A near-future Los Angeles has been imagined on screen a hundred times, but Westworld’s conception doesn’t draw much from obvious inspirations. Gone are the spurs and six shooters and ten-gallon hats instead, we get self-driving cars and robot construction workers, mini AirPods and super-advanced smart homes. So aesthetically speaking, leaving Westworld for the real world entails a change of genre. Other than some glass-walled laboratories, sterile underground control rooms, and lavish homes, Westworld has rarely had occasion to show us what the outside world of the future actually looks like - it was the nature of the conceit that the show’s aesthetic would be primarily borrowed from westerns, not science-fiction. But the show has found the right style for its philosophical musings, and the action unfolding scene after scene is finally as satisfying as the answers that might eventually be revealed. Unanswered questions still abound, and, Westworld being Westworld, things that seem simple now could prove rather more complicated as the season proceeds. Even if you gave up on Westworld, bored of its endless digressions, Season 3 wants to win you back. If you were irritated by Westworld because of its tendency to revel in its own cleverness, you will find Season 3 more direct, more exciting, and more straightforward. It really does feel, moment to moment, like a different show, one more interested in mood than mysteries, more focused on psychology than plot. It’s hard to overstate the effect of these changes on the character and tone of the series. Less brooding, more moving - this is Westworld Season 3.
And, most crucially, while it continues to pose serious questions about how technology and humanity intersect, it poses them more briskly and energetically than ever before. It abandons the remote theme parks that were its self-contained setting, instead taking place in a near-future Los Angeles that is breathtakingly well-realized. It introduces interesting new characters whose lives, at least initially, have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the events of the show’s first and second seasons.
The third season of HBO’s Westworld represents such a drastic change that its first episode feels less like a premiere than a pilot.
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