Westworld season 2 episode 1 review: A solid return for HBO's fun, frustrating show

HBO has a lot riding on Westworld, the heir apparent to the soon-to-be-departing Game of Thrones, a show dissimilar from the fantasy epic in terms of subject, but consumed, discussed and obsessed over (they hope) in the same way, its thrill being spectacle, twists, and the viewer's ability to compute and predict these twists.

*Spoilers ahead*

Tonight saw the arrival of season 2, which opened in complete disarray. The hosts have escaped their narratives and mostly gone on vendettas against the humans that enslaved them, the guests at Ford's soiree being picked off in their tuxedos and ball gowns one by one, cowering behind stagecoaches like frightened NPCs.

Bernard was the heart/synthetic organ of the episode, waking on a beach disorientated, his glasses symbolically getting washed away as he tries to come to terms with his life-changing self-discovery. New character Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) does not help matters, a Delos flunky brought in for crisis management and taking no prisoners, executing any and all rogue hosts and brutally examining their circuitry in the middle of the dirt (that scalping scene!).

Simultaneously (we think, but Westworld loves to jump between timelines) we see how the mass break-out is affecting other characters. Dolores is on a mission to take the park over, leading a group of rebels and taking out a few guests. The whole 'Dolores is also Wyatt' thing felt superfluous and overly complicated in the first season, so I was relieved to see it dispatched with here, Dolores addressing it head on and declaring that she is no longer either of those pre-scripted characters but now herself, whomever that may be.

The Man in Black/older William meanwhile is pretty delighted by the sudden upping of the stakes, the "real consequences" that come with the hosts being capable of hurting guests simply adding a new, exciting frisson to the Westworld experience. The man just loves a good quest, and having gone on the wild goose chase that was "the maze" in season 1, is now instructed to search for "the door", which I sincerely hope turns out to be more than just a metaphor for the door to one's mind or the doors of perception or some other pseudo-intellectual cop-out.

​Maeve is the final main character to get her own sub-plot in this season opener, enlisting the help of Westworld in-show showrunner Lee Sizemore in finding her daughter. Lee is not an authentic character and Simon Quarterman's performance verges on panto at times, but this unlikely duo does bring a little much-needed levity to the show, Maeve giving Lee a taste of his own medicine by turning his scripted lines back on him and forcing him to strip naked like a host would. Maeve's motive is fascinating, her being aware that her daughter is simply the result of a programmed storyline not rendering the relationship void as one might expect. Does lived experience have indelible meaning? Is her programmed love so different from the kind that humans appear to experience for reasons of procreation? This plot strand may prove to be the most philosophically interesting this season.

Though the show hides them in swift, passing dialogue, two key pieces of information were revealed tonight that will become key in later episodes: there are indeed six parks, and Delos has secretly been logging records of guests' experiences and DNA. For what reason, we don't know, but it all feels very Cambridge Analytica.

The episode ends with Bernard apparently realising he was behind the slaughter of a load of hosts including Teddy (who was alive elsewhere in the episode), confusing our timelines and setting us back a step in terms of working out what the hell is going on in this show. Though sometimes frustrating - a barrage of information - Westworld is a hard show not to enjoy, a video game come to life whose sandbox nature means there's never a dull moment, the possibilities being endless and only limited by the creators' sizeable imagination and HBO's generous budget.

Westworld airs weekly on HBO in the US and through Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in the UK.