerie rearrangement of a pop song, in this case “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns N’ Roses. Great, now that’s stuck in my head all day.
And if you want even more sci-fi, HBO also released a trailer for Beforeigners, a Norwegian show about people from the distant past — the Stone Age, the Viking age and the 19th century — who are somehow transported to our time and cause all kinds of ruckus:
You can watch the first episode of Beforeigners now. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
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