No one knows the secrets of HBO’s Westworld like Redditors — save, perhaps, the show’s creators themselves. During the first season, members of the show’s designated sub, r/Westworld, managed to guess nearly every major plot twist weeks before they played out on screen.
With season two of Westworld fast approaching, The Outline called up two of r/Westworld’s most prolific posters — u/griffton and u/audiosemipro — in order to get the down low on what to expect in the coming episodes.
Warning: This article is chock-full of spoilers for Westworld season one. Interviews have been lightly edited and condensed.
Hi guys, thanks for speaking with me. Let’s jump right in. What questions do you hope will be answered in this season of Westworld?
u/audiosemipro: I think some of the big questions that they haven’t answered are: What’s outside of Westworld? We don’t know really what life is like, if it’s even really on Earth or anything like that.
u/griffton: The most interesting question that the first season left open was about what is going on with the hosts and whether they are truly sentient, or is that just another layer of programming — and what it means is if they are truly conscious, for humanity and artificial intelligence and all that.
I was talking to a friend about Westworld the other day and they said “Oh, well the one thing I’m happy about is that is that they didn’t try and make this whole question of consciousness the main point of the show,” and I was like, have we been watching the same show?
u/griffton: Yeah, but they do leave it pretty subtextual. You have to be thinking about it. It’s not telling me what to think about the topic, it’s more bringing up the topic so you can think about it yourself.
One of the things that’s made the season so enjoyable to watch and follow along with on Reddit was that sort of ‘show don’t tell’ line of thinking also applied to some of the show’s biggest plot twists
u/griffton: They definitely gave just enough [detail] that I don’t think it’s that surprising that some people figured it out, but it wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t something where everyone was sure before anything happened
u/audiosemipro: That’s just how the show was made. Everything is intentional, to the smallest details. Some of the evidence for that [multiple timeline theory] thing was that the label on the milk can that rolled into Dolores hand was different [from scene to scene.] And so, like anything you see you could potentially be true because they’re crazy about making this show. I mean, I’ve really got to hand it to them for really being committed to it.
Do you have any particularly wild theories or predictions for season two?
u/griffton: At the end of last season, we saw Maeve seem to kind of go off of her programming and lead this host rebellion. And I’ve seen this theory out there, and I think it has some merit, that she’s actually just on another loop created by Ford, and that this whole host rebellion is actually a new storyline in a way.
u/audiosemipro: I think we’re definitely seeing more worlds. I think that’s going to be really cool. I think Dolores is actually going to be really kind of a killer because they kind of set her up as being the good guy, but her character is essentially like the gunslinger in Westworld — the movie, the original one from years ago — who was actually the bad guy.
u/griffton: The other big twist that everyone thinks is likely, and might even be too obvious, is that the Ford that we saw killed at the end of season one is actually a host and that he’s actually just safe and alive somewhere.
u/audiosemipro: Another thing is Peter Abernathy [i.e., Dolores’ father, who lost his mind after finding that photo of the woman in Times Square]. He, you know, went psycho, and he got all that shit put in his head from Charlotte [Hale, the young Delos board member] trying to get the Delos data out. He could turn out to be some Terminator-esque like super robot because he has access to the entirety of Delos’ data. He could, you know, create an army or whatever, because he has the capability.
Any last thoughts as we near the big premiere?
u/griffton: I mean, I thought the first season was so good and the twists were so interesting and compelling that I can’t imagine that second season will be dull.
u/audiosemipro: I don’t know how they’re going to top [the last season]. The first season worked really well because they kept it super ambiguous, but I know at this point people are expecting really crazy stuff.
