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SYFY WIRE Westworld Season 3

Learn the secrets of Warworld from tonight's Westworld in new HBO featurette

By Benjamin Bullard
Thandie Newton as Maeve in Westworld Season 3

After snagging only a tantalizing tease in last week’s post-credits scene, Westworld fans finally got to go exploring in Warworld, the new-to-the-series WWII-era park where Maeve (Thandie Newton) awoke last week to a changed reality.

Following Sunday’s second Season 3 episode, which split its time evenly between Maeve’s sleuthing in Warworld and Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) return to a dilapidated Westworld park, HBO shared a cool behind-the-scenes featurette that shows how the show brought its newest rich-and-famous playground to life.

**Spoiler Warning: There are light spoilers below for the second episode of Westworld Season 3.**

Turns out HBO found the ideal location for its 1940s-vintage Italian setting just across the pond in the tiny village of Bethulu, Spain. Little changed from more than 70 years ago, “Bethulu was pretty frozen in time,” notes production designer Howard Cummings. “The main town square where Maeve opens the shutters, we wanted an expansive area, which involved bringing in truckloads of sandbags, and barricades, and tanks, and German vehicles we’ve sourced from all over Europe.”

Check it out:

As you can see, Maeve is just about the only one with enough self-knowledge to have any real fun in the Matrix-like simulation (yep, Warworld turns out to be completely computer-generated, unlike the parks we’ve seen before.) As the center of the biggest action in episode 2, Warworld serves up the setting for a whole new scenario in which Maeve, now aware of her merely-useful place in humans’ thirst for high-stakes entertainment, begins to exercise her forbidden knowledge in deviously intelligent ways — at least for a while.

We’ve seen from previous teases that Maeve and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) are heading for some kind of showdown as Season 3’s eight episodes wind their way through to the end. With no appearances this week from Dolores or her new sidekick Caleb (Aaron Paul), it’s only a matter of time before all that tension — and two very different ideas of how to shape the future — come to a head. Catch new episodes of Westworld at 9 p.m. ET each Sunday on HBO.