'Westworld' Season 2 Trailer Breakdown: Dreams Don't Mean Anything...Or Do They?

This morning, HBO released a jaw-dropping new trailer for their returning sci-fi series Westworld, and it certainly looks as if the year-and-a-half wait between seasons will be worth it. In this Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown, we'll take a closer look and see if we can uncover any secrets that may be hiding in plain sight.

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown Jeffrey WrightLisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are the showrunners behind Westworld, and this trailer opens with what appears to be an homage to the opening of Inception, a film written and directed by Jonathan's brother Chris. Like Leo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb in that film, Jeffrey Wright's Bernard wakes up face down in the waves.Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown 2

But unlike Cobb, Bernard isn't in the unconstructed dream space of limbo. He's in the Westworld theme park, on the edge of a lake full of corpses. Interestingly, a previous trailer indicates that Bernard leads a team of Delos security agents to this body of water, so perhaps the shots of him waking up on the shore actually take place elsewhere – or at a different point on the timeline.

"I dreamt I was on an ocean," he says. "You and the others on a distant shore."

"Were you with us?" Dolores asks. "No," Bernard says. Does that answer, combined with the fact that we've seen him primarily alongside humans in all of the Westworld season 2 footage thus far, prove that he won't be fighting with the host uprising?

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Looks like someone from Delos has called in reinforcements, and they're taking this android revolt extremely seriously. Look at the top of that image. They're bringing in boats, along with whatever holographic geo-mapping tech is being set up in the foreground.

The hardcore fans over at Reddit quickly realized that the black lines on the rectangular box in the front right foreground are a binary code, and when decoded, it leads to this:

That hidden video lead to yet another video, which you can read about here.

As Bernard and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) walk past the base being set up on the beach, we hear Dolores ask, "What's it mean?"

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"Dreams don't mean anything, Dolores." But Evan Rachel Wood's disappointed face begs to differ. "That doesn't seem to satisfy you," Bernard says, also addressing Westworld's fandom, who know the significance dreams have had in the show thus far.

"Because it's not completely honest," Dolores responds. She's experienced enough lies for a thousand lifetimes, so she's more than ready for a heaping dose of truth.

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown Dolores

Is that a smile on Dolores's face as she's on horseback? The character suffered tremendously in the first season, so she didn't have much to be happy about. Maybe now that she's self-aware, things are starting to look up for her.

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Check out this awesome library, where Dolores gets her own Beauty and the Beast moment. Knowledge is power, and she learned that lesson the hard way last season. But where is this library located? It's way too sleek for the Westworld park...could it have belonged to Anthony Hopkins' Robert Ford, one of the park's creators?

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"Did you ever stop to wonder about your actions? The price you'd have to pay if there was a reckoning?" Dolores asks a bound man, kneeling as Teddy Flood (James Marsden) watches from his horse in the background. At first I thought Dolores was speaking to Jimmi Simpson's William here, but look behind him: the woman standing on the cross (possibly hanging from a noose?) is wearing modern looking high heels and what appears to be a more contemporary dress than what we see the hosts normally wear in Westworld. So maybe it's not William, and is instead a Delos employee, a survivor of the slaughter in the season one finale?

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown Angela

Here's a new look at Angela (Talulah Riley, promoted to series regular for season 2), the park greeter whom we learned last season was a member of a cult that followed "Wyatt," a villain in Ford's narrative. There's a bloody ring around her head – did she survive a scalping attempt by the Ghost Nation tribe, or is this some sort of self-inflicted sign of devotion to Wyatt?

"That reckoning is here," says Dolores in voiceover, and Angela pulls the trigger on an unknown target.

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There are a few shots of Delos security sweeping through strewn bodies that reflect a recently-released behind-the-scenes video. But the next shot of interest is the one above, which shows Dolores and Teddy leading a group of...prisoners? Guests? Delos employees? They're presumably going to meet up with The Man in Black (Ed Harris), who explains that, now that Dolores and the rest of her kind are free, the stakes are finally real.

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown Maeve

Here's Maeve (Thandie Newton) tucking her daughter in at night, probably in a flashback. She blew her chance to escape Westworld in the season one finale in order to reunite with her daughter, and now she's taking the park's head writer, Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), hostage.

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"She's something we programmed. She's not real," Sizemore says. But Maeve shoves him up against a wall – she's not having it. "You're going to take me to my daughter," she demands.

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Hard cut to a dark room with Dolores awaiting diagnostics. The man standing opposite her is...

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...William, and it's notable that he's wearing a black suit. He looks menacing; maybe this scene happens just as he's transitioned into the persona of The Man in Black?

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In this shot, The Man in Black rides away from the lifeless body of the host version of Robert Ford as a child, created by Anthony Hopkins' older self and seen last season.

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Now we get a glimpse at what appears to be all-out war, with two juxtaposing shots of the modern Delos security and the Confederate soldiers in the park.

"Here we are," Dolores says in voiceover, "a kind that will never know death. And yet we're fighting to live."

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown Dolores

"There is beauty in what we are," she tells Bernard. Seems like she's trying to fully recruit him to her side. As Jeffrey Wright said recently, his character has allegiances to both sides. Will this be enough to push him over into embracing his identity as a host?

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Armed and walking through smoke, Dolores, Teddy, and Clementine (?) are ready for battle. "We've ridden ten miles and all we've seen is blood," Teddy says. "Is this really what you want?" But Dolores is adamant, and she's drawn a line in the sand: "It's us or them."

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A member of Ghost Nation stumbles across a naked man leaned against a tree. That could be Logan (Ben Barnes), William's cocky soon-to-be-brother-in-law who was left for dead in the desert in season one.

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We knew Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) survived Dolores's assault on the Journey Into Night party last season, but now we see her armored up and back in the park. She's not afraid to get her hands dirty.

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown meeting

As if this trailer weren't already packed with information, here's where it really starts to pick up the pace. We see a few quick shots of a tense meeting between Maeve, Dolores, and Teddy ("Revenge is just a different prayer at their altar, darling," Maeve says), and a few more of Dolores wielding a gun and firing at the camera.

Westworld season 2 trailer breakdown Delos

Here's our first look at James Delos, the man who founded Delos Incorporated. He appears to be walking away from Logan, and since we know Logan's family owns Delos, it seems safe to assume this is a talk between father and son.

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"They wanted a place hidden from God. We had something else in mind entirely," explains The Man in Black. We've seen this faceless creation in other season 2 marketing, but this one discards a human into a milky vat. It's unclear if it and its kind have decided to rise up against their human creators like their more fully-formed host counterparts.

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This man's limp and that knife indicates it's the Man in Black, walking toward...a hidden door of some kind? A secret entrance behind the scenes of the park? Or could it be a passageway between worlds? He promises to "burn this whole thing to the ground," and nothing about him implies that he's kidding around.

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Here's this trailer's first look at ShogunWorld, and while we're still not sure exactly how this new park will factor into the show, at least we know that Maeve makes her way inside at some point.

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Here's a shot of Angela, dressing after what looks like a hell of an orgy. But when does this take place? I have a theory about that, and I'll get to it in just a second.

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The Man in Black, having just read Trump's latest tweet.

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As Dolores says, "I know exactly what is out there" in voiceover, we see her, dressed in a fancy black dress, gaze out into a cityscape. Here's where my theory comes in. What if this and the moment with Angela getting out of bed are flashbacks? We know a young Robert Ford will appear in season 2 (though he won't be played by Anthony Hopkins), so what if the show takes us all the way back to Ford's days as a young adult, where he meets the "real" women who inspired the later creation of his android hosts?

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This shot of Dolores and William appears to be set in the real world. That raises the possibility that A) my aforementioned theory could be correct and William met the "real" Dolores before he visited Westworld for the first time, or B) William smuggles the version of Dolores we know from season one out of the park at some point, or C) along with Westworld and Shogunworld, this setting is part of another theme park owned and operated by Delos.

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WTF? Multiple Bernards? That character's plotline was already complicated to track because of his connection to Arnold, and now we have to be wondering about which version of Bernard we're seeing at any given time? Westworld certainly isn't making things easy for us.

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Now I have to wonder which Bernard is blowing someone away with a machine gun. WILL WE EVER KNOW?

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"You frighten me sometimes, Dolores," says (a) Bernard. And the trailer ends with Evan Rachel Wood flashing this creepy smile and saying, "Why on Earth would you ever be frightened of me?" Oh, I don't know – maybe because you have no compunction about gunning down humans in the streets? I'm not saying she's not justified, but I'm with you, Bernard – Dolores is a little scary now.

Westworld season 2 premieres on HBO on April 22, 2018.