‘Westworld’ Season 3 Review: Still Confusing, and Still the Most Epic Show on TV

It’s important to remember that HBO’s Westworld is about a theme park. Even if Westworld Season 3 takes us into the heart of a luxurious dystopian future, where skyscrapers have gone green with hanging gardens and you can outsource crime on an Uber-like app, its roots are in that Western-themed fantasy land. Season 3 might skip the theme park setting, but its first four episodes prove that Westworld itself works best if you approach it as a thrilling theme park attraction, and not a serious television show.

Westworld Season 3 picks up — we think — in the days following host Dolores Abernathy’s (Evan Rachel Wood) successful escape from Westworld. When we last saw her, she had murdered slippery Delos executive Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) and Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) had implanted her pearl into a host copy of Hale. She evacuated the island with a handbag full of red pearls and set up shop in the Los Angeles mansion designed by her deceased creator. She brought Bernard back to act as a foil and an ally in the upcoming war against humankind.

Season 3 opens with Dolores making her first major moves against humanity. Free to move around the world, she’s working undercover to take down what would be the hosts’ biggest threat: a super computer that keeps tabs on all of humanity and predicts what’s going to happen next. (If that sounds like Project Insight from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, you’ll be pleased, or confused, to learn that the project is called Incite.) Dolores’s underground missions play out like glamorous spy games. She seduces a craven billionaire playboy (John Gallagher, Jr.) whose father designed the super computer and stealthily follows him about, spying on his contacts for intel. However, these spy games put her in the direct path of a frustrated and depressed army vet named Caleb (Aaron Paul).

Perhaps the most exciting part of Westworld Season 3 is the addition of Breaking Bad alum Aaron Paul. Here, he brings a welcome sense of authentic world-weariness to the show. Caleb, also called Cal, is a completely disaffected member of society. Though he struggles to rise in station, his “numbers” doom him to the drudgery of construction work. His one outlet seems to come via a crime app called Ri¢o where he’s like an Uber driver, but for committing petty crimes. One such job puts him in Dolores’s path, and soon this strange, beautiful, deadly woman inspires him to action.

That’s not the half of what happens in just the first four episodes of Westworld Season 3. As the show’s trailers revealed, Maeve (Thandie Newton) finds herself in a new World War II-themed park and in the employ of a mysterious new figure played by Vincent Cassel. A newly host-ified Charlotte Hale struggles to maintain control in an unfamiliar world, and Bernard recruits host Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) to help him in his quest to stop Dolores. There’s the return of Ed Harris’s “The Man in Black,” the introduction of Lena Waithe and Marshawn Lynch as Cal’s crime pals, and so much more. If that sounds like a lot for four episodes, you’re right! In terms of pacing, Westworld Season 3 made me feel like I was a cat darting its eyes after a laser pointer.

Ironically, the best part of Westworld Season 3 might be those overwhelming visual tableaus: the spectacular shots of a copter floating over a metropolis, the romantic European vistas of Maeve’s WWII world, and even the intimate hell that Caleb is going through. Westworld doesn’t just try to show us a haunted vision of the future, but it immerses us in it.  Between the incredible performances, stellar fashion, mind-blowing VFX, and thrilling action sequences, watching Westworld Season 3 is an absolute treat. Making sense of Westworld Season 3 is what’s hard.

Westworld has always been a technical masterpiece of a show that’s fumbled when it comes to story. It’s a series that puts more emphasis on the puzzles than its character development, and that doesn’t change in Season 3. Are there different timelines? I don’t know, probably? Are there wild twists? You bet. What are the stakes of Westworld Season 3? Is it really a fight for freedom for real or are Dolores, Maeve, and company stuck in yet another genius’s version of a game? HBO only sent critics the first four episodes so it’s too soon to call. Nevertheless, it is frustrating to think that Westworld still doesn’t seem capable of making things easy for its audience.

Westworld Season 3 may not come together narratively, but it is a truly thrilling audience experience. It will, like the park that inspired its name, immerse you in a sumptuous escapist world. If you want to be like the Man in Black and pursue the maze-like narrative, you can still do that in Season 3. However, Westworld Season 3 might be best enjoyed if you approach it like a roller coaster: full of ups and downs, twist, and sensory highs.

Westworld Season 3 premieres on HBO on Sunday, March 15, 2020.

Where to stream Westworld