Timelines? Even More Secret Hosts? What’s the Big Twist of ‘Westworld’ Season 2 Gonna Be?

It’s almost here! Westworld kicks off its second season this Sunday, and the Hosts are about to run amok. After a season finale that saw Dolores follow that maze inside her bicameral mind and find her purpose — specifically to assassinate park creator Robert Ford and spark a robot rebellion — the second season is poised to go some places. Particularly the places we’re not expecting. One of the defining features of Westworld in its first season was that it was a show full of secrets. Right from the first episode, the audience was trained not to trust which characters were robots (“Hosts”) or not. And after a mid-season twist that told us not even time itself was operating the way we thought it was, Westworld officially became The Twist Show.

Being The Twist Show has its benefits, since it keeps people talking about, thinking about, and most importantly theorizing about he show. But it has its drawbacks, specifically the fact that if you don’t keep outdoing yourself, the audience is going to get restless, and the perception of staleness settles in. With that in mind, you have to figure that producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have cooked up something major to unleash on us in Season 2. It’s just a matter of guessing what it is. (That’s what watching TV is all about, right? Guessing plot twists before they happen? Otherwise, how would you know you’re winning?)

With that in mind, we’ve come up with our best early guesses as to what the Big Twist of Season 2 will be. Not all of these are much more than blind guesses, but if any of them happen, we get to claim credit. No takebacks!

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The Identity of The Other Parks

One of the big stories about season 2 is that we’re going to start visiting the other parks that Delos runs. In the finale, as Maeve was making her escape with Felix, Hector, and Armistice, they came across a room with all new and different host types. These are the hosts for what we now know will be called Shogun World

After the Super Bowl teaser for Westworld aired, fans were able to find clues to a secret Delos web site that teases the identity of six parks in all, with Shogun World the only other one with a name or imager. In addition to being a window into the kinds of fantasies that Delos is interested in indulging — specifically masculine-dominant warrior-hero fantasies about conquering that are based in old movies and books — these other parks are also windows into the kinds of settings that Westworld will be visiting. Nolan and Joy previously teased that Medieval World and Roman World were on the table for season 2 and beyond, and since those two were worlds referenced in the original Westworld movie, we can surmise that Futureworld (referenced in the movie’s sequel) is also on the table. So that’s five parks. Who wants to bet that the revelation of the sixth park’s identity is gonna be a real whopper?

A Third (Fourth?) Timeline

The big gag of season 1 was obviously that we were operating on two timelines, and that the white-hatted William we saw acting the hero for Dolores was the younger version of Ed Harris’s gnarled, embittered Man in Black. It was a twist that changed everything we thought we knew about how the plot was unfolding. And again when we found out that Dolores’s interview sessions with Bernard (really Arnold) were also on a different timelines than the main action. Multiple timelines have been used on countless TV shows to shock audiences — think the “We have to go back!” season 3 finale of Lost for one major example. It’s doubtful whether Westworld could go to that well again, if only because fans will have their heads on a swivel looking for clues where the timelines could diverge. But it’s at least a possibility.

Ford: Model T(wo)?

Anthony Hopkins’s Robert Ford was probably the most important character in season 1, if only because he was the prime mover behind pretty much everything we saw. He designed the quest that ultimately led to the Hosts’ rebellion in the finale, getting his last laugh on Delos by arranging what amounted to his own suicide-by-Dolores. …Or did he? If there’s going to be one big twist this season, it would have to be something so major, it makes us all question what we’ve seen so far. We all saw Ford get killed. What this theory presupposes is … what if he didn’t? It’s very possible that Ford could have created a host of himself who could have been the one that Dolores killed. OR Ford could have created a host in his image to survive him after he’s gone, like he did with Bernard/Arnold. Don’t be surprised if, some time late in season 2, Anthony Hopkins turns up in a lab, still tinkering away at his little obsessions.

More Secret Hosts

At some point, we’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns on surprise robot revelations. Finding out James Marsden’s Teddy Flood was a Host early on trained the audience not to trust their instincts about humans and robots and which could be heroes. Basically, the only true gags on this level would be finding out that either Ed Harris’s Man in Black or Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale were secret androids. Unless … everybody is a Host, and this entire show has been one elaborate production for the benefit of an unseen aud— oh wait, that’s us. Watching a TV show. Still, the “everybody is a Host” theory has been fleshed out on Reddit, on multiple threads, and it’s not un-compelling.

Westworld Isn’t On This Planet

This was a theory that floated around a lot in the early part of season 1 and then died down as the timeline shenanigans began to take prominence. But it’s still possible. Again, look to Reddit. The question of where in America (especially a Future America where one assumed overpopulation has continued) one could even build a controlled environment such as Westworld (not to mention all the other worlds) is still pertinent. It all just seems SO isolated from everything in the outside world, it would only make sense that … there is no outside world. Or at least not the one we know. If nothing else, it would make the very title of the show, Westworld, a kind of Easter egg. Which one would think would be the Holy Grail of a twist-heavy show.

Where to stream Westworld