Updated 11:39:00 P.M.: After telling the Reddit community that in order to help guide and control spoiler leaks in Season 2 of Westworld they would release a video previewing the main twists of the plot, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy revealed the entire message to be a practical joke. The video they posted late Monday night starts out promising before taking a turn:
When reached for comment on the video earlier in the day, HBO responded: “This is an initiative from the Westworld showrunners. We suggest you stay tuned to Reddit for their next move.” Now we know why that statement was worded so carefully.
The original post continues below.
Over a year ago, before they had even started to shoot Westworld Season 2, series creators and married couple Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy indicated to a packed audience at Paleyfest that they were noodling some ideas on how to keep their twist-filled HBO series from being ruined by Reddit detectives and spoiler-fiends posing as theorists. On Monday morning, less than two weeks before the Season 2 premiere, and at the tail-end of a Reddit AMA, the duo revealed their solution at last: spoil everything.
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In a message to the Reddit faithful, the Nolans explained that if they received enough support from fans, they would post a pre-season video detailing the entire plot of Season 2 in order to protect fans from knowing . . . the entire plot of Season 2. Once parsed, their logic is actually quite sound and shows, perhaps, a new way forward for creatives in this age of obsessive, digital fandom.
Back at Paleyfest 2017, citing the first four or five seasons of Game of Thrones as an example, Lisa Joy pointed out that the show’s success wasn’t dampened in the slightest by thousands (millions?) of A Song of Ice and Fire book readers knowing almost every turn of the plot in advance. “Knowing the ending,” she said with a smile, ”doesn’t ruin the journey.” Her husband, meanwhile, was cracking jokes about the nimble minds over at Reddit throughout the panel. When asked about some of the unanswered questions from Season 1 (particularly whether Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores had achieved free will), Nolan smirked: “I’m waiting for the message boards on Reddit to tell us.”
This friendly, relaxed attitude already put the Nolans in a better position than some other creatives who have unsuccessfully tried to wage war with a spoiler-addicted fandom. Nolan once again cited those early, very popular seasons of Game of Thrones on Monday in…
