Westworld Season 2 has been officially picked up by HBO, just as Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy let details unspool.
Fans of Cowboys and Robot Indians can rejoice, because HBO finally confirmed what everyone has been long expecting: we’ll be headed back to the park for Westworld season 2 in 2017. The news was made official when HBO Programming President Casey Bloys released a statement confirming the series, as well as Divorce and Insecure, will be getting a second season order.
This must be a special relief to HBO considering that the days of dragons and wildfire are looking fewer and fewer as we approach the final two truncated seasons of Game of Thrones over the next few summers. Additionally, Vinyl turned into an infamous flop for the premium cable giant, which then preceded some changes behind-the-scenes, including with Bloys’ ascension.
“It’s fantastic to have a broad-based cultural and ratings hit to build from,” Bloys said on the subject of Westworld, as according to Variety. “That’s a great, great luxury.”
The news also cannot come a moment too soon, since showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, while discussing last night’s shocking and traumatic hour of Westworld, let slip to Entertainment Weekly that we can expect much more detail being given to how hosts work during the second season, including how they’re powered.
“Their construction and their power source is something we’re really going to get into during season 2,” Nolan said. “So we’d like to keep that mysterious. They’re closer to biological than they are mechanical, but they don’t suffer brain death the same way we do. They’re largely indistinguishable from human beings, but their brains don’t require oxygen—which opens up interesting possibilities. Their brains are not as fragile as ours. On one hand, their cognition is controllable and malleable, but on a structural level, they can’t be killed in the same way you and I can. There are advantages and disadvantages to being a host. [In] season 2, we’ll be exploring more of the nuts and bolts of what they are—as the hosts themselves are trying to understand.”
This consideration of artificial biology is not that surprising since Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy already revealed they were breaking down the second season during the Westworld panel at New York Comic Con that we attended in October 2016.
“There were a handful of things that we weren’t able to touch in the first season, and we’re now currently breaking the second season,” Nolan had said during the NYCC panel. “One of the really nice things about TV is, you get to go again.”
Indeed, that feedback loop can begin in earnest now, as Westworld season 2 is powering full-steam ahead like a locomotive. And come on, we all know that you’re going to be wearing the black hat when it comes time to watch it.
