anthony hopkins

The 2017 Emmy Awards have brought us one of our biggest wins yet. After winning in another category last year, Sterling K. Brown has taken home another statue for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama for This Is Us.

Transformers: The Last Knight has everything: bad Optimus Prime, King Arthur, planets crashing into other planets, giant flying machines, a robot dinosaur (hey there, Grimlock), Anthony Hopkins somehow taking it all seriously. A new clip featured on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, introduces Hopkins’ character, along with Laura Haddock as an Oxford professor, and their loyal assistant Cogman(!).

With the recent announcement that Transformers: The Last Knight would be hitting theaters two days earlier  —  moving from Friday, June 23 to Wednesday, June 21  —  fans are closer than ever to seeing their favorite Autobots (and humans) throw down against a reluctantly evil Optimus Prime. This is the summer of heel turns by beloved franchise characters; first we saw Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto betray his family in The Fate of the Furious, and now we’re counting down the days until Optimus Prime stabs Bumblebee in the face. Rough summer for heroes, it would seem.

It’s big, it’s loud, it’s here: feast your eyes on the first trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight! After a truly weird production period that involved dragons, King Arthur, igniting the ire of British vets by dressing up Winston Churchill’s childhood home as a Nazi headquarters, and the usual level of Bayhem, we finally have our very first glimpse of the fifth installment in the inexplicably popular franchise.

At long last, HBO’s Westworld finally unfurled its major mysteries by Season 1 finale “The Bicameral Mind,” opening the door to a year’s worth of speculation before Season 2. Even so, producers tease that Ford’s new narrative will be “defined by chaos” in Season 2, which itself will explore “the dawn of consciousness.”

Okay, so I guess William got that mole of his taken off at some point? Who knew he was so into cosmetic surgery? He should have gotten some plugs for that bald head of his while he was at it.

Or a little trauma can be deceptive. Tonight’s episode of Westworld, “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” named after a famous composition by Johann Sebastian Bach, showed both. For some characters, trauma opens their eyes to the reality that they’ve deliberately avoided. For others, trauma blocks them from discovering a truth.

Looking back at my recaps of Westworld’s first season to date, I find that I am very bad at theories. I’m not great at creating them and I’m not great at debunking them. I pretty much dismissed the “William is the Man in Black” theory right off the bat, but the show itself has left enough wiggle room that it could still be true. While I’m not entirely convinced that’s the way the show is headed, it does seem increasingly likely that the accompanying theory that the show’s narrative exists simultaneously yet invisibly in multiple timelines is true. (Then again, now that I’m saying this, that could negate the whole thing. I’m like the George Costanza of Westworld theories. When I say something could happen, you should assume the opposite will.)

Tonight’s Westworld, “Trompe L’Oeil,” concluded with maybe the show’s biggest bombshell to date: Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), the head of programming Westworld’s artificial hosts and the right-hand man to its director and creator, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), was revealed as a robot. It calls into question just about everything Bernard’s said, done, or thought in the previous six episodes, along with some of the seeming truths about Westworld and its reality. So who exactly is Bernard Lowe and what does his true identity mean for the future of the show? Here are three different possibilities about his backstory:

One scene really stood out to me on this week’s Westworld. Robo-madam Maeve (Thandie Newton), one of the Hosts in the Western park who is beginning to develop consciousness, suddenly remembers one of the many times she’s been killed. She also has a vision of a terrifying man in a white and red suit, pulling her away, performing surgery on her, tossing her body in a hap of others. She draws the figure on a piece of paper, then goes to hide it under the floorboards in her room where she discovers a pile of similar slips of paper, indicating she’s played this scenario out over and over again.

Michael Crichton’s 1973 sci-fi film is something of a cult classic, offering an early blueprint for Jurassic Park with its tale of scientists playing God and an ill-advised theme park run amok (seriously, what on earth happened during Crichton’s family vacations?). Similarly, Crichton’s campy romp through a futuristic resort serves as a blueprint for HBO’s Westworld, which takes a more thoughtful and unsettling approach in its inversion of the ’73 film, presenting the A.I. (or “hosts”) as the protagonists of the series.

It’s been plenty rough-going for HBO’s Westworld adaptation, but the newest trailer gives us much greater hope than that ambiguous fall premiere. Take in a revamp of the 1973 classic with the newest teaser for HBO and Jonathan Nolan’s dark odyssey.