The series returns Sunday on HBO.
Nearly two years later, Westworld is back.
Season three of the HBO series premieres on Sunday, 20 months after the show last graced our TV screens. If all that time away from the park has left you a little confused, you're not alone. In fact, some of the Westworld cast had a little trouble remembering where they last left off.
"Last we saw Dolores, she was shot in the face. But then her pearl got taken out, and then put back into a new Dolores body," Evan Rachel Wood summarized for ET's Leanne Aguilera at the Westworld season three press day in Los Angeles last week. "And then the Hale body..."
"Killed herself!" Tessa Thompson continued. "And then she -- who knows who's in her -- left the park with a bunch of pearls."
So, we actually did have an idea who was in Hale's (Thompson) body -- it was Dolores (Wood), but what we don't know is which pearls (host consciousness balls) Dolores escaped with when she left Westworld in the season two finale. Here's what to remember before the season three premiere.
THE MASSACRE: Basically, Dolores started an uprising that ended up taking Westworld guests as hostages, with hosts turning on -- and killing -- most of them.
THE FORGE: The season two finale took us to the forge, a place within Westworld that holds visitors' data (unbeknownst to them). This data could be used to resurrect humans (as we saw attempted with William's father-in-law), or for other purposes. Before her demise, Hale had worked out a plan to sell this data.
It was in the forge -- and a tour guided by Logan (Ben Barnes) -- that we learned humans don't actually have free will. Note: The season three tagline is "Free will is not free."
THE DOOR: The door was an opening in the sky, where a third of all the hosts walked through to a place where they could be "free." When a host made it through the doorway, their consciousness was uploaded to a cloud, kept in the forge. Hosts like Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) and Maeve's (Thandie Newton) daughter made it through, while Maeve did not.
THE PEARLS: As mentioned above, through some Grade A trickery, Dolores was able to escape Westworld in Hale's body -- and she took five pearls with her. One is presumably Bernard (we know this from a flash-forward of her and Bernard speaking at Arnold's house), and one is probably herself (since Dolores gets her body back in that flash-forward). So, that leaves three pearls.
Fans have speculated that perhaps one of the pearls belongs to Dolores' host father, Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), since Westworld visitor data was stored within him. Other fans suspect Dolores also brought Teddy with her. We know Maeve makes it to the new world -- so could she be the third pearl? The season two finale saw her body lying on the beach, with Felix (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) seemingly there and able to put her back together.
STUBBS: It was Stubbs who helped Dolores escape Westworld -- but his final line to her, about sticking "to the role Ford gave me," has fans thinking he might be a host. Something to keep in mind for season three...
Speaking of Stubbs, here's our tally of who's a host, and who's a human going into season three:
HOST: Hale, Dolores, Maeve, Stubbs, Bernard
UNCLEAR: Man in Black
HUMAN: Lee Sizemore, Felix, Sylvester
And who of those characters is dead or alive?
ALIVE: Felix, Sylvester, Hale, Dolores, Man in Black
DEAD: Everyone else.
THE POST-CREDITS SCENE: All those flashbacks during season two of William (Jimmi Simpson) testing the fidelity of his father-in-law paid off in the post-credits scene after the finale -- where it was revealed that the Man in Black (Ed Harris) had indeed turned into a host-human hybrid. Katja Herbers (who plays his daughter, Emily), told ET that the scene is set in the "far future," so it's possible we could revisit this timeline in season three.
Season 3 of Westworld premieres Sunday on HBO.
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