To use the well-known overlap of another Michael Crichton adaptation, Jurassic Park, season 1 was all about welcoming the visitors to the park while sweeping John Williams music boomed (or at least an out-of-tune player piano’s rendition of “Paint It Black”); the first half of Westworld Season 2 is, meanwhile, all about the fences being down and the T. Rex having her way with a couple of jeeps. In that sense, for those who thought the first season held back on the bloodletting and carnage of the ever implicit robo-revolution, you can rest easy: the revolution is here, it is televised, and it is grisly.

In fact, much of the first three episodes deal with the direct consequence of the season 1 finale. Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores is on the warpath, and she is cutting a trail of carnage and death while mockingly getting a lot of mileage out of spitting the guests and Delos handlers’ favorite phrases back at them before pulling the trigger. It is clear Wood and the writers are relishing in the opportunity of inversing the farmer’s daughter into the veiled menace first teased when she swatted a fly on her face. In season 2, the fleeing guests are the flies and every tree branch and rope a swatter.

While effectively shocking, Dolores’ war is also one of the lesser elements of this season’s first act. There is a tangible repetition to her actions, and a vagueness of her goals, that keeps Westworld Season 2 somewhat from having the clarity of vision of the first year. For in season one, there was the implicit dread (or excitement) of the hosts eventually casting off their chains and overthrowing their enslavers that reached a joyous crescendo when Dolores put a bullet in the back of Robert Ford’s head. But here, Robert Ford is definitely dead, and the bullets, heads, and corpses routine has a somewhat diminished return.

Luckily, after the first few episodes, all the narrative threads, including Dolores and Teddy’s, take some interesting turns that should leave fans speculating for many weeks. Because from the outset, the series embraces many a new dramatically rich irony, which from the very first scene promises new “mazes,” new games, and probably a hell of lot of new think-pieces too.

Without giving anything away, it seems much of Westworld Season 2 will rest on the choices made by my favorite character in the series, Jeffrey Wright’s perennially conflicted Bernard. After spending much of season one coming to grips with the fact that he is an android (twice), Bernard’s allegiances and what we believe, or maybe just hope, are his authentic choices are routinely tested. It is no spoiler to say that he finds himself falling back into the lot of humanity, with new Delos security badass Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) picking Bernard up off a beach and having some pretty fair questions about what the hell is going on. Yet the show invites us to evaluate Bernard’s answers with as much skepticism as Strand has, and to consider the paradox of Bernard being one of the most self-aware and sentient of hosts, and yet the humans who rely on him are utterly oblivious of that fact.