Every Detail We Have About Westworld Season 3, From the Cast to the Premiere Date

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: season three won't be here for a while. Although HBO officially renewed the show for a third season back in May 2018, the network has yet to announce a specific premiere date, revealing only that it will arrive at some point in the first half of 2020.

If we had to guess, you should expect it to premiere in the Spring sometime (for context, season two didn't premiere until April 22). According to cocreator Jonathan Nolan, the longer wait between seasons was due to their attention to detail.

"It's an ongoing conversation with our friends at HBO, and for us, with a show of this scope and scale, we're not interested in doing the compromised version," he explained to Entertainment Weekly. "We want the show to get bigger and bigger and more ambitious, and this takes time. We want to take all the time we need to get it right."

The third season will consist of just eight episodes instead of the usual 10 that made up both seasons one and two. So far there's no telling whether or not the episodes will be extralong, à la Game of Thrones.

Season two ends with a ton of deaths for both humans and hosts alike, but that doesn't mean all of your faves are gone for good. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) will return (the actors' vocal discussions of equal pay confirmed it months back), while we know Jeffrey Wright, Ed Harris, and Tessa Thompson are returning thanks to the season three trailer footage. The actor we should be worried about seeing again is James Marsden, since Teddy "dies" at the end of season two, if you recall.

Breaking Bad alum Aaron Paul officially joined the cast of Westworld for season three as an ally of Dolores's mission to infiltrate the real world. He most recently starred in Hulu's cult drama The Path and will now be a regular on the HBO series. For now, more details about his character are being kept under wraps, but given his proclivity for playing people with rough edges, we assume he'll fit right in.

Additionally, Master of None star Lena Waithe has also signed on to play a part in the upcoming season. Her particular role is being kept secret for now.

The final few moments of "The Passenger" see hosts Dolores and Bernard milling about the home in Japan that Arnold is seen building at the start of the season. So, in other words, they're finally free of the park! The season three trailer confirms that Dolores is up to something out in the real world, likely sparking a revolution. So does that mean our time in the parks are over? Yes and no. "It's been a long build-up to get outside the park," Nolan told EW. "And we're incredibly excited about what that looks like and sounds like and what exactly our hosts discover out there."

Since the original 1973 film, Michael Crichton's Westworld, sees its tourists roaming around parks like Medieval world and Roman world, we have a feeling there are still some elaborate set pieces waiting for us within the park. We get a taste of that in the season three footage that shows a glimpse of Maeve being inside some sort of park taking place during WWII, with Nazi flags hanging throughout a European street.

We could ask a billion questions about Westworld and still not run out, but we'll stick to the main ones raised in the finale. For starters, the postcredits scene hints that the Man in Black might be a host, and that his seemingly dead daughter Emily is actually still alive (we have a feeling she's a host, though). There's also the interesting theory that Teddy's consciousness has been embedded in Bernard, which would explain a lot of his scrambled memory issues throughout season two (and would give the writers a way to keep Teddy around, even though we saw him wandering around the Valley Beyond). There's also a hypothesis floating around Reddit that The Man in Black is Ford's son (wouldn't that perfectly explain his deep-seated issues with the guy?!), as well as concerns that the third season will experience a time jump.

Of the time-jump idea, Nolan teased to EW that the series "won't necessarily" be shifting forward in time, but Lisa Joy told THR that there will indeed be a jump, even if it's just a little one. "I think that storyline is something we'll get to eventually," Joy explained of the futuristic postcredits scene. "But season three, the main story will not be leaping that far forward. I'm really curious creatively to see what happens to Bernard and Dolores, now that they've finally earned their freedom. I think we'll see a lot more of that."