Feeling a little confused by this new season of Westworld? You’re not alone. Luckily, the show’s own Jimmi Simpson is here to weigh in on a whole bunch of insane fan theories and let you know how close you are to figuring it all out. Sort of. As with all these “Actors Read Fan Theories” videos from Elle, Simpson is…
A year and a half after first teasing a glimpse in the season one finale, last night’s Westworld finally welcomed viewers onto the highly anticipated grounds of Shogun World, the titular park’s feudal Japan-inspired counterpart. While its plot lines, characters, and even its architectural layout purposefully mirror…
Westworld’s period-appropriate cover songs have always been a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, and I have, accordingly, always sort of loved and sort of hated them. There’s a bit of comic sparkle to the entire concept, rolling up a somber player-piano cover of Radiohead or Soundgarden or whatever for each new montage…
How much do the stories we live by matter when we find out those stories are a lie? It’s an idea that Westworld keeps coming back to, especially in its second season, when the show has more or less surrendered itself completely to the hosts. Maeve knows that her daughter was a plotline she was programmed to follow, a…
Westworld dropped a doozy of an episode last night, with the 71-minute entry proving internet theorists right on at least one front: Yes, Delos is using the park as a means of experimenting with digital immortality. We see this through the character of Jim Delos (Peter Mullan), who, after dying of some nebulous…
Anyone looking for proof that the second season of Westworld is playing with a different set of rules than the first can find it in the introduction and reveal of the season’s first major new human character, Grace (Katja Herbers). She showed up in last week’s cold open, hanging out in Rajworld, having some intense…
Much of the prerelease hype around this season of Westworld had to do with—well, everything that wasn’t Westworld. Last season’s finale showed a glimpse of Shogun World, and some of the early trailers for this season touted real-world settings (that may have also just been Futureworld). There’s also Roman World, and…
There’s always too much good TV to keep up with, but in a packed spring—The Americans, Westworld, The Terror, Legion, sigh—Atlanta’s second season has felt like uniquely essential viewing. Comedies go “dark” all the time, but few manage to delve all the way into horror, as Donald Glover’s has, while still retaining…
Last night’s episode of Westworld gave us a glimpse into not one, but two new parks within Westworld. One we’ve been expecting: The samurai that confronts Maeve and co. near the end of the episode means that we’re inching closer to the much-discussed Shogun World. But the proceedings kicked off in another park…
The colonial critique inherent in Westworld’s premise has been present from the start. The only ones with any real power in the park are the guests, the outsiders, the invading force; they can murder, rape, and pillage to their heart’s content, without concern for their own safety or any sort of punishment, venting…
We’re barely two episodes into the second season of Westworld and already the show has provided its notoriously prolific fan community with plenty of fuel for their theories. At this point, it seems like every frame contains some clue about a different timeline, potential hidden host, or ultimate endgame that the…
We’re only two episodes into the second season, but it seems that’s long enough to pull the trigger: HBO’s sentient host robots have renewed the dystopian theme-park thriller Westworld—or as they call it, “a heartwarming origin story of how we took over humanity”—for a third season.
Just as Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy seek to tirelessly obfuscate Westworld’s timeline, HBO did everything in its power to ensure Giancarlo Esposito’s guest spot on Sunday’s episode remained a secret. It makes sense; it’s always a joy to see Esposito, but to see him as a villain is to evoke his star-making turn as …
From the outside, Westworld looks a lot like the 1973 film that inspired it: Theme park robots rise up against their human masters and chaos ensues. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO series, however, is using its vessel as an extended series to explore the global implications of artificial intelligence gaining true…
Well what do you know. Last week, I was predicting that Jimmi Simpson wouldn’t be reprising his role this season as William, given how that character’s fate played out. What would be the point? He was there for a bit of not-all-that-necessary mindfuckery, and once we connected point A to point Ed, the narrative loop…
Yesterday, we wrote about an Esquire interview with actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays sad robot Bernard on HBO’s Westworld. In that interview, Wright dumped some lighter fluid and a few lit matches onto Reddit’s Westworld threads by declaring that there were “some flashing neon breadcrumbs” in the show’s pilot, namely…
“I think, as an audience, it’s best to just surrender to it and enjoy the trip.” So says actor Jeffrey Wright about Westworld’s second season, foolishly trying to plug the flood of theories spilling across message boards and comments sections throughout the internet. But, since nobody will listen to him on that count,…
Opening credits are a curious thing in this era of modern TV. Some, like FX’s Atlanta or HBO’s Here And Now, focus primarily on the title card, with the weight of its appearance informed by the context of the previous scene. Others, like, say, Mad Men, stick to their template and don’t deviate. HBO’s Westworld, then,…
Given the events of the first season finale, it’s unlikely Anthony Hopkins will be popping up in the flesh in this new season of Westworld. But that doesn’t mean he can’t still find ways to creep everybody out with his disturbing use of technology. Over the weekend, the 80-year-old Academy Award winner used a…
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld adaptation has come a long way from early reports of its fitful production, including calls for extras to perform some “genital-on-genital touching.” Now in its second season, the sci-fi/western thriller series has offered engrossing mystery after mystery, and several great…
