‘Westworld’ Season 3 premiere: Not even Aaron Paul can save this show from itself – USA TODAY

Spoiler alert! The following contains details from Sunday’s Season 3 premiere of “Westworld,” “Parce Domine.”

“Westworld” has never had a problem looking good. 

HBO’s sci-fi series has always had big money and big talent like J.J. Abrams, Anthony Hopkins, Thandie Newton and Evan Rachel Wood behind it. A remake of the 1973 Michael Crichton film about robots at an Old West theme park that turn on the humans who use (and abuse) them, “Westworld” was already impeccably styled, with gorgeous costumes, sweeping shots of beautiful landscapes, solid computer graphics and more than enough blood and nudity to satisfy the “Game of Thrones” crowd.

But while “Westworld” is adept at aesthetics, it has long lacked substance and coherence. The writers certainly have ideas but often too many science-fiction plots that jumble together across multiple timelines and realities. Those ideas have rarely coalesced into an easily understood theme or moral, or even episodes paced quickly enough to avoid languishing in dull exposition.

S2 recap: ‘Westworld’: What you need to know before digging into Season 3 of HBO’s mind-bending drama

This is all to say that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have been excited by the slick, thumping trailer for the third season (Sundays, 9 EDT/PDT). But with new stars like the great Aaron Paul and Lena Waithe, a new world outside the theme park to explore and a significantly reduced cast of characters after Season 2’s bloodbath, there was hope that “Westworld” could hit the reset button and emerge a more streamlined, satisfying series.

Hear from the stars: ‘Westworld’ escapes theme park: “I was anxious to get out and see what the world was like”

Instead, for a third, unfortunate time, the series just can’t deliver on its promise. What do we say about people who get fooled three times?

“Parce Domine,” Sunday’s premiere, picks up three months after Season 2 concluded (although it has been almost two years in real time). The complicated, timeline-jumping second season ended with a lot of overly complex jargon, but in essence, our bloody antiheroine Dolores (Wood) escaped the park with a bag full of robot brains, set on seeking revenge against the human world, and maybe running the whole place, too. It’s in a futuristic Los Angeles that she crosses paths with Caleb (Paul), a rare homo sapien who meets with her approval.

In the tense opening sequence, she brutally attacks a rich rapist who abused her in the park, stealing his money, forcing him to relive his crimes and killing him. She installs herself as the rich girlfriend of a tech CEO (John Gallagher Jr.) and sets up one of her handy robot brains (identity: so far unclear) inside the Charlotte Ford (Tessa Thompson) host to enact her plans at Delos, the company that owns Westworld.

Meanwhile, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) is in hiding on a cozy little farm after Dolores inexplicably took him into the real world with her. Maeve (Newton), the only android as powerful as Dolores, was AWOL in the premiere, much to the disappointment of everyone involved. 

Parallel to Dolores’ one-woman war, we see unassuming Caleb (Paul), a construction worker and military veteran dealing with PTSD. He can’t catch a break on the corporate ladder, he lost his best friend while serving, and he is forced to take gigs on a petty crime app (the most hilarious bit of futurism so far) to make enough money so he can care for his ailing mother. 

Dolores is after her boyfriend’s company’s artificial intelligence system (although he’s really just a figurehead). His security team spots her as an imposter and kidnaps her, ready to feed her to the fishes. Caleb’s latest gig on the app has him delivering the murder weapon to the CEO’s honchos. Of course, Dolores is hard to kill and Caleb has a conscience, so he returns after she fights off her attackers, and she collapses in his arms. 

The episode opens with such daring panache that it initially appears as if Season 3 has learned from the past “Westworld” errors, but after that thrilling sequence the pace of the episode slows to a crawl and the writers continue their bad habit of focusing on backstory. Paul is an absolutely welcome addition to the cast, charming as ever, and he is the window into the human world viewers have been desperately craving.

But even an intriguing new side character is still a side character. The focus only on Dolores, Caleb and Bernard in the season premiere and delay the return of fan-favorite Maeve is a mistake. 

Later on, this season has a new villain (an aptly cast Vincent Cassel), Maeve shows up and the writers expand their technophobic themes to explore the dangers of data surveillance. But it’s jarring to make such a hard turn away from Season 2’s concerns (what about that whole immortality thing?). And the streamlining is not enough. Fewer characters means the series jumps less frequently both in timelines and locations, and Season 3 has just eight episodes, down from 10 (four were made available for review). But it still feels as though there’s fat that could have been trimmed. 

Many of the trappings of “Westworld” have changed, but fundamentally this is the same series that spends too long on setup without sufficient delivery, one that prizes cool fights over reasons behind them. More often than not, the series is as soulless and hollow as the corrupt theme park it portrays. 

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