Westworld Season 3 Trailer Heads to The Real World

Like another famous puppeteer’s creation before her, all Dolores Abernathy ever wanted was to be a real girl. Westworld‘s first two seasons proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is. The only thing that’s left for her in Westworld season 3 is to join the real world to be with the rest of her kind…us.

HBO has released a thrilling and revealing official trailer for Westworld season 3. There is plenty of action and intrigue to be found here so give it a look and then we’ll break down what it all means.

Yes, the whole “pop song as a spooky piano number” has become overused in our big tentpole trailers but at least Westworld comes across it honestly. Thanks to the self-playing piano at the Mariposa Saloon, Westworld has always been able to indulge some excellent piano covers of popular songs. And Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is a perfect choice for this trailer. Like it or not (and she mostly does not), Dolores and her host brethren are the children of humanity. Now they’re coming to our turf to teach us how to behave.

Well…sort of. The most surprising thing about this trailer is how Dolores’s rage doesn’t appear to be focused on all of humanity, but rather a certain rich and powerful subset of it. In fact, after Dolores’s narration sets up her desire to see the real world, we are treated to a scene of her collaborating with a human being, not antagonizing him.

“You and I are a lot alike,” Dolores tells Aaron Paul’s character, Caleb. “They put you in a cage and decided what your life will be. they did the same thing to me.”

It seems as though the lessons of Westworld season 2 have stuck for Dolores, at least the lesson that humanity has a lot more in common with the AI we create than we’d like to believe. Every living creature has its own loops to walk. Dolores seems to realize that Caleb will be needed to break these loops for man and machine alike. Not only that but Dolores appears to enlist the help of her oldest enemy, William a.k.a. The Man in Black (Ed Harris).

William has somehow survived his flash-forward from the end of last season (or it hasn’t happened yet) and is now ready to join Dolores’s cause.

“I finally understand my purpose I’m going to save the fucking world,” William says.

But save it from who, exactly? The most obvious answer is the shadowy powers that be. Those powers seem to be represented by Vincent Cassel’s unnamed character. We know from some Westworld marketing material that Maeve (Thandie Newton) will find herself in another Delos-owned park in season 3, this time a World War II-themed one. In this trailer, we see her have some sort of a meeting with Cassel’s character in which he asks her to track Dolores down and kill her.

read more: Westworld Creators Think Their Dystopia is Humanity’s Best Chance

Revolution appears to be the name of the game in this Westworld season 3 trailer, but who is rebelling against who? And what exactly are the battle lines. At one point Charlotte (or whatever entity is inhabiting Tessa Thompson’s form) opines that it’s “five of us” against the world. Who exactly are the five of us? As far as we know only four hosts escaped Westworld before it collapsed: Dolores, Dolores again, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), and Maeve. As evidenced by Dolores and Maeve’s showdown at trailer’s end, Maeve likely isn’t a part of their crew. The formidable five could then be Dolores, Charlotte, Bernard, Caleb, and William – though Bernard seems unlikely as he’s always disapproved of Dolores’s methods. Either way, that’s still a coalition of humans and machines united against the rest of the corrupt world.

Ultimately, there is just too little information provided about “The New World” to tell definitively. However revealing this trailer may be, this is still Westworld we’re talking about here. Surely many twists are yet to come. But for now let’s appreciate the beautiful Alita: Battle Angel-style urban rebellion that the Westworld season 3 trailer provides.

Westworld season 3 premieres on Sunday, March 15 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

Alec Bojalad is TV Editor at Den of Geek and TCA member. Read more of his stuff here. Follow him at his creatively-named Twitter handle @alecbojalad