I’m sure I’m not the only person approaching the second series of Westworld with a mild degree of trepidation. Because, christ, the last one was a slog. You tuned in anticipating an orgy of nudity and killer robot cowboys, and instead what you got was homework. You didn’t just have to watch Westworld to watch Westworld, you had to painstakingly scour the internet for theories and meanings and explanations. It was less a television programme and more a study in advanced cryptography.
But all might not be lost. In an unprecedented move, Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy just jokingly announced that they’re going to spoil the entire series for everyone before it even begins. In a Reddit AMA, the pair revealed that they were going to post a video that explains the plot of the new run, including all its twists and turns, upfront. If people want to watch it, they can. If they don’t, it isn’t mandatory.
It was a joke – imagine HBO ever letting that happen – but, still, they might be on to something. By blurting out the entire storyline to a key group of slathering superfans, Nolan and Joy predicted that they’d stop the show from being spoiled for everyone else. “The fans of Game of Thrones, for instance, rallied around and protected the secrets of the narrative in part because they already knew those secrets”, they wrote. And, to be fair, this makes sense in a vaguely off-kilter way.
With Game of Thrones, all the information was already on the table before the first episode began. If you wanted to know what happened next, you had a stack of giant books containing all the answers to reference. And, to some extent, this kept a lid on spoilers. The most rabid fans already knew what was coming up, and they trusted the storytelling, so the joy of the show came from the anticipation of seeing the books translated to screen, rather than discovering the next big narrative beat.
It’s only when the show outpaced the books that spoilers became a real problem. Now we have Game of Thrones fans constantly swarming around the sets with long-lens cameras, shooting grainy images of characters interacting for the internet to devour, because they no longer have the books to act as a crutch. People are figuring out what happens next on their own, and the show is suffering as a result.
So in that sense, the Westworld video felt quite clever. If all the information is already out there, then viewers have a choice. If you want to experience the show as it was designed to be experienced, the video is something for you to avoid. But if you want to get in deep from the outset, watching it will stop you from spinning out into the sort of elaborate fan theories that once threatened to derail Lost.
But that’s as far as the plan would get. To truly get ahead of Game of Thrones, you had to first read five colossal, densely-written fantasy novels. That’s a huge investment, which is why fans of the books felt so protective of the show. If Westworld wanted to spoil the series by publishing a complicated fantasy novel, that’s one thing. But a video is a different beast. There is no investment to watching an internet video. It takes no time, and it means nothing. It simply doesn’t inspire the same level of proprietorship.
Still, I do sort of wish that Nolan and Joy would bite the bullet and release the video. Especially in the age of Peak TV. There’s such an immense glut of shows to be consumed this year that I’d take any shortcut I can just to keep up. My time is stretched beyond all measure, and Westworld is such a tonally flat slog of obfuscated meaning, that a spoiler video would save me so much time. He’s a robot, she’s a real person, he’s a robot who think he’s a person because he was designed by a robot. There are gunfights and exponentially more breasts than penises. Bang bang bang. I’m all caught up. Now I’ve got more time for MasterChef. Jonathan, Lisa, do the decent thing. Release the video.
