The first season of Westworld focused on the idea of artificial intelligence and humans co-mingling in one epic theme park. The second season saw those same artificially intelligent beings lead a revolution against their human counterparts. In Westworld's third season, Dolores has escaped from the Delos-owned park she called home -- or perhaps prison is the more correct word choice. She teams up with Aaron Paul's character, who she tasks with taking down a mysterious person who took his future away. Maeve, who also escaped, is given a pretty hefty task of her own: kill Dolores.

Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton) has ventured into ShogunWorld this Season 2 of HBO's "Westworld," and being in the Japanese theme park is quite an eye-opener for the host. "There's a parallel experience between what she went through and what's been going on with these other AIs," Newton told The Hollywood Reporter about Maeve's journey. "There's a betrayal, that not only is her story her story, but countless others in the park." However, her being there is helping other hosts gain more independence. "We're seeing how these characters are also breaking free from their loops," Newton continued.

There are many things that Westworld is. Its scenes are sculpted with the same beauty and care that went into building the robots' exquisite bodies. It explores with delicacy the adjacent modes of consciousness that accompany sophisticated artificial intelligence. And then there are the things that Westworld is not. There is, for starters, the total absence of meaningful relationships.

Westworld is an HBO television series based on American novelist Michael Crichton's 1973 futuristic science-fiction thriller about an android Western theme park. According to Variety, the first season of Westworld garnered an average of approximately 13.2 million viewers per episode. There are many reasons contributing to the show's popularity. On the surface level, the series is thrilling, complex, chilling, unpredictable, and completely unsettling – the very emblem of dystopian nightmares. On a deeper level, the show raises many philosophical questions on the potential impact of human-like robots powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Friends, humans, rapidly-evolving robots, the time has finally come: Westworld Season 2 is here. After nearly 17 months, HBO's futuristic thriller about a theme park where the rich can live out their Wild West fantasies with android "hosts" finally returns on Sunday. At the end of the first season, it seemed as though some of the hosts were starting to gain more agency than robots are supposed to have (or were they?) and there were a lot of mysteries left unsolved. In anticipation of the Season 2 debut, WIRED got together some of our biggest Westworld aficionados to hash out our hopes and dreams for the second season. Do we think these violent delights have violent ends?

In anticipation of Sunday's Emmy Awards, this week WIRED staffers are looking back at some of their favorite shows from the past year. One scene from Westworld replays in my head again and again, a little like (I imagine) one of the poor, doomed robots on the show who start noticing and remembering the programmatic loops in their simulated, hyper-violent Old West sandbox game. It's when the android Maeve, played by Thandie Newton, grabs a technician's tablet showing the dashboard for her personality software and, with a deft finger swipe, upgrades herself to genius. Yes, maybe taking control of your life by literally taking control of your life is a teensy bit on the nose. But for me it was the best flicker of weirdness from a show that--again, like its robots--dreamed big dreams.

Heading into last night's season finale of "Westworld," the show's android hosts were poised to finally, as our President-elect might put it, throw off their shackles: Maeve was plotting an escape into the human world, and Dolores was moving closer to the core of her own memories and identity. Among the guests, the cold-blooded Man in Black approached the center of the mysterious maze, an achievement that he hoped might herald an upending of the park's unnatural order. In fleeing their engineered lives and games, though, none of the show's androids--nor, indeed, any of the humans--ended up making it out of the park's walls. Instead, the robots staged their liberation from within, and--thanks to an eleventh-hour flourish by Ford--arose to dominate Westworld, not to defy it. Throughout the show's first season, Maeve, with her penetrating and cool violence, often seemed closer to liberation than Dolores, who was always this close to breaking down.

Sunday night's season 1 finale of Westworld was the perfect finish to a near-perfect season of television. While many fan theories came true tonight, there were some big twists that not everyone saw coming. Better still, the finale leaves plenty of loose ends flapping in the breeze, leaving the door wide open for a second season. Perhaps the biggest twist of the night was Dr. Ford's role in...well, everything. It turns out it wasn't Arnold's voice in the hosts' heads, nor was it Arnold manipulating the hosts to awaken and rebel.

There aren't many saloons where you can get into a decent pistol duel nowadays. But at the Mariposa in Sweetwater, you can walk in, order a shot of bourbon, and straight-up Aaron Burr a robot--all to the strains of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, courtesy of a player piano that happens to be ever so slightly out of tune. "In the show, everything is so real, until you look closely. The music is a subtle layer of that." Djawadi is no stranger to scoring an epic HBO drama; he also composes for Game of Thrones.

Going into "Trace Decay," the eighth episode of "Westworld," some fans held out hope that Sidse Babett Knudsen's clever performance as the theme-park underboss Theresa Cullen wasn't at an end. Yes, last week, Theresa died--brutally and with lots of blood spatter, and with Anthony Hopkins's Ford smirking from the corner. The killer was her softhearted colleague and former lover, Bernard, who was unmasked as a robotic cup-bearer built by Ford. But in "Futureworld," the 1976 sequel to the original "Westworld" movie, the Delos corporation, bent on world domination, replaced humans with robotic clones. Could Theresa survive, in some form, to scheme another day?