Westworld is back for its third season after a couple of years off, and it’s as heady and ambitious as ever. The show, about a future where lifelike robots gain sentience before turning on their human creators, has never been afraid to engage with the big ideas: free will, automation, the meaning of human existence, etc. It’s still doing that now, although it’s put a stop to those time jumps that stymied some fans during season 2.
Speaking to Variety, showrunner Jonathan Nolan reassured people that the more straightforward narrative of season 3 is something and he and co-showrunner Lisa Joy wanted to do, not something forced on them after people were confused by season 2. “Did we dumb the show down? We’re very lucky in that we’re at a place with HBO where they let us make the show we want to make,” he said.
“It’s a lot more linear this season,” said Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores, the host at the head of the AI rebellion. “It feels like we’re introducing a new show to the world again, starting over and building it from the ground up with these characters that we know and love, and with the elements that are still very much ‘Westworld.’”
I think I probably speak for several fans when I say that the show was due for a bit of a reboot, so I’m all for the hosts having broken out of the parks and being free to explore the wider world. And this is somewhere the showrunners have wanted to get to for a while. “When Lisa and I were talking about the pilot, one of the things that was most exciting to us was, you learn the rules of these creatures and their world, and then you spring them out of there,” Nolan said. “And you’ve withheld from the audience, for the most part to that point, what the outside world looks like.” No more!
Showing that world to us has presented Nolan and Joy with new challenges. The show is set in the year 2058, and takes us to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other real-world cities. But how do you show us what Los Angeles will look like in 38 years? If you’re Nolan, you shoot in Singapore.
"I love America. Great place. But we haven’t spent the kind of money that you’ve seen spent [in Asia], in terms of infrastructure and public transportation and airports. The experience of going to any major Asian city is always a little bewildering and humbling on that level. It really does feel like you’ve gotten in a time machine and stepped forward 20, 30 years into the future. It’s the old William Gibson thing, right? The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed."
William Gibson, of course, is the famed science fiction author widely credited with creating the genre of “cyberpunk,” which definitely has an influence on Westworld. Joy and Nolan will be adapting his novel The Peripheral for Amazon as part of an overall deal they have with the company.
Hearing that makes me wonder how long Westworld will be around. It’s a very complicated show that takes pretty long breaks in between seasons, and according to Variety that’s not likely to change anytime soon. “As Jonah and Lisa will tell you, I will always say, ‘Can we get it sooner?’” said HBO programming president Casey Bloys. “As shows get bigger and more complicated, I think more time between seasons is probably becoming more of the norm.”
And if Nolan and Joy have other irons in the fire besides, can the show really last much longer. Variety reports that the pair “hope to make at least one more season” of the show, but won’t reveal any details beyond that.
For now, we can just enjoy the episodes ahead of us, which employ technology we haven’t seen on the show before. For example, for season 3, Nolan and Joy borrowing some technology used on Disney’s The Mandalorian to provide more dynamic, realistic backdrops that will really up the verisimilitude of interior scenes.
I suppose it’s only natural for a show like Westworld to be hip to the latest technologies. It also alleviates some headaches caused by setting your show in a western-theme amusement park. “The horses got replaced with motorcycles,” Joy said. Apparently that means fewer takes ruined by horses having to relieve themselves in the middle of a shoot. Not all technology is out to get us.
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