Smarter, bigger ‘Westworld’ returns with a vengeance
It feels good to be back in the wild, wild Westworld. Sixteen months after HBO’s sci-fi Western concluded its first season, the series is back with a bigger, bloodier Season 2 (Sunday, 9 ET/PT, ★★★☆) that manages to take the excellent groundwork the show laid in 2016 and change it into something more mature, more emotional and more assured. The second season feels less like a freewheeling experiment and more like a TV show that knows what it’s doing and where it’s going.
When we left the notoriously complex and twisty series, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and many of the “awakened” hosts had started a rebellion, killing Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and laying waste to the human guests at a swanky board gala. The new season doesn’t pick up precisely where it left off — the timeline is still a bit fuzzy — but the new season’s main arc is the fallout from the hosts rising up and freeing themselves of their programmed “narratives,” both within and outside the park.
Dolores is now the leader of a bloody revolution. Maeve (Thandie Newton) is still looking for her daughter, now with the help of Sizemore (Simon Quarterman). William, aka the Man in Black (Ed Harris), is having the time of his life now that the stakes are real. Many of the other characters, both human and host, made it through the firefight, but it would be too much of a spoiler to reveal their paths.
Just like last season, the most compelling plot is Maeve’s, and Newton continues to turn in career-best work as the park’s most conscious host, turning her emotions on a dime and making her sometimes-lessthan-ethical character sympathetic and appealing. Unfortunately, the second season gives Dolores the least-interesting plot, and her scenes in the park feel sluggish and dull compared with the new locations, characters and technologies many of the characters discover.
The first season felt like a 10-hour pilot, as the writers took their sweet time setting up every chess piece for the inevitable robot rebellion to begin. Now that the hard work is over, the series is more assured, fasterpaced and easier to watch. The characters feel more lived-in, and the dialogue, music and settings can be self-referential. Each scene conveys more meaning.
Perhaps the best part of the new season, at least in the five episodes made available for review, is that it’s far less of a frustrating puzzle. While plenty of fans enjoy analyzing each scene for big clues, it has only made Westworld stronger that the writers don’t seem all that interested (at least not yet) in pulling one over on the audience. Of course, there are mysteries and twists galore, but they feel more in tune with the overall narrative than, say, all that time-line trickery in Season 1.
And don’t worry, the astute fans on Reddit will likely still predict where the story will go, as they did last time with the Man in Black reveal, but the show has finally evolved enough so that the twists aren’t — to borrow a term from the robotic hosts —its “cornerstone” anymore. The new season proves that while
Westworld may be known for its twists, that’s not the only part of the series worth tuning in for anymore.
Second seasons can make or break a series, especially one as high-concept and mythology-driven as
Westworld. The drama could have turned far too out-there and wild to top the spectacle of Season 1. And while there’s still at least as much violence and nudity, Westworld is more focused, more characterdriven and more thought-provoking.
And isn’t that the kind of beauty you want to see in this world?