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kottke.org posts about Jonathan Nolan

The full spoilers for season two of Westworld

Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are the creators and producers of HBO’s Westworld. Last night, they released a 25-minute-long video on YouTube that they say contains the full spoilers for season two of the show. (Update: it’s a rickroll. Har har.)

Nolan shared the rationale for the unusual move on Reddit (which I’ve read three times and still don’t understand from a logic perspective):

I greatly enjoyed watching the friendly folks at this subreddit guess the twists and turns of the season.

It creates a larger problem for us, though, in terms of the way your guesswork is reported online. ‘Theories’ can actually be spoilers, and the line between the two is confusing. It’s something we’ve been thinking about since last season. 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 (through season 5).

We thought about this long and hard, and came to a difficult (and potentially highly controversial) decision. If you guys agree, we’re going to post a video that lays out the plot (and twists and turns) of season 2. Everything. The whole sordid thing. Up front. That way the members of the community here who want the season spoiled for them can watch ahead, and then protect the rest of the community, and help to distinguish between what’s ‘theory’ and what’s spoiler.

I have not watched it and won’t1 but from the comments in the thread (spoilers!), it appears legit. Orrrrr, it’s some elaborate troll by Nolan et al. to flood the zone with fake spoilers, to misdirect hardcore fans. Or maybe since Westworld contains many levels of fakes and artifice, I wonder if they’re doing this as part of an ARG, creating another layer of trickery and misdirection for the show? I guess we’ll see!

Update: LOL, I have been duped. SPOILERS: that video is mostly of a dog in front of a piano with the Westworld theme playing. And an olde tyme rendition of Never Gonna Give You Up. Hanging my head in deep shame.

I still believe that it would be cool if the show could somehow work in a release of faux spoilers into the main plot of the show. That would be impressive, more so than another rickroll.

  1. I am not a personal fan of spoilers; I prefer to watch/read/listen to things with as little foreknowledge as possible. But I also feel that good literature and films and TV shows are mostly unspoilable. If the plot is the only thing your book or movie has going for it, it’s probably not very good in the first place. Knowing what Rosebud is or the endings of various Hitchcock thrillers does not take anything away from the mastery of Citizen Kane, Vertigo, or Rear Window. โ†ฉ