'Westworld' Season 3 trailer reveals sinister new rival tech company

Given that it takes place in a world where a robot-filled virtual reality theme park exists, it’s hard for Westworld to parallel the real world too directly. However, it’s hard to not notice similarities between the world depicted in the show and our own. There’s no area in which this is more noticeable than that of Delos, the mysterious uber-company that controls the park and, seemingly, most of the technology present on Earth in some way or another. It’s a pretty clear analogue for tech giants like Apple and Microsoft.

It only makes sense, then, that Delos would have competition. The show’s third season is going to open up to a broad new scale, leaving the park entirely and taking rogue robot Dolores into the “real world” - a transition fans have long anticipated.

With the world of the show opening up, we’ll get a better look at the tech giants that dominate the landscape, and it looks like the first of them has finally reared its head. A mysterious video released by HBO this week introduces us to Incite. From what we can tell, this is the primary competitor Delos grapples with in the field. What they do is not entirely clear from this trailer — appropriate both because Westworld has never been a show that offers up easy answers, and because anyone who’s ever seen a Silicon Valley tech startup video package will recognize the strange ambiguity of actual function on display in the video. All we know for sure is that they operate in cybernetics, as evidenced by the final shot of the video package. Whether this is in the form of Host-like robots or human cybernetic enhancements has yet to be made clear.

It also comes with the mysterious caption, “If Data is Destiny, Then You Chart The Path.” Again, this is a tough one to crack as it could allude to a great many things, but it’s hard to read that and not think about the way data was used in the show’s second season to create lifelike human replicants.

There’s still much to be learned about the third season of Westworld and knowing the show, it’ll be quite some time before things are made clear. However, the breadcrumbs viewers can follow to the center of the show’s maze are finally starting to appear.

Westworld Season 3 comes to HBO sometime in 2020.