Westworld: Everything We Know About Season 3

It's seems a bit absurd to try to explain everything we know about Season 3 of Westworld when we can barely wrap our heads around Season 2 -- that season finale was confusing, eh? What even happened? -- but here we are, moving on with the futile task of predicting what's next when we don't even know what we just watched. HBO's tale of robot revolution blasted off into the stratosphere in Season 2, expanding the already massive scope established in Season 1 to deliver one of the most expensive shows on television, if nothing else.

And though the series is usually shrouded in secrets and non-disclosure agreements, showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have let loose some details on the next season, and we can extrapolate other things from the finale itself in our quest to predict the future. So let's do this: Here's everything we know about Season 3 of Westworld.

Evan Rachel Wood, Westworld

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It likely won't air for a while. After premiering Season 1 in early October 2016, Westworld took a lot of time off between seasons to get things right, and Season 2 didn't air until late April of 2018. It stands to reason that we can expect a similar lengthy break between Seasons 2 and 3. However, there's optimism that we could get on a yearly cycle since part of Season 2's delay was because of set production that added two new theme parks -- the Raj and Shogun World -- as well as several new outposts in Westworld. Season 3 is expected to spend more time in the "real world," which would only require typical location shoots and not much actual construction of new places that currently exist only in Joy and Nolan's minds. Or will it?

"We want to take the time to make every season as exciting as possible," Nolan told EW. "And we have an enormous challenge going into Season 3 with the worlds that we're building going forward. We want to make sure we have the time to do that right."

Mid-year 2019 for HBO will be dominated by the final season of Game of Thrones, so we'd expect Westworld to ride the wave of hype for that show and air as soon as Game of Thrones says goodbye. For the record, HBO has not said squat about when Season 3 will air.

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Season 3 will spend plenty of time outside of Westworld. Reiterating what I said above, Westworld is expected to spend lots of time in the "real world" as Dolores continues her mission to take what humans have and make it her own. In the Season 2 finale, we saw Dolores make her escape from the park using a cloned body of Charlotte Hale eventually make it back into her own body in the outside world, along with Bernard and whoever the new Charlotte is.

We'll probably figure out what those other three* parks are. Season 2 showed off two other parks, the East Indian-influenced the Raj and feudal Japanese Shogun World. But there are still (at least) three other parks unaccounted for, as internet sleuths looked over the Westworld ARG and determined that at least six parks existed. And we'll likely find out what those were. When asked if we'll learn about those parks, Joy told THR, "Absolutely."

Finally! A definitive answer! But that brings up the question of how we'll see them, given Season 3's focus on the outside world. Will we even see Westworld at all? How is that going to work?

There's a new rivalry brewing, and it's going to be huge in Season 3. Dolores and Bernard haven't seen eye to eye since they became aware of their bot-ness. Dolores is vengeful and wants to smash humans under her 3D-printed thumb, but Bernard is more of a non-violent, curious soul, and that's going to cause tension between them... tension that Dolores is well aware of.

"They will likely come into conflict," Joy tells THR. "They may even kill each other. But she's come to understand that true freedom isn't something that arises from a lack of dissent, from a dictatorial or totalitarian rule of one set of ideologies. It's something that has to happen with a plurality of ideas, sometimes coming into conflict. Because she's learned her lesson, she's bringing Bernard back into this world to be a check on her own power, in some ways."

It sounds like it's another extension of Ford and Arnold's difference in ideologies. Do you crush your old masters or live alongside them? Are you subservient to them, equal to them, or superior to them? Is their world yours by right?

Ed Harris, Westworld

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The Man in Black is a host! At least in the future. The post-credits scene that melted your face featured the Man in Black (Ed Harris) taking a fidelity test administered by his daughter Emily (Katja Herbers). That more than strongly suggests that he was a host... at least this version of him. But the scene was set in the future in yet another timeline that the show has thrown at us -- we just don't know how far in the future. And host may be the wrong word since he'd actually be a replica of an actual human, much like James Delos was in the fourth episode of Season 2.

"In the far, far future, the world is dramatically different," Joy told The Hollywood Reporter. "Quite destroyed, as it were. A figure in the image of [the Man in Black's] daughter -- his daughter is of course now long dead -- has come back to talk to him. He realizes that he's been living this loop again and again and again. The primal loop that we've seen this season, they've been repeating, testing every time for what they call 'fidelity,' or perhaps a deviation. You get the sense that the testing will continue. It's teasing for us another temporal realm that one day we're working toward, and one day will see a little bit more of, and how they get to that place, and what they're testing for."

The other implication here is that in this timeline, the Man in Black is dead as a doornail and likely re-experiencing some of the moments in the Season 2 finale on a loop. And of course if you'd like to hypothesize that what we saw of the Man in Black in Season 2 was actually part of this future loop, then go right ahead. We'll just slowly and cautiously back out of the room while you go crazy-eyed.

Stubbs? Also probably a host. This one's apparently still up for debate, but my read is that Stubbs is a host after all. The way he let Dolores posing as Charlotte through and spouted off talk about Ford giving him core drives was enough for me. But if you need more proof, the finale's director Fred Toye told Vanity Fair that he thought Stubbs was a host, too.

That doesn't mean we should expect a time jump into the far future because there's plenty to talk about in the present. Oh sure, the tease of a far future with a dead Man in Black sounds great and exciting, but it will take a while to catch up to that. "But Season 3, the main story will not be leaping that far forward," Joy told THR. "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." OK, so what was the point of that post-credits scene other than to torture us?

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Lots of characters probably won't return. At least in their previous forms. Name a character and they probably died at least temporarily in the Season 2 finale, with many of the hosts hopping into a rift in digital space-time free from human interference. Emily, Elsie, Sizemore and many others on the human side are dead, probably for good, as any potential backups they had to be digitally recreated were blown up in the Forge.

As for the hosts, Joy told THR of their new home, "It's a sort of digital afterlife for them. The stakes and the finality of it are important. It's not something where I think the humans can type it up and get back in and start messing with them anymore. It's what so many hosts sacrificed so much for, to see their kind to this safe space."

Nolan's take on the same question, when asked if the hosts that went into the portal won't continue on in the show: "I think that's on the safer end of things to presume. But there's a big story we're telling here so ... yeah."

Nolan also confirmed that even though this is the type of show where a character can easily be resurrected through digital backups, we won't be seeing many characters again. "It's a large ensemble cast and sadly we're saying goodbye to some people at the end of this season," Nolan told EW. "But as always with this show, who remains and who doesn't is something we're having a lot of fun with." Of course they also said Anthony Hopkins was done with the show after Season 1, so who knows?

Westworld returns for Season 3 who knows when.

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