“This’ll get gross.” So says a technician for the Delos Corporation just before he chops at the head of a murdered android, peels back its realistically bloody scalp, cracks open its synthetic skull, and pulls out a piece of fluid-oozing brain-hardware. Westworld is back, everybody!
HBO’s science-fiction thriller returned April 22, picking up where its imaginative but plodding first season left off: The park’s director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), is dead; his robot creations, the “hosts,” have taken over; and Westworld’s remaining human guests are fleeing for their lives. And the premiere does, indeed, “get gross.” Nearly all of its perfectly composed shots are littered with corpses, and countless additional humans and robots are gruesomely slaughtered over the course of the episode’s 69 minutes, including a child robot who gets shot in the face.