We’re only two episodes into the second season, but it seems that’s long enough to pull the trigger: HBO’s sentient host robots have renewed the dystopian theme-park thriller Westworld—or as they call it, “a heartwarming origin story of how we took over humanity”—for a third season.
Given that the show’s premiere back in 2016 was the most-watched debut ever for a freshman show on the pay-cable channel, and the new season came back up 5 percent and growing from those numbers, it’s not surprising HBO would be eager to greenlight the next installment of the Wild West-based dawn of artificial consciousness and its bloody consequences. This season has gotten much darker and sinister, with less rootin’-tootin’ adventure and more, “Oh god, what have we done, why is the park secretly capturing DNA information, is Bernard even aware of how involved he was in these experiments, and why isn’t Teddy freaking out more?” Nonetheless, the synthetic HBO executives who have replaced actual humans and that are orchestrating the downfall of humankind as we speak are doubtless thrilled to be prepping all of us psychologically for our inevitable servitude. Hopefully they’ll still let us watch HBO at night when we’re working the harvesters on their moon farms.