Westworld's creators want to give all of season 2's secrets to Reddit ahead of time
The first season of HBO’s Westworld was all about mazes within mazes, with a twisty plot that partly relied on the audience not figuring out solutions too far ahead of the characters on the show. Of course, the internet being what it is, a lot of fans figured out those solutions anyway, with some theories eventually gaining so much steam that the show lost a little bit of its punch when they were proven to be right. For season two, showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have come up with a ridiculous scheme to make sure the internet doesn’t inadvertently spoil Westworld, though, and they’re going to do it by spoiling Westworld before anyone else can.
They dropped that reveal on Reddit, naturally, explaining in an AMA (via The Verge) that they’re planning to give the Westworld subreddit “a video that lays out the plot (and twists and turns) of season two.” The idea is that the members of the Westworld fan community can then use all of the spoilers they learn from the video to protect viewers who want to avoid spoilers, since they’ll be able to “distinguish between what’s ‘theory’ and what’s spoiler.” Essentially, Joy and Nolan are handing out the answers to the test ahead of time so everyone can figure out who’s cheating.
This somewhat ridiculous scheme was partly inspired by the readers of George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire books, many of whom quietly and quickly agreed to police spoilers when the Game Of Thrones TV show took off. Anyone could go on the internet and see what would happen in the first few seasons of Game Of Thrones, but as Joy and Nolan explain, the fans “rallied around and protected the secrets of the narrative in part because they already knew those secrets.”
That being said, it could easily still turn the entire second season of Westworld into the opening night of a Star Wars movie, when every asshole on social media decides to have a good laugh by telling everyone that Han Solo dies. It requires an outrageous level of optimism to actually put faith in the internet in 2018, so Nolan and Joy are also wisely putting this scheme in the hands of the Westworld fan community. As they explained on Reddit, they’ll only release the video if their post on Reddit can get 1,000 upvotes, and it’s currently fluctuating between 150 and 250. It’s probably too early to call this vote, but it seems like Westworld fans want their secrets to stay secret for now.
In other Westworld news that is not quite big enough to count as a spoiler, Joy and Nolan have also offered some information on Shogun World—the samurai-themed park that they spent a lot of time pretending wasn’t real even though we all saw it in the first season finale. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, they teased that one Shogun World-centric episode will be almost entirely in Japanese, with the goal being to make it feel like “a totally different world.”
Wether it all gets spoiled or not, Westworld will return to HBO on April 22.