I suppose you can’t blame Westworld for trying. The HBO series, which launches its third season on March 15, has had some trouble working its way to the galactic center of the zeitgeist the way its erstwhile sibling, Game of Thrones, did. They are two very different shows, of course—but I do think that HBO hoped Westworld, an expensive series plagued by production problems, would become a similar kind of international watercooler hit. (Remember gathering ‘round the watercooler, before COVID forced us all into isolation?)

Despite decent ratings, Westworld hasn’t permeated the cultural discourse like its Westerosi brethren. Especially not in its second season, which doubled down on the foundational mysteries at the heart of the series—about a futuristic amusement park where rich humans visit their fantasies upon an increasingly conscious population of robots—to sometimes inscrutable effect. Audiences were handed a knot of intricately woven timelines that was pretty hard to untie into coherent strands, on top of having to unpack a black box full of dreamy existential babble about self and soul and autonomy. I really liked the season’s moody, opaque operatics—some episodes were downright stunning—but plenty of people understandably did not. How, then, would Westworld proceed, in perhaps its last chance to become a genuinely big deal?

A strategy is near immediately apparent in Season 3, which explores the world outside the park. (The Season 2 finale gave us a glimpse, in what would have been a perfect series closer, ahem.) The four episodes I’ve seen ramp up the red-meat butt-kicking stuff while uncomplicating the mysteries and motivations that have heretofore guided the series into its enticing abstractions.

This new iteration of the show is, to use a dated word, a bit basic. It’s got some cool sci-fi stuff going on, but the twists and loops have been ironed out to create a smoother surface for more action-movie content. But will the show’s transformation into something more easily legible and digestible be enough to attract new eyeballs? Or should Westworld have not worried so much about an imagined wider audience and just stuck to its six-shooters, delivering a third (and final) season that stood strong in its idiosyncrasy—putting it in the same league not as Game of Thrones, but HBO’s The Leftovers?

At this point, the latter seems like it would have been the wiser—or at least more fulfilling—option. I don’t love this leaner, meaner Westworld. The show suddenly seems so much less sexy and dangerous and alluring than it once did: it’s flat, more obvious, occasionally hokey. It tries a bit too hard to appeal to those who only want a shoot-and-stab-’em-up about sexy robots. Westworld has always been a violent show, one that, quite like its fictional park guests, is a bit turned-on by wanton bloodshed. But the show used to be careful to offset that, at least a little bit, with some horror and revulsion in response to that annihilation. Less so in this new version, which happily makes a monotonously butt-kicking badass out of lead robot Dolores as she charges along on her quest to, I think, destroy humanity.

What the show has smartly retained, for the most part, is its core cast. Evan Rachel Wood manages to find levels within Dolores’s newfound monomania. She’s clever and frightening, satisfyingly shrewd with a jolt of danger. Tessa Thompson, as the robot now pretending to be corporate shark Charlotte Hale, gives off that same purring menace, though she’s given a bit more emotional roundness to work with. Charlotte, or this version of Charlotte, brings to mind the conflicted, confused robots of older Westworld, unsure of her purpose while programmed to pursue it.