Yahoo News Westworld writers already know how it will end
The brilliant brains behind HBO's Westworld have opened up about their plans for the show's endgame.
Speaking last night (June 19) at a screening of season two's finale, showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan revealed that they don't have a set number of seasons in mind for the knotty sci-fi series, but that they already know exactly how it'll wrap up.
"When we were writing the pilot, I pitched a scene to end the entire series on and so far we have not deviated from liking that scene," Joy said.
"As a writer, you never want to tempt a smiting from the TV gods, so we'd never venture to guess how many seasons we will live for. But I do think that there are tentpole moments that we're trying to work towards and hopefully we'll reach our ending in the time that we have."
However long Westworld runs, then, don't expect the show to go the way of Lost, with its many unanswered questions.
"On Lost, they really believed in the 'mystery box' and not looking too much inside of the mystery box," Joy suggested. "It was a kind of idea generator that you didn't need to dissect and open up. and that's an absolutely fascinating and engaging way to tell a story.
"But for us, we are interested in dismantling the mystery box, opening it up, looking at what it is, seeing how it works... and really questioning and exposing that. So each season, the questions that we tee up, we do try to address.
"We have an answer for all of them. We do intend to answer the questions that we set up."
Nolan added that the approach on Westworld is to treat each season like a movie in a film franchise – standalone, but still teeing up the next instalment in the series.
"We don't want to wear out our welcome," he said. "We have no interest in making this show until it hits syndication. We don't want to do this forever. Luckily, we're at a moment in television which you don't have to do that.
"For us, we've approached the logic of making the show a little more like a film franchise, where each season settles its debts for the most part with the audience and sets up some interesting questions for the next season. "
As for Westworld's complicated relationship with fan theories, while Joy insisted she doesn't dive into online speculation, Nolan admitted that he does read some of the conversation surrounding the series.
"I do a little bit of it, to get a sense for whether things are being understood," he said. "And it's fun!"
Westworld's season two finale will air this Sunday at 9/8c on HBO in US, with Sky Atlantic simulcasting the 90-minute episode from 2am in the UK. The finale will also be repeated on Sky Atlantic at 9pm on Monday.
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