Evan Rachel Wood is playing a new character on Westworld’s new season, wink wink
James Marsden is also coming back to the show after getting killed in season 2
HBO’s sometimes-excellent (but it’s been a while) Westworld is finally coming back for season four after two years of absence, with its first trailer teasing a handful of new mysteries that might at least start off really interesting… regardless of whether or not they remain interesting once the answers start getting doled out. At a Westworld panel during the ATX Festival this weekend (via Deadline), though, one of those mysteries became a slightly different mystery.
The teaser prominently featured an appearance from someone played by series star Evan Rachel Wood, whose character Dolores was supposedly killed off for good at the end of season three. At this panel, series co-creator Lisa Joy confirmed that “Dolores is dead” and that Wood is playing a new character named Christina who is “from a city that looks like New York” and lives there with a roommate played by Ariana DeBose who “may or may not have a crush on Christina.”
Wood added that Christina is “a normal woman living in a big city just trying to make it as a writer” and that “nothing ever happens to her, really.” Well that’s that! No mysteries here! The sci-fi show that often features different layers of reality, whether it’s separate timelines or new worlds that are just robot-filled theme parks (to say nothing of the robots and the robots who don’t even know they’re robots), is going to have its biggest star playing “a normal woman” who never does anything interesting. Suuuuuuuuuuure. (Of course, if you’re already a Westworld fan, you probably love this shady shit.)
In other Westworld news, Sonic’s dad James Marsden—who played poor faithful robo-companion Teddy in the show’s first two seasons—is coming back. We don’t know who he’s playing, or even who Lisa Joy says he’s playing, but it’s worth noting that the original Teddy died before the Westworld hosts were uploaded to the Valley Beyond paradise reality… so there are any number of ways for someone to recover his brain and pop it into a new body. Is that totally unhelpful? Damn right, but that’s Westworld, baby.