9. Will there be so many mysteries this time around?
This is the biggest question of all. Season One came with all the clues, twists, and meta-mindgames you’d expect from a show co-created by J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan, whose puzzle-box projects include Lost, the Cloverfield franchise, Memento and The Prestige between them. (The third member of the trinity, Lisa Joy, has a track record of more straightforward storytelling.) All that code-cracking, flash-backing, and maze-running kept YouTubers and Redditors busy for months. But sometimes the trickery got in the way of what otherwise would have been a cracking yarn about machines struggling to become sentient, the sadistic humans who made them that way and the weird war between them.

Maybe it’s foolish to expect an old host to learn new tricks. But if the Season Two trailers – full of half-built robotic bulls, menacing fleshless android skeletons and Evan Rachel Wood on horseback straight-up murking dudes – are any indication, Westworld has pulpy power to spare. With the secrets of the Maze, the Man in Black and Ford’s new narrative finally solved, could the show embrace the joys of sci-fi/fantasy/action genre storytelling that have worked so well for shows from Game of Thrones to Breaking Bad, without ever dumbing them down?

I’ll be covering Westworld for Rolling Stone again this year, starting with this piece on the big questions left over from Season One; the question above is really the only one that matters.

Tags: horror, reviews, Rolling Stone, TV, TV reviews, westworld

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