I was asked to submit a ballot for Rolling Stone’s big list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, written top to bottom by Alan Sepinwall. Can you guess which ones I voted for, and which of my votes missed the cut?

The funny thing is that despite the length of the finale and the glacial pace of most of the preceding episodes, Westworld Season Two still feels like it just barely got started. Take away the shifting time frames and the occasional detour into Flashback Country, and what have you got? A road movie in which characters who either perpetrated or survived Season One’s climactic massacre all head to the Valley Beyond. A bunch of robotic redshirts and a few supporting players get killed. A few other supporting players make it through to a virtual-reality paradise while Bernard, Dolores and the Man in Black live on (in one form or another) in the real world to fight another day.

It’s not a bad narrative, necessarily. From The Warriors to the freaking Odyssey, plenty of good work concerns its characters’ quest to get from Point A to Point B without losing their lives or souls in the process. But the show’s parameters for the park are too vague to give their journey a sense of direction. All we know is that it’s really, reallybig. That, and there are strategically located bunkers and hideouts just a few minutes of screentime away from wherever the characters are at any given moment so they’re never in real danger of getting lost.

Meanwhile, the constant cross-cutting between storylines dilutes our investment in the physical journey of any one character or group, since we know we’ll be whisked away to some other place and time at any moment. There’s a reason the Akecheta episode hit as hard as it did, even aside from Zahn McClarnon’s performance: It rooted us in the experiences and perils of a single character for an entire episode, in a way that made us feel what was at stake – and that no amount of Dolores monologues could equal.

And we don’t even have a recognizable endpoint in mind to serve as an anchor, the equivalent of The Lord of the Rings‘ Mount Doom. “The Valley Beyond” is amorphous even by the show’s standards (at least Season One’s “Maze” implies a central location). It’s just a bunch of rocks in the middle of a Western landscape like countless others the characters have crossed, and even as a metaphysical concept it’s just a bog-standard promised land. To paraphrase Bernard’s imaginary Ford, you might as well have spent the season chasing the horizon.

Which is a bit like the experience of watching Westworld itself. There are enough individual elements at play – concepts, creature effects, a handful of strong performances – to make you believe it could all come together at some point. There’s a consistent leap of faith needed, a fingers-crossed hope that the show will Get Good the way many other dramas that suffered shaky starts eventually did. Yet all our pathways keep leading us to the same place: clichéd dialogue, meaningless twists, plodding pacing. And the good Westworld remains, as ever, its own Valley Beyond, maddeningly out of reach.

I reviewed the blah season finale of the blah show Westworld’s blah second season for Rolling Stone. I wanted to post this long an excerpt for a couple of reasons. First, it’s me riffing on one of my favorite topics: the way film can use the motion of bodies and objects across physical space to communicate. Second, and more on this soon, it illustrates a point I frequently try to make, which is that rather than start with thematic or sociopolitical critiques and work downward, you can often start with seemingly small formal considerations of cinematography, writing, performance, etc. and discover how they work upward toward larger flaws.

I’d also recommend reading my new Rolling Stone colleague Alan Sepinwall’s thoughts on the season; we realized early on that our takes were very complementary.

I wrote this morning’s top story at Wired.com: “The New Spoiler Culture: Game of Thrones and the Fight to Live Uninformed.” I spoke with critics Alyssa Rosenberg, Alan Sepinwall, and Maureen Ryan, and fansite honchos Elio García Jr. of Westeros, Phil Bicking of Winter Is Coming, and John Jasmin of Tower of the Hand [plus Mindset from the wonderful tumblr Nobody Suspects the Butterfly, though that ended up on the cutting room floor 🙁 ] about the complex interplay of books, show, DVRs, DVDs, streaming, readers vs. non-readers, social media, forums, Tumblr, Twitter, etc etc in keeping people free of information they don’t want to know about a given work of fiction. Thanks very much to editor Laura Hudson for making it happen.

How great is that banner image, by the way?