Westworld: Watch Season 3's New Opening Credits

Last night saw the third season premiere of Westworld on HBO and with it a major shift in the narrative of the series as Dolores finds herself in the real world with major plans to change the status quo. In addition to the story changes, a brand new opening credit sequence for the new season made its debut, potentially offering some clues into what we can expect from the new batch of episodes. You can watch the full sequence for yourself above and hit the jump for our full analysis of what the new credits could mean. As you may recall all the seasons of the past have all offered clues about the season's content in the credits.

First we should note the things that are exactly the same between the third season's opening credits and the two previous seasons of the series. The pair of "host" hands playing on the piano throughout the opening, eventually receding and the piano continuing to play on its own, are the exact same bits of footage in all three seasons.

Another similar element, but with a new twist in each season, the opening shot. Each season's opening credits begin with the sun seemingly rising across the horizon, which is revealed to not actually be a landscape but the interior body of a human host for season 1, the interior body of buffalo host for season 2, and a flying host eagle for season 3. It's worth noting that like host buffalo from season 2 that falls to its death in the opening credits, the host eagle in season 3's credits flies toward what looks like a jet engine which burns it to a crisp.

The final similar element is the closing seconds of each opening credits sequence. In the first season we see the muscular system of a human host as it is dipped into the white liquids that give it its skin, and in the second season we see the muscular system of a human host submerged under water. For the third season we see one of the "Drone" hosts from the second season being submerged into red liquid. These type of hosts are essentially helper hosts who are not sentient like the park hosts but work behind the scenes. Perhaps what this imagery is alluding to is the hosts Dolores is creating in the real world and replacing real people with, the red liquid they're being dipped in naturally being the blood of the spilled humans.

Now for the major differences we'll focus solely on the third season's credits which include, as we said, the host eagle flying toward a jet and disintegrating; but also a host figure approaching their reflection in a pool, perhaps a nod to the Greek myth of Narcissus. The figure approaches their reflection and emerges on the other side, coupled with imagery of the show's new supercomputer MacGuffin, Rehoboam. Shots of the supercomputer, along with the shots of the host eagle disintegrating as it approaches the jet engine (itself a stand-in for the sun), leads to shots of the host figure descending back into the pool and their face opening up/skin peeling off.

This seems like a big allusion to the other Greek myth of Icarus. Perhaps what this new season is suggesting is that someone (Dolores being the most likely candidate) is flying way too close to the sun with their plans. The first episode of season three revealed that Dolores was hatching a plan to not only takeover the Delos corporation but to replace anyone that gets in her way, or serves a larger purpose, with host versions of themselves, as we saw with Tommy Flanagan's Martin Connells. There's also the larger question of what she wants with the Rehoboam AI, and perhaps we'll know how the new opening relates to that in the coming weeks.

Westworld airs Sundays at 9 PM on HBO