Remember when they said Westworld‘s second season wouldn’t air until 2018 and that seemed sooo far away? Can you believe the wait ends this week? Crazy. 

If you haven’t rewatched season one, but you want a little refresher on where everyone seemed to be at the end of the last episode (bearing in mind that time is non-linear for the hosts), we’ve got you covered. 

Here’s what we think we know about the major players:

Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood)- The O.G. Host of Westworld, Dolores appears to be a reserved lady of the prairie when we meet her, subject to the violent and/or lustful whims of the park’s guests and infinitely optimistic that she and her cowboy love, Teddy, will go away together.  By season’s end, she’s revealed as the first self-aware host, troubled by an inability to differentiate between the past and the present, and wholly capable of murder. She evolves from an ingenue to a revolutionary, guided by at least one puppet master. 

Wyatt (Sorin Brouwers)- For most of the season we believe him to be the baddest bad guy Westworld’s architects have ever produced, but when the world starts falling apart we discover that his baddest acts were actually perpetrated by Dolores. 

Teddy Flood (James Marsden)- He’s introduced as Dolores’s sweetheart, an apparently earnest fellow, but then we learn that Teddy might also have been part of a massacre and part of Wyatt’s gang. Of course when we learn that Dolores is Wyatt, we also learn that Teddy did participate in a massacre– by her side, before the park even opened.  

RELATED: WESTWORLD Season 2 Gains 3 New Actors, Including VIKINGS’ Gustaf Skarsgard

Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins)- Architect of Westworld and its destruction, Dr. Ford has been playing God with the hosts by tweaking their code to empower them with apparent sentience– or has he been manipulating even that? He sets himself up to die by Dolores’s hand. 

Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright)- Ford’s heir apparent, we meet programmer Bernard as a human man, married, grieving the loss of his son and having an affair with colleague Theresa. To our, and Bernard’s, surprise, it turns out he’s secretly a host, created by Ford in the image of his deceased partner, Arnold, and there’s no wife or son waiting for him at home. 

Arnold (also Jeffrey Wright)- Probably the guy who talks to Dolores alone, encouraging her sentience. He orchestrates Dolores and Teddy massacring all of the park’s hosts before opening day in an effort to stop Ford from proceeding with suppressing their consciousness, and dies by choice at Dolores’s hand. 

Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman)- Ambitious junior architect whose base visions for the park are derided and overridden by Ford, Sizemore allies with Charlotte Hale in an effort to oust Ford and steal his intellectual property. 

Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson)- Before she was kicking intergalactic a** as Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok or making headlines as Janelle Monáe’s muse in videos like the one below, Tessa Thompson was shady Delos board director Charlotte Hale. She comes to Westworld to oversee Ford’s ouster and stays to be overthrown by a robot army. 

Man in Black (Ed Harris)- A repeat guest at Westworld, who initially seems to have no purpose beyond finding and mastering a secret next-level aspect of the park. He’s an investor in Delos, and in the aftermath of his wife’s death he murdered frontier woman Maeve and her daughter just to see how it would feel. 

William (Jimmi Simpson)- A new Westworld guest, brought to the park by his future brother-in-law, Logan, who wants to drag him out of his shell by having some relatively safe visceral experiences. This works better than Logan intended, and by the end of the season William has fallen for Dolores and gone totally native in the park. Afterwards he grows up to become THE MAN IN BLACK, which means that all of the scenes with William are actually in the past. 

Logan (Ben Barnes)- William’s frenemy / future brother-in-law, Westworld veteran, potential Delos investor and all-around d*ck. Logan goes for the superficial in his Westworld experiences, having sex with anyone he fancies and engaging in random acts of violence. Like William, he is in the past. 

Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum)- When we first meet him, he’s Dolores’s father. He’s the first host to start showing the cracks of the new programming that unlocks memories of previous iterations. He also becomes the tool Charlotte and Lee hope to use to get Ford’s data out of the park. 

Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton)- Madam of the saloon brothel, Maeve’s world weariness is disrupted by flashes of memory from another life– one in which she was a simple frontier woman with a daughter she loved and lost. She takes the most assertive role in freeing herself from her narrative loop, faking her way to the behind-the-scenes area where hosts are repaired, cleaned and refreshed before being sent back into the park. She forces techs Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) and Lutz (Leonardo Nam) to let her tweak her programming, empowering herself to take her self-awareness into the real world and/or into the park to find her daughter. Or is it self-awareness if Ford is still somehow manipulating her?

Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro)- A bandit who is supposed to die over and over in a spectacular shootout in town, he is freed by Maeve and taken along on her journey of self-discovery. (Also they have some sex.)

RELATED: WESTWORLD Adds Neil Jackson and Jonathan Tucker to Season 2

Lawrence / El Lazo (Clifton Collins Jr.)- A host the Man in Black believes can lead him into Arnold’s secret maze level (in the not-past). He also appears as El Lazo in the outlaw town of Pariah, where he infuriates Logan and his ex-confederate friends by stealing their nitroglycerin, leading to Dolores discovering she’s a sharpshooting killing machine (in the past). 

Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward)- Bernard’s assistant who goes missing while trying to figure out what’s happening with the hosts. Ford has her killed to protect his ultimate plan. 

Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen)- Bernard’s side-piece, who also happens to be his boss. She’s been working to steal Ford’s intellectual property for Delos so they can get rid of him. Ford knows this, though, so he programs Bernard to murder her. 

Clementine Pennyfeather (Angela Sarafyan)- Maeve’s go-to prostitute, who gets used by Charlotte and Theresa in an effort to discredit Ford. They turn her violent, intending an incident with her to help undermine his position. This results in her being decommissioned, but she’s revived for the big revolution at the end. 

Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth)- A Hemsworth is in this show! He has a security job and is pretty forgettable, but here’s hoping that he stands out in season two. 

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Don’t forget that we glimpsed Eastworld in the finale, and there’s every reason to think it isn’t the only additional world park. Casting choices and the season two trailer below suggest we’ll at least get a glimpse of this first one soon!

RELATED: Be sure to keep up with our season two recaps here!

 

 

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