Westworld isn’t due back until 2020 and we’ll definitely be getting more details Sunday when it takes over Comic Con’s Hall H (of which we’ll be in attendance), but some new information has already been released, including details about the new flesh free robots first seen in the teaser back in April.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the fun fella sitting on a girder with new cast member Aaron Paul is George, a Delos model G-267. George does not talk, but, like Paul’s character, will be crucial to the new season.
EW interviewed showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and has been publishing chunks of the interview since yesterday. In today’s piece, Nolan said that robots like George will play heavily into the new season.
Part of what our hosts find [in the real world is], they’re caught in between — they’re fashioned to look like human beings and act like them but they have more in common with the mechanical pieces in our world.
The hosts are uniquely alone in that way. And that’s not true of the other robots they find in the world. [Robots like George have] been designed for a specific purpose and the hosts and the hosts have been designed to be emotional mirrors for us.
If that sounds more thoughtful and less weird Lost-box of mysteries than previous seasons that’s because it’s entirely on purpose. This season won’t be about figuring out what is happening in what period of time or who is and isn’t secretly a host.
“This is season is a little less of a guessing game and more of an experience with the hosts finally getting to meet their makers,” Nolan told EW in a piece released yesterday.
Paul’s character, Caleb, is a construction worker and the sort of person who can’t afford to murder human-like robots in an adult theme park. “Aaron’s character will challenge Dolores’ notions about the nature of humanity,” Nolan said. Which is probably good for the humans as Dolores seemed ready to murder the whole lot of the meat sacks by the end of season two.
And where will Dolores meet Caleb and realise not all humans are grotesquely gluttonous billionaires out to torture, rape, and abuse? Probably out west.
“Part of the story plays out in the Western United States, and that’s a thematic through-line in the show — the American West as a setting and an ethos. The idea of the West as a wild place, where just over the next hill or horizon there are no rules. On that thematic level, Dolores emerges to figure out what happened to the real West. And the answer is: We paved the thing over, and civilisation eventually caught up with all those people who were running away from it.”
Westworld returns in 2020. Stay tuned for more news out of San Diego Comic Con.