‘Westworld’ Season 2 Features Dolores’ Continuing Journey of Newfound Consciousness, Focuses on Guest Experience

‘Westworld’ season 2 is set to feature Dolores’ continuing journey of newfound consciousness. It will also focus more on guest experience as teased by showrunners Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy.

Season 1 followed hosts as they slowly gained sentience and realized their artificial existence. More specifically, season 1 followed Dolores, the oldest working host in the park, going through an existential crisis after finding out that her life was one elaborate lie. Viewers watched as she transformed from a simple farm girl to a ruthless killing machine.

Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores in the series, talked more about her character during an interview with Vanity Fair. She said, “She’s overriding her programming and her conditioning… Every episode, she’s opening up more and more.”

She continued, “The only thing I can say about Episode 10 is I feel like a lot of people are going to get up on their seats and clap. There are certain things that we’ll see which made that character so important to me and will make her so important to a lot of people.”

Wood also explained, “I think it was always that Season 1 was going to be this backstory and set up—getting to know the park and characters. I think Season 2 is really going to be warp speed. The show might really start in Season 2.”

It was speculated Dolores would rise to power and control all of Westworld in the incoming season. She already took charge of a host uprising against their own creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), which led to his own demise in the season finale.

During an interview with TV Line, showrunners Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy teased that season 2 is set to address the yet unanswered questions from season 1. Nolan said, “We talked a lot about how the experience would feel for a contemporary guest going into the park. We laid out a lot of that logic in the writers’ room.”

Nolan also revealed during a separate interview with Empire that season 2 will continue to put more focus on Westworld despite the Samurai World hint from season 1. He said, “I think expand is the right word. The center of our story remains the title of our story, Westworld. It’s really where our story lives, but starting with the idea of the Hosts having a very limited knowledge of their world, we wanted, every season, to gently expand their understanding of the world to encompass not just Westworld, but their immediate surroundings and the world beyond that. So we’ll see a little more in the second season, but Westworld remains the heart of our story.”

‘Westworld’ season 2 was renewed on HBO last November 2016. It is expected to return sometime in 2018.