Spoilers below for the Season 2 premiere of Westworld, so be sure to watch before reading on.
HBO's Westworld is a room-escape game wrapped in an Isaac Asimov cautionary tale inside a set of depressingly high-tech Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. And now that Season 2 has finally arrived, viewers' totally real brains are working in overdrive to understand all the new details. (Here's how we tackled the premiere.) One particularly harsh visual was the eleven-day-old corpse of Anthony Hopkins' Robert Ford, whose finale death has remained questionable to many fans. Hopkins posted a bizarre video on Twitter ahead of the premiere, in which he looked like a severely malfunctioning Westworld host, but are the two connected at all? Watch and decide.
First, I have to applaud Anthony Hopkins for gleefully being this random and wacky at 80 years old, and there's no amount of Twitter vitriol that can extinguish such ridiculousness. Now, there's also no stopping the nightmares that may come from having seen the actor's eyes go wide with such Hannibal Lecter-esque madness, but we appreciate it all the same. Especially if it's actually a stealthily absurd way to keep Robert Ford's most vocal conspiracy theorists talking.
Anthony Hopkins is far from the most active celeb on social media, so the tweet popping up on the same night as Westworld's Season 2 premiere is circumstantially interesting. As well, had the clip just been of him blowing off steam with a cup of tea or a crossword puzzle, there would have been less of a reason to immediately suspect a connection to the HBO drama. But because he's herky-jerking around as if all his circuits are malfunctioning, we can't help but hope that we'll be seeing an artificially rendered Robert Ford somewhere in Delos' playgrounds.
Even the wording of "all work and no play" adds another level of pop culture nefariousness to Hopkins' post, given its connection to The Shining. And we can even make it relevant within Westworld, assuming that Ford's human death would relieve the character of his decades of "work," and that kicking off his robotic revolution would signify the "play" angle. I mean, the actor was busy filming as the lead in the upcoming TV film King Lear, as well as other pipeline projects he's got going, so it could very well be that he was too busy to return in full. But what about a smaller appearance?
It would definitely need to be a robotic version of Robert, since his human form is no longer around to put any of his lawless plans into action. Relive the truly gruesome shot that definitively destroyed anyone's hopes that it was actually Robert's host version that Delores killed in the Season 1 finale.
It's certainly possible that there are new host versions crafted with the organic tissue needed to make maggot infestation occur, but we have to assume that Robert Ford's human form really is dead and unable to make disturbing social media videos for his followers to watch in the year 2052. Since we're convinced everyone within Delos' ranks has had a host version of themselves created, though, our hopes are high that Anthony Hopkins will return to Westworld in full at some point during Season 2.
Note that yes, Anthony Hopkins did made an audio cameo in the premiere when the Man in Black (or Bill, if you will, and we won't) came across the younger Robert host. Robo-Robert revealed The Door game as Man in Black's next big venture before getting shot in the face, and thanks to some digital magic with the audio, Hopkins' voice could be heard. Even though it was only a split-second, it was still instantly exciting, and also hinted that Robert was fully aware of the different ways his mindset could live on within the park's attractions.
With Robert Ford's host potentially waiting for the right time to step out of the shadows, Westworld Season 2 airs Sunday nights on HBO at 9:00 p.m. ET. While waiting for the next episode, head to our summer premiere schedule to see all the new and returning series on the way.
