Warning: Full spoilers for the Westworld: Season 1 finale follow.
Westworld’s first season has come to a close, and suffice to say, fans can’t wait to see what happens next – though they will indeed have to wait, unfortunately, as the show isn’t likely to rerurn until 2018 for Season 2. In the meantime though, I spoke to the show’s creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy – who co-wrote the season finale, with Nolan directing as well – to discuss the big reveals that occurred and what it means for the future.
Nolan and Joy weighed in on what we learned, what it could mean and more, including how they felt that some of their big reveals were being predicted online by a passionate group of Westworld fan theorists.
IGN: I know you guys are going to have to evade some of my questions but I'm going to try, dammit! It felt like Ford was obviously very aware of what was about to happen at the end, but we should not take it that he in any way programmed Dolores to kill him, right? This was still her decision; just one that he was pretty sure was going to happen?
Jonathan Nolan: Yeah, or otherwise it betrays his point. There's a distinction there -- and it's a distinction that we're fascinated with and have been from the beginning -- between dictating someone's behavior and understanding it. And understanding it to a sort of grandiose level. That sort of plays in the space of fate and predestination and all these sorts of interesting things which are somewhat metaphysical with human beings, although not necessarily -- and we'll get back to that -- but with hosts are very literal. They're programmed to do things. And even within the program space in which they are improvising, in theory there's a sense, especially if you're the creator, in knowing where that's going to go… It's a conundrum of generating a truly random number generator, which is an interesting problem within mathematics and programming, because you need random numbers to have truly random behavior. It's actually very difficult. But yeah, in this moment, we're playing here with the distinction between Ford controlling what's going to happen and Ford understanding what's going to happen.
IGN: Let me get out of the way, because it’s already been a theory from some fans - could there have been any host swap shenanigans or can you say that that was definitely the real Ford at the end?
Nolan: That was definitely a real Ford.
IGN: Of course, the reveal about Ford leads us down other paths and questions. Should we assume he is behind re-programming Maeve?
Nolan: That's the strong implication of her storyline, is that it has been a feature of his overall plan here. Bernard has shown us -- and I'm sure all the lovely people over at Reddit have transcribed -- the programming of her plan. And the next step of her plan is not what she does at the end of the finale. What we're seeing there is both the kind of gut-wrenching realization that so much of the journey we've been on with her has been facilitated by Ford, who has apparently re-programmed her storyline toward a different narrative and also facilitated the overall security system cutting her a little a slack and letting her slide by. He has total control over this place, he's so absolute. We want to believe that what's happening here is free will and that belief is challenged. For me, that last moment with Maeve where she decides to get back off the train... We changed our approach in terms of shooting it. Everything that's taken her onto the train throughout the entire season has been steady cam or studio mode, and when she makes that decision and we pull her back on the train and for the first time and for the first time in the series, we're seeing handheld photography, which begins to suggest that we're entering a new phase with them. We just want to underline that visually a little bit.
IGN: Before we move on, you did say “apparently” Ford is the one who reprogrammed her, so is there wiggle room there going into the next season?
Nolan: I just don't think the audience should assume anything.
IGN: You mentioned Reddit in relation to the show. This the era of not just the internet but of social media and message boards and crowdsourcing theories. The show had a lot of fan enthusiasm from the second it premiered with everyone theorizing about it. Was the downside of that that some people are going to come up with the right answers? Did it bother you or did you kind of expect it going along the way?
Nolan: No, it's incredibly gratifying and exciting when people are... I mean, what you're doing there is writing in a language and code simultaneously for both the small portion of the audience -- which I fit into -- that loves to play with it and who loves to do the math on that and also the larger audience, equipping them so that when the turn comes, when Dolores realizes that she's made this tragic mistake of conflating two moments in her life and one person as two people, that it makes sense. That they felt it on a gut level. So a lot of things that are layered in there are for people to absorb on a subconscious level, and you know there is a certain portion of the audience absorbing it on a conscious level. I think the only bummer was that thought that was coming out of Reddit then finding its way not into articles, because for my entire career I've been lucky that people have spent the time to write articles about, "Hey, what's really happening in this film or this series?" That's incredibly gratifying and lucky for me. But usually that stuff is under a sort of spoiler heading. Here, it was trickier because these are theories and in so many of these shows the theories don't really add up to much. Here they add up to everything. The difference between a theory and a spoiler is tricky. Again, the only bummer for us was then seeing some of those "theories" winding up in headlines where the audience can't possibly avoid that.
Something that we're hoping in the second season is we might generally encourage reading about the show and writing about the show -- now that we all know that yes, the things we're putting in the show definitely always add up to something -- to try to help the audience protect that. Ironically, if we'd written these things as novels first, a la Game of Thrones, the audience would know that they weren't theories and would be helping protecting that experience for the rest of the audience.
IGN: That's very true.
Nolan: Maybe we'll write the next season as a novel first and then the show after. [Laughs]
IGN: You guys had the super fun reveal of this other park with the SW initials. Is it Samurai World, Shogun World? And did you know from the start you where going to introduce other parks just as the film had?
Nolan: We knew from the beginning we were going to introduce other parks. We knew from the beginning because the beautiful playful, somewhat incestual relationship between the great westerns and the great easterns of the '50s and '60s -- specifically, the Kurosawa films that were then remade as Magnificent Seven and all the delicious, my favorite Sergio Leone westerns, Jumbo becoming a A Fistful of Dollars, etc. Given the nature, the meta nature of the narrative here, that it had to be… That Shogun would have to be the next world that we stepped into. Also, my personal collection of samurai swords was always something we could use.
IGN: So Shogun World? Is that the name?
Nolan: You'll have to stay tuned.
IGN: Elsie and Stubbs' fates were very ambiguous when last we left off with them. Are those two questions that we might get answers to fairly quickly in the next season?
Lisa Joy: Yeah, I think in the next season we'll definitely be exploring any loose ends that were left. Stubbs and Elsie are some of our favorite characters and so we deserve to know what happened to them, and we will.
IGN: We know the basics now, but there are still specifics about William and Logan as young men left unexplained. Will Jimmi [Simpson] and Ben [Barnes] be a part of the show next season now that we know the true nature of who William is?
Joy: [Dramatic pause] I think we're going to have to wait and see.
IGN: "Dramatic pause" is going in the article for that one.
Joy: He could ride that horse naked for… I don't know [how long]! [Laughs]
IGN: The way the season ended with this double whammy of Dolores and Maeve's actions, even if things are contained quickly, it’s hard to imagine business as usual at the park next season. Safe to say a different dynamic is coming?
Joy: I think any time you think that on this show something might be business as usual, go the opposite direction.
IGN: Now that we’ve seen how the park functions, are you excited to can approach things from a very angle?
Joy: Yeah, I think the possibilities of experimentation and reinvention in this series is part of what drew us to Westworld. It all happened from a very organic place. The first season was devoted to the emergent consciousness in these hosts. And now that they have their consciousness, now that they can hear their inner voice speaking to them, the question is, what are they going to do?
IGN: We didn't go outside the park this season, beyond what was beneath it. Will we eventually venture elsewhere?
Joy: I have a lot of faith in the hosts and their ability to unearth the mysteries of their universe in time. The question is just, how much time and which hosts shall blossom first?
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at http://ift.tt/LQFqjj.
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