HBO’sWestworld, the Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy reboot of the classic Michael Crichton premise, is entering its senior year with the network as a new season 4 trailer makes its debut online. Fans of the series are sure to find all sorts of Easter eggs and hints in the timeline, as well as a brief hint as to what the next season of the beloved robots vs. humans caper is about.
Westworldhas enamoured fans ever since its debut back in 2016 as part of theBad Robot television deal J.J. Abrams' company had struck with Warner Bros. television. Since then its fascination for fans, who spend hours speculating over its every nuance, has been palpable and each new tidbit released invites fresh discussion.
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The trailer for the fourth season ofWestworldopens with a voice-over supered over a shot of a futuristic city. Evan Rachel Wood (now no longer Dolores but a new character called Christina) is then seen waking up, a long-time series staple for showing the audience consciousness on a meta-level. She’s narrating about how she recognizes there’s something wrong with the world and is just starting to figure out what it is, as we see Christina look out and see digitized versions of her fellow people and buildings around her —shades ofThe Matrixabound.
The trailer cuts to the Charlotte host (played by Tessa Thompson) looking out over the world, speaking in voice-over to the Man in Black, Ed Harris, and telling him that it’s time that people like him, who controlled the hosts’ every move, get their own actions turned back on them. She speaks to him as he wears a black body suit with white tubing suspended in a frame similar to the ones the hosts are printed on. He’s then shown a frame that contains a host sphere and told it’s time to enter the next stage of evolution, implying some sort of human-host hybrid—going back to the video game analogies, this would be the Mass Effect synthesized ending.
Cue up more shots of a despondent Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), a terrified Caleb (Aaron Paul), and Bernard (The Batman’s Jeffrey Wright) being asked if he thinks he can “save them”—whether people or hosts is never answered. Christina’s voice-over calls for a story with a happy ending and audiences see shots of Maeve and Caleb entering a 1920s-themed world, and then a montage of characters returning to the park and battling over its future. Gunplay, explosions, those creepy faceless white Delos robots, and flies crawling into ear canals are all prominent. Whatever the future holds,Westworldis going to do with a bang.
Back whenWestworldfirst re-entered pop culture consciousness, it was a dual-timeline series showing us the collapse of the Delos Corporation’s Westworld theme park—a sort of live-action video game in which people could pay exorbitant fees to be able to shoot the animatronic characters for real—before evolving into a dual timeline series about what happened two weeks before the collapse in the second season. In the third season, the robots left the theme park and entered the real world. Based on the trailer, this new season is picking up where they left off in glorious fashion.
