Westworld [1]'s second season went out with a few bangs, albeit confusing ones [2]. As usual, HBO's mind-melting sci-fi series has set up a complicated string of questions leading into season three [3]. After episodes packed with exciting new adventures in Samurai World and The Raj, the season finale finally introduces the fated Valley Beyond, which will undoubtedly change the course of the show forever. While much of what's to come is still pretty murky, there are mercifully a few concrete details we can provide. Check them out ahead.
The Premiere Date
Let's get the bad news out of the way first: season three won't be here for a long, long time. Although HBO officially renewed the show for a third season back in May, the network has yet to announce a specific premiere date. In fact, the cast seems to be just as in the dark as we are.
"Yeah, I have no idea where it's heading," Ed Harris, who plays the Man in Black, recently told HuffPost [5]. "We're not supposed to start shooting season three until next June, so I don't even know if I'm in it or not. I figure I am? But I don't know in what capacity, and I don't know what the what will be happening. We'll find out."
If it doesn't start filming until June 2019, that could mean waiting until Spring 2020 (for context, season two didn't premiere until April 22 of this year). According to cocreator Jonathan Nolan, the longer wait is due to their attention to detail.
"It's an ongoing conversation with our friends at HBO, and for us, with a show of this scope and scale, we're not interested in doing the compromised version," he explained to Entertainment Weekly [6]. "We want the show to get bigger and bigger and more ambitious, and this takes time. We want to take all the time we need to get it right."
Who's Coming Back?
Season two ends with a ton of deaths [7] for both humans and hosts alike, but that doesn't mean all of your faves are gone for good. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) will return (the actors' vocal discussions of equal pay [8] confirm it), and we'll hazard a guess that Ed Harris and Jeffrey Wright will come back as well. The people you should be worried about are Tessa Thompson (who's going to be insanely busy with her movie career [9]) and James Marsden (Teddy "dies" at the end of season two, if you recall). We'll just have to keep an eye out for any official cast announcements!
Will Season 3 Take Place in the Park?
The final few moments of "The Passenger" see hosts Dolores, Bernard, and Charlotte milling about the home in Japan that Arnold is seen building at the start of the season. So, in other words, they're finally free of the park! Does that mean our time in the parks are over? Yes and no.
"It's been a long build-up to get outside the park," Nolan told EW. "And we're incredibly excited about what that looks like and sounds like and what exactly our hosts discover out there." Since the original 1973 film, Michael Crichton's Westworld, sees its tourists roaming around parks like Medieval world and Roman world, we have a feeling there are still some elaborate set pieces waiting for us within the park.
Cocreator Lisa Joy echoed this sentiment to The Hollywood Reporter [10]. "I don't necessarily think that we've seen the last of these artificial worlds that are central to the concept of our series as a whole," she said. "But the major lens that we will have is going to be the real world. If the park does emerge and come back, we would plan on explaining how that could be, and why."
The Big Questions
We could ask about a billion questions about Westworld and still not run out, but we'll stick to the main ones raised in the finale. For starters, the postcredits scene [11] hints that the Man in Black might be a host, and that his seemingly-dead daughter Emily is actually still alive (we have a feeling she's a host, though). There's also the interesting theory that Teddy's consciousness has been embedded in Bernard [12], which would explain a lot of his scrambled memory issues throughout season two (and would give the writers a way to keep Teddy around, even though we saw him wandering around the Valley Beyond). There's also a hypothesis floating around Reddit that The Man in Black is Ford's son [13] (wouldn't that perfectly explain his deep-seated issues with the guy?!), as well as concerns that the third season will experience a time jump.
Will There Be a Time Jump?
Of the time jump idea, Nolan teased to EW that the series "won't necessarily" be shifting forward in time, but Joy told THR that there will indeed be a jump, even if it's just a little one. "I think that storyline is something we'll get to eventually," Joy explained of the futuristic postcredits scene. "But season three, the main story will not be leaping that far forward. I'm really curious creatively to see what happens to Bernard and Dolores, now that they've finally earned their freedom. I think we'll see a lot more of that."