We watched Westworld season 3 so you don’t have to

polygon.com:

The year is 2022. You’ve just watched the trailer for Westworld season 4, which premieres on HBO Max this Sunday. You feel a strange mix of emotions: anticipation, curiosity, but also frustration. You search your mind, retracing your thoughts in search of the answer to a single question: “Wait, what the hell happened in Westworld season 3?”

There’s a lot of twists and turns in the third season of Westworld, so many in fact it makes the simple task of remembering what happened and when it happened an exhausting task, to say nothing of the question of what really happened versus what didn’t. To help ease that confusion, we’ve combed through our memory banks and pieced together as clear and concise an explainer of Westworld season 3 as humanly possible. Let’s start broad and drill our way down to the specifics, shall we?

Westworld season 3 takes place in 2053, approximately three months after the events of season 2. Bernard, Dolores, and a copy of Dolores stored in an artificial host body impersonating the now-deceased Delos executive Charlotte Hale (more on her later) are the only hosts who managed to escape from Westworld into the real world.

Bernard is in hiding, having been blamed for the Westworld massacre at the end of season 1, and on a mission to find Dolores and thwart her apparent plot to exterminate humanity. He goes back to Westworld (which happens to be located on an island in the South China Sea) in search of allies to help in his fight against Dolores, in particular Maeve Millay, the former brothel host who in season 2 developed a form of “synthetic telepathy” that allowed her to command and control other hosts within her vicinity. While searching for Maeve, Bernard finds Ashley Stubbs, the former head of