🚨 Spoilers for Westworld Season 2 Episode 1, "Journey Into Night" below. 🚨
Please give a warm robotic welcome to the Drone Hosts, Westworld's faceless new characters who spend their time lurking around a secret underground bunker and being generally terrifying. But they have feelings too! Maybe!
We meet the Drone Hosts for the very first time during Westworld's Season 2 premiere, and already have a pretty clear idea of their purpose. Here's what we know so far (and note this explainer will obviously be updated as more information about these weird-but-lovable creatures comes to light):
They hang out in an underground lab.
Drone Hosts do not frequent Westworld proper, nor do they even frequent Delos' main Westworld labs. Instead, they live in a secret underground bunker that only Charlotte Hale seems to know about. Even Bernard, who as we know is a top-level Delos employee, has never heard of, nor seen, a Drone Host before.
They're humanoid robots, but...without skin.
Drone Hosts basically seem to be robots one step before they get their final layer of human skin. In other words, they're made of the same milky white material as the rest of their kind, but there's certainly no mistaking them for human.
They're a bit reminiscent of this guy from Season One, only sans face:
They have a very specific job.
Drone Hosts appear to spend their time removing the baseball sized "brain" from regular hosts in order to log video of guest experiences. Bernard also suspects they're gathering human DNA from the hosts—he observes a Drone Host using a Q-tip towards on another host's genitalia in the premiere.
"The Drone Hosts relate to the corporation’s secret project which is hidden in plain sight in this park," Jonathan Nolan explained during an interview in Entertainment Weekly. "As we talked about in the pilot, the park is one thing for the guests, and it’s another thing for its shareholders and management—something completely different. We’ve used the Google analogy—for consumers, it’s for search and email, yet for the company, it’s for advertising."
They're "off network."
The Drone Hosts are "off network," meaning they weren'taeffected by Dolores and Maeve's rebellion, or Ford's new narrative. That said, Charlotte Hale implies that the Drone Hosts can read other people's DNA, and the fact that that Bernard was allowed into the laboratory despite NOT having human DNA makes me think Ford is controlling the narrative in this part of the park as well—meaning the Drone Hosts are (posthumously) under his watch.
For more Drone Host goodness and theories, read our Season 2 premiere recap, then check out more Westworld Season 2 theories below.
Westworld airs Sunday nights at 9 PM on HBO.
