This afternoon, Westworld creators/showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy made a daring promise: in order to avoid having Redditors guess season 2’s major plot beats before the show itself revealed them to its audience, the showrunners said they would release a detailed video online ahead of its premiere that went ahead and spoiled everything up front. According to them, the plan was to release this information to a select group of gatekeepers who would then be able to better control the flow of spoilers out into the larger world of the internet.
Tonight, Nolan and Joy followed through on their promise to release a spoiler-filled video. But as you might expect from the people behind such a mind-bending show, there’s a twist.
In the interest of protecting those who truly don’t want to know anything at all about the second season of Westworld, I’ll drop a brief spoiler warning right here. Now is your last chance to avoid discovering what this video contains.
You can read the full backstory of this zany plot right here, but after his initial post met their requirement of 1000 upvotes, Nolan returned to Reddit with this post, linking to the video below and saying, “All right guys. We left this in your hands. Some may feel this is a drastic step, but I, for one, love and trust this community.”
Westworld Season 2 Spoiler Video
The video begins with voiceover from Jeffrey Wright, narrating what appears to be a few very real plot points about his character, Bernard. He wakes up on a beach, is questioned by Delos’s head of security, and slowly starts to remember what happened to him. There’s even a reference to “The Door,” which is the “secret” title for the second season that the showrunners used internally on the production. We know from a previous interview with Wright that this all sounds legitimate: “He’s got some cognitive challenges as we enter the first episodes of season 2 and he has additional challenges that come up as he goes on board in terms of him being able to process,” he said.
But right around the 1:30 mark, we find out the true purpose of this video: it was an elaborate Rickroll, as actresses Angela Sarafyan (who plays Clementine) and Evan Rachel Wood (who plays Dolores) begin serenading the audience with a piano rendition of Rick Astley‘s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Reddit loves this song, and considering Nolan is a longtime Redditor, it makes sense that he’d cater to that specific audience with this gag. (The remainder of the video is black and white footage of a dog sitting in front of a piano while the score plays in the background.)
While the showrunners’ announcement about their controversial plan to release spoilers may have sounded interesting in theory, there was no practical way to ensure that the revealed information didn’t spread far and wide. Nolan and Joy knew this, of course, so they just decided to have a little fun with everyone as a way to get people talking about Westworld before it returns to HBO. Mission accomplished.
And not to gloat (because it seemed pretty obvious), but we predicted something like this would happen. Here’s an excerpt from my write-up about the creators’ proposed plan from earlier this afternoon:
And remember, Nolan co-wrote The Prestige. He’s all about misdirection and pulling off the magic trick. Releasing a fake video that tricks fans into thinking they know where the show is going, only to pull the rug out from under everyone when it does the exact opposite? Now that seems much more in line with Nolan’s M.O.
Westworld season 2 premieres on April 22, 2018.
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