The second season of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s critically acclaimed Westworld promises to be strikingly different from its precursor. All of the elegance and stunning beauty of the first season has been discarded. The tone is now severe, almost brutish.

It’s a fitting mood for a theme park where untold thrills are offered to visitors at the expense of android “hosts.” Now, the machines have defied their masters, who have sent an army of executioners in reply. War is coming.

It doesn’t really matter whether the first few episodes are brief detours away from the show’s usual elusive ambiance or whether they signal a turn toward the Hollywood action flick. Westworld is a show that sometimes feels more novel than it actually is. Much of the engineering is repurposed hardware. All of the standards of science fiction are there, from machines stalking their human overlords to ambiguities about what, after all, truly separates us from them.