It’s been a long-time coming, but Westworld is set to debut its third season in the US on March 15.
And according to its showrunner Jonathan Nolan — alongside his wife Lisa Joy — it’s an “all too likely new world” that could very well be our own, a few decades from now.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nolan said that the new season has “been an exploration of the technological and cultural moment we find ourselves in” and that the characters are in a world that’s a “linear extension of the world we’re in now”.
“Sure, there have been global, political, transformative events, but it’s basically a straight line. You have a technological elite and you have ever more concentration of capital amongst a group of people who control.”
In this next season, we will see a handful of the robot “hosts”, who called the titular theme park home, escape into the real world.
“For two seasons, we’ve been wondering about Dolores’ world. Now she gets a chance to visit our world. We’re now getting her perspective looking at the world going, ‘What a s—show,'” he told the outlet.
While the hosts are out in the real world, we will still spend some time in the park and for the showrunners, this meant enjoying finding things that would be “culturally acceptable to an audience 30 to 40 years from now.”
In an interview with Variety, Nolan revealed that even from before the pilot, they were most excited to “spring them out” of the park.
“And you’ve withheld from the audience, for the most part to that point, what the outside world looks like,” he said.
Nolan and Joy said that the show was such a great opportunity to explore their “complicated feelings about humanity’s relationship with technology”.
“In ‘Westworld,’ in the earlier seasons, the gods are these tech people, who are putting the hosts in these different loops. And now when you look outside of the park — I think everyone has delusions of grandeur, of agency, free will, yada yada yada, and maybe they’re not delusions. That’s part of the inquiry that I think we’re excited about this season,” Joy told the outlet.
This next season will also see the series lose it’s time-twisting structure and will instead be a “sleek, ‘heat’-style-crime-thriller-with-robots”.
Evan Rachel Wood, who has played host Dolores since the pilot, told Variety that “it’s a lot more linear this season”.
“It feels like we’re introducing a new show to the world again, starting over and building it from the ground up with these characters that we know and love, and with the elements that are still very much Westworld,” she said.
With season three about to premiere, the question of another season remains.
According to both Nolan and Joy, they do “hope” to make at least one more, however, they’re not entirely sure beyond that.
They do know, however, that we’ll still have to wait at least 18 to 20 months for the next installment after this next one airs.
WATCH: The official trailer for Season 3 of Westworld.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDJbFA32_QY