Westworld season 2: episode reviews, recaps, and news

Every week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and internet culture reporter Aja Romano get together to discuss the latest episode of HBO’s sci-fi drama Westworld. This week, they’re discussing the second season finale, “The Passenger.” Spoilers follow! Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the episode!

Aja Romano: As this season of Westworld has progressed, we’ve both expressed reservations about whether we were watching the show the “right” way, and I think I was hoping the season finale might answer that question for me. That is, I hoped it would answer definitively the question of whether the series was interested, even momentarily, in a traditional narrative path with linear character development, or whether it mainly cared about surprising us with its many meta-layers of gamification, metaphors, and plot upheavals.

Many weeks, after my recap of Westworld posts on Sunday nights, I hear from readers.

Sometimes, those readers want to correct something I’ve gotten wrong, which is always welcome. But sometimes, those corrections aren’t actually correcting anything — they’re more trying to win me over to their theory of what the Man in Black is up to, or what Westworld is supposed to be, or which planet the series takes place on.

Every week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and internet culture reporter Aja Romano get together to discuss the latest episode of HBO’s sci-fi drama Westworld. This week, they’re discussing the second season’s ninth episode, “Vanishing Point.” Spoilers follow! Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the episode!

Todd VanDerWerff: I don’t entirely know what to make of “Vanishing Point,” an episode that promised to take this season in some interesting directions thematically and then sort of did and sort of didn’t. If you’re heavily invested in the question of whether the Man in Black is a Host, well, this was the episode for you.

Every week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and internet culture reporter Aja Romano get together to discuss the latest episode of HBO’s sci-fi drama Westworld. This week, they’re discussing the second season’s eighth episode, “Kiksuya.” Spoilers follow! Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the episode!

Todd VanDerWerff: “Kiksuya” could have — and probably should have — gone so, so wrong.

This second season of Westworld has had more jittery stops, starts, and resets than Bernard’s brain. There are only so many times you can see Teddy get off that train, or hear that telltale “Welcome to Westworld” theme, before you start longing for a release from repetition that the show has perpetually denied viewers.

Seven episodes into season two, the show is clearly and deliberately keeping most of its characters rooted in place even as they travel. Sure, everyone is going to meet up eventually, but metaphorically and often literally, they’re trapped — stuck in the park with no way out, stuck in cycles of manipulation, stuck in endless programming loops, and stuck experiencing realizations that we’ve already had revealed to us.

Caroline Framke: Now this is more like it.

“Virtù e Fortuna” feels like the explosive jump-start that I was waiting for from season two of Westworld — or, at the very least, it finally feels like Westworld wants to give us something different.

Caroline Framke: The robot revolution is officially upon us, and it is spectacular.

By “spectacular,” I mostly mean that Westworld hasn’t lost its taste for splashy spectacle rather than it being particularly well done. In season two, this show is still palpably impressed with itself, its willingness to Go There (wherever “there” is), and its (admittedly impressive) use of a generous budget.

In the age of spoiler warnings and fan theories, a proposed gambit from Westworld co-showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy materialized on Monday.

As part of a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Nolan and Joy said that if certain requirements were fulfilled, the Westworld team would post a video spoiling the entire plot of the second season of their show, which returns on April 22.