I had mostly bailed on HBO’s Westworld by the end of season #1 and certainly by the middle of season #2. The endless puzzleboxing was infuriating. I was amazed that the producers had the chutzpah to launch a third season (eight episodes, 3.15.20 to 5.3.20), but that they did. I refused to watch. I was done.
A fourth season was announced in April 2020, and they’ve been shooting it over the last several weeks, or so I understand. A couple of months ago a certain Reddit guy posted that the old western village of Sweetwater would be used again for the new season, and has been moved forward in time to the 1920s.
Posted on 2.20.20: Westworld‘s third season is nearly upon us. An eight-episode endurance test that begins on 3.15.20, it will presumably deliver the same infuriating mixture of bullshit brain-teasing, dick-diddling, plotzing and puzzleboxing.
Last summer showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy told Entertainment Weekly that season 3 would have a more comprehensible story line…really? “Season 3 is a little less of a guessing game and more of an experience with the hosts finally getting to meet their makers,” Nolan said.
Posted on 4.27.18: “That feeling of being fiddled and diddled without end, of several storylines unfolding, expanding and loop-dee-looping for no purpose than to keep unfolding, expanding and loop-dee-looping…is such that I’m determined to hate all further permutations of Westworld without watching it. I don’t care how that sounds or what it implies. Come hell or high water, I will not go there.”
From a 4.20.18 review by CNN’s Brian Lowry: “The first half of [season #2] repeats the show’s more impenetrable drawbacks — playing three-dimensional chess, while spending too much time sadistically blowing away pawns. The result is a show that’s easier to admire than consistently like.
“The push and pull of Westworld is that it grapples with deep intellectual conundrums while reveling in a kind of numbing pageant of death and destruction. Where the latter is organic to the world of HBO’s other huge genre hit, Game of Thrones, it doesn’t always feel integral to the story here, but rather a means of killing (and killing and killing) time.”