![]() Nolan, Joy, and their collaborators seem to have multiplied the number of self-referential lines that speculate on the nature of Westworld and Westworld. Most of the robots can’t wait to kill their human creators, and now that the park’s human caretakers are either dead, captive, or on the run, robots who’ve been damaged or snuffed out might not be repaired immediately or at all. Both those stipulations have now been amended. The humans, meanwhile, were safe, because the robots had been programmed to limit their injury of guests and never kill them. Season one’s graphically bloody human-on-robot violence became tedious once you realized that robot characters who’d been killed never stayed dead, and therefore any emotions you experienced at the sight of their injury or murder were misplaced. The Man in Black repeatedly announces that, thanks to the revolt, the stakes of the “game” that is Westworld (and presumably also the show that is Westworld) have been raised in a way that makes the entire thing more interesting. ![]() Season two doubles down on the show’s meta tendencies. Westworld Creators Release Video ‘Spoiling’ All of Season Two Season one climaxed with a robot uprising - essentially a slave revolt à la the Blade Runner films, Ex Machina, and other robot-driven sci-fi - that promised a war-driven second season and answered complaints that the robot characters (the women, especially) were too passive. This in turn meant that season one amounted to a cleverly structured ten-hour exposition dump telling us how all of the major human characters came to be who they were, spelling out the relationships of android characters (including Thandie Newton’s Maeve, Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores, and James Marsden’s Teddy) to their past lives/story lines, and revealing that a key player we assumed was human, Jeffrey Wright’s scientist Bernard, was a robot too - a replicant version of Arnold, partner of the park’s creator, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). Two characters whom viewers might have initially assumed were different people - the scowling, bloodthirsty Man in Black (Ed Harris) and the seemingly kindhearted William (Jimmi Simpson) - were thus revealed as older and younger versions of the same character. They realized that - like so many movies co-written by Nolan with his director brother, Christopher - Westworld was playing tricks with chronology, telling a story set in the past and another set in the present and juxtaposing them via parallel editing so that they seemed to be happening at the same time. Watch: How Close Are We To Real-Life Westworld Robots? Annoyed by fans’ preemptive disclosure of major plot twists during season one, he promised to spoil all the major developments of season two in advance, then released what amounted to a cryptic extended trailer, as if to say, “If you geniuses can figure out anything definite from this, congratulations - you win.” It was a delayed retaliation for the Great Timeline Deduction of 2016, which saw untold numbers of Westworld fans work together on social media and in online forums to predict how the first season would end before it could actually, y’know, end. The culmination (so far) was Nolan’s trolling of Redditors during an “Ask Me Anything” appearance a week before the series’ return. ![]() ![]() Viewer reaction was inevitable considering the kind of show Westworld is: the TV-drama equivalent of a magician who explains the trick he’s about to do, by way of setting up another trick, all the while daring you to see both tricks, plus anything else he’s got up his sleeve. Not since Lost, the granddaddy of modern TV Easter-egg hunts, have the showrunners of a major drama tried so hard to outsmart and outplay their fan base, much of which treats the series as a game to be mastered or a puzzle to be solved. ![]() The show’s relationship with its fans is as compelling as anything happening on the screen and often feels like an extension of it. It’s constantly explaining itself to us, analyzing itself, deconstructing itself, to the point where recapping it seems as pointless as pushing the down button for an elevator that’s already one floor away. Where most so-called prestige dramas pride themselves on building narratives that are layered with meaning, Westworld seems to assume that the layering itself provides all the meaning we could want or need. In a medium that rarely suffers a dearth of programs satisfying one or more of those criteria, that’s an accomplishment - however dubious in certain ways - and the sheer ambition of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s feat compels a wary respect. HBO’s science-fiction puzzler Westworld is the most humorless drama on TV right now, the most narratively complicated (sometimes overcomplicated), the most self-aware, and one of the most lavishly produced. ![]()
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