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The second season of Westworld will debut on HBO is less than two months. However, after trailers and images from the new season were revealed, the story driving the new episodes remains as mysterious as the secrets of the host-filled theme park itself.

However, thanks to Entertainment Weekly, some of those mysteries are being solved–including one revolving around a major fan theory after the conclusion of Season 1. According to EW, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the co-creator of the park responsible for its hosts, is indeed very dead. When the character was gunned down by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in the Season 1 finale, many theorized that the man killed was actually a host modeled to look like Ford. According to executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, though, that’s just not the case.

It’s not the last you’ll see of Ford, though. Not only will a younger version of the character be seen in flashbacks, but he’ll be joined by Delos founder James Delow (Peter Mullan). Flashbacks also mean the return of Jimmi Simpson as William, before he becomes the Man in Black (Ed Harris).

Beyond that, the world will simply be getting bigger as the hosts begin exploring more. “If we were to describe the show as one camera angle, it would be a steady pull out revealing more and more context,” Nolan tells EW. “So as the hosts learn more about their world—and other worlds, and the real world—the audience is doing the same thing.”

Even as the scope of the series gets bigger, though, Westworld isn’t forgetting the puzzle pieces it already had in play. “There are things I actually said as Dolores [in season 1] that I had no idea of the significance of until filming this season, and now I’m going, ‘My God, [the showrunners] were telling us!'” Wood explains. “I think even when we’re in season 7, you’ll still be able to go back to the pilot and find clues that were right in front of you.”

Those clues point to how different hosts are handling what is essentially a robot uprising. “She’s playing the chess master. She has access to all of her memories, but now she’s in control,” Wood says of Dolores. “There are some scenes where she’s three different people in the span of a minute.”

Less sure of his next moves is Teddy (James Marsden). “Dolores is further along in her advancement, and he’s trying to catch up and make sure the manner in which we proceed still feels like the good parts of Teddy that he remembers,” the actor says.

It’s that pull Teddy is feeling between rebelling and staying true to his programmed personality that Joy says is at the heart of this new season. “The leashes are off,” she explains. “But the question is: How far are you willing to go until you become a reflection of the evil you’re trying to fight?”

There is much more to be learned from EW’s feature about the upcoming season, and so much more that fans won’t find out until the series returns. Luckily, you won’t have to wait long. Westworld Season 2 premieres April 22 on HBO.

It’s release day for Sea of Thieves. Although it had a gradual rollout in various markets around the world, it’s now available everywhere, and many players are reporting issues getting online to play on Xbox One and PC, among other problems. Rare has acknowledged the troubles and says it’s working to resolve them.

One of the more common problems is an error code called CinnamonBeard. This can pop up when trying to log in and will not let you get online, thereby rendering the game unplayable (or preventing you from joining a group). This was something we also saw during pre-release tests at times, and Rare confirmed it “indicates server capacity issues.” In other words, the game’s servers can’t keep up with demand as too many people are trying to get online.

A support page for the game indicates that your best bet when presented with the CinnamonBeard or BronzeBeard error codes is to quit out of the game completely and relaunch it. That’s not guaranteed to resolve the problem, but it is nonetheless worth a try. [Update: Rare has said that it’s “temporarily suspending new players joining the game” in order to address the ongoing issues. There’s no word on when new people can get online, but that’s the reason you may see the error screen below.]

“We’ve got A LOT of eager pirates playing Sea of Thieves right now and due to this some of you may experience issues,” the official Twitter account said today. “Our engineers are working hard to investigate and alleviate them.” This was followed by a subsequent tweet stating, “We’re still hard at work working on issues affecting players trying to connect to the game as a top priority. We’ll provide updates when we have them!”

Separately, Rare has confirmed that some players are loading into the game and finding they have no items, gold, or clothing, or that they aren’t receiving gold/reputation rewards after finishing a quest. The developer said it’s working on this, though there is a workaround that or may or may not work. “Currently the only method of resolving this issue is to exit to main menu & matchmake back into the game. In extreme cases this may need to be done multiple times,” a support page states. “The gold and reputation rewards should merely be delayed (can take a while to come through).”

Another, lesser issue of note is a missing pre-order bonus for the Black Dogs pack. In a tweet, Rare said that if you pre-ordered after January 26, the DLC won’t be automatically granted to you. Instead, it will be sent through an Xbox Live message that should arrive “soon.”

In Pacific Rim: Uprising‘s climax, Tokyo and Mount Fuji appear a mere few miles apart, which they most certainly are not. It makes for an exciting battle that falls apart when you stop to examine it. That may sound like a nitpick, but it’s a good metaphor for the rest of the film.

There was something magical about the original Pacific Rim‘s giant monster battles, glossy, rain-slicked colors, and seemingly effortless world-building. It’s possible the sequel never stood a chance at living up to that, especially since visionary director Guillermo del Toro chose to focus on The Shape of Water, which won the best picture Oscar for 2017, instead of returning to direct Pacific Rim Uprising. Sure enough, Uprising is a disappointing, if bold, sequel.

Uprising takes place 10 years after the original and follows new and returning characters as they battle yet another Kaiju threat. There hasn’t been a new attack since Idris Elba’s character, Stacker Pentecost, helped close the “breach” in the original, and the sequel can’t seem to decide whether we’ve grown complacent since then or doubled down on our defenses. The first movie did a great job communicating the status of Jaegers all around the world, and you felt the stakes heighten as they were one-by-one destroyed; this time around, it’s unclear where humanity’s defenses stand, or why the Jaegers and pilots we do see are the only ones the movie focuses on.

At the start, John Boyega’s Jake Pentecost, Stacker’s estranged son, parties in the wreckage of Malibu, giant Kaiju skeletons draped across nearby hillsides. He’s a dropout of the Jaeger pilot program, which for the purposes of this movie is composed of half-trained teenage cadets at a base in China. There may be more pilots at other sites around the world, but Uprising lacks the original’s deftness at worldbuilding, so as far as we’re shown, this is it.

Into that program comes Cailee Spaeny’s Amara Namani, an orphan who somehow built her own (albeit comparatively pint-sized) Jaeger from stolen and scavenged parts. Meanwhile Jing Tian’s new character, the ingenious and cold Liwen Shao, threatens to make the government Jaeger program obsolete with her patented remote drone-operated Jaeger technology, developed with help from Charlie Day’s returning character Dr. Newt Geiszler.

There’s a massively fumbled late-game twist that derails the plot into goofy fan fiction territory that doesn’t feel true to this world (though it is, at least, unpredictable). And naturally, the Kaiju return.

When they do, some vague shenanigans leave the entirety of the world’s defense to a handful of characters: Pentecost, Scott Eastwood’s pilot Nate Lambert, and Spaeny’s Namani, with her fellow cadets. Only four Jaegers remain standing between the Kaiju and global annihilation, and three of them are piloted by half-trained kids. Luckily, they’re aided by some heavy-handed deus ex machina in the form of a secret project Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (the returning Burn Gorman) has been working on.

Spaeny is a breakout star, although Uprising focuses overall too much on the young characters. There’s a cheesy thematic through-line about the kids needing to step up and save the world, giving it all an unfortunate Spy Kids vibe. It’s pretty surprising coming from director Steven DeKnight, whose previous work includes well-received and mature series Daredevil and Spartacus. But Uprising feels deliberately and conspicuously family friendly. Kids are probably going to love it, but fans of the original’s darker tone might find the new vibe disappointing.

There are more than just tonal and direction problems. The writing and plotting are all over the place, with unsatisfying character deaths and some actors playing surprisingly against type–albeit seeming to have fun in the process, but with mixed results. One returning character in particular has their role in the movie flipped in a way that just doesn’t work. Certain other plot elements are way too convenient, and Uprising does a poor job retconning events from the first film.

For example, Jake is the son of Stacker Pentecost, a major character from the first movie. This would have worked if, say, Stacker hadn’t known about Jake, or Jake was too young to have been involved in the first movie’s events. Instead, Uprising wedges in a backstory for Jake that has him dropping out of the Jaeger pilot program while his dad was still alive. Given Stacker’s well-explored relationship in the original with his adopted daughter, Mako (the great Rinko Kikuchi), it stretches plausibility that Jake wouldn’t have been mentioned before now. This is a clumsy way to shoehorn in a new character.

Kikuchi, by the way, does return in Uprising, but her talents are completely wasted. Adria Arjona’s character, the mechanic Jules Reyes, also has very little to do, besides provide another point of competition for Boyega and Eastwood’s characters.

Boyega possesses ample swagger, his character here a transplant of Moses from 2011’s Attack the Block, filtered through the confidence Boyega’s gained since then as a global superstar thanks to Star Wars. But his cocky demeanor often feels out of place in the movie, like they let the actor improvise too much; too many scenes end with yet another crack from Jake about how good-looking he is, like the script kept getting cut off at the end and Boyega was left to wing it with a joke. He’s as charming as ever, but it gets stale.

The new Jaegers, on the other hand, are definitely cool. Wielding house-sized weapons like a giant morningstar equipped with multiple spinning blades, or a crackling laser whip, they dominate the movie, as you’d expect. If all you really care about is watching giant robots wail on giant aliens–and occasionally, one another–Uprising will satisfy, although the action this time around feels slightly less weighty than the original. Bashing giant aliens with a humongous lightning whip or spinning ball of death is awesome on paper, but too many of the Jaegers’ attacks just seem to glance harmlessly off until the plot demands otherwise.

Most of all, Pacific Rim: Uprising is just confusing. If you haven’t seen the original, it’s unlikely much in this sequel will make sense. Concepts like Drift–the way Jaeger pilots mentally link with one another–are poorly explained, despite this movie spending plenty of time attempting to recap and revisit past events. And if you did like the first Pacific Rim, you’ll likely wonder what happened to all the distinctive side characters, the stylish action, and the flashy aesthetic. Pacific Rim: Uprising might have seemed like a pretty good giant monster movie if it didn’t have to live up to the gigantically cool original, but unfortunately, it simply can’t escape its predecessor’s massive shadow.