Westworld’s robotic hosts are already plenty creepy, what with their imperfect approximations of human behavior (mixed with a strain of violent unpredictability that the show’s actual humans rarely see coming). The show’s recent Super Bowl trailer for its second season introduced a whole new order of uncanny machine to the show’s synthetic universe, though, revealing a white-faced, plastic-looking monster thing lurking behind Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard, and later smashing some hapless Delos scientist against a wall.
Now, showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have revealed a little bit more about these mysterious and threatening presences, telling Entertainment Weekly that they’re called “drone hosts.” They’re apparently part of “the corporation’s secret project which is hidden in plain sight in this park,” and something that, “As Bernard is making his way through the wreckage of the fallout from the first season, he’s discovering things about the park that even he doesn’t know and coming upon creatures like the drone host.”
“Drone” has a lot of meanings in the modern technological context, of course. Are these hosts “drones” in the sense that they’re remote-controlled? (If so, by who?) Or do Nolan and Joy mean drone in the sense of eusocial insects, like bees? That raises the question: Who’s the queen? And what will her swarm do to Westworld when her hive is ultimately unleashed?
Westworld returns for its second season on April 22.