The official trailer for the fourth season of HBO’s sci-fi series Westworld couldn’t have come at a better time.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that an engineer from Google is alleging that one of the company’s artificially intelligent chatbots he was working with had become sentient.
The same topic has been explored during the first three seasons of Westworld and will continue into the upcoming fourth as hosts and humans attempt to live amongst each other. Season 4 is described by HBO as “a dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on Earth.”
In the fourth season, Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale is now a copy of Dolores, who was killed off last season. As The Wrap explains: “These copies are not some kind of hive mind, and the main Dolores has no direct control over them. This Charlotte is still her own person, and she can make her own decisions about what she wants to do.”
In the new trailer, Charlotte is seen speaking to someone connected to a printing machine. Of course, it’s probably best not to guess which character (William, perhaps?) she is directing her dialogue to since nothing is ever as it seems in the Westworld world, but the actor playing him is Ed Harris. “Your kind made a sport out of hunting us,” she says. “You controlled our every move, and now I’m going to do the same to you.”
She adds: “It’s time to evolve into the species that we were meant to become.”
Who knows where Westworld’s trippy storyline will take fans during the eight episodes of the upcoming season, but after two years away from the dystopia future, it’s probably time we find out.
Westworld Season 4, which stars Tessa Thompson, premieres on HBO on June 26, 2022.