The first series of Westworld ended just before Christmas. It might be a year – maybe more – until anyone gets to see it again. In a climate where we’re constantly being bombarded with exceptional television, Westworld faces an uphill battle to sustain our interest until it returns. Fortunately, it understands this. Even more fortunately, it has a solution: the destination website.
Anyone visiting the official Discover Westworld website over the last couple of days will have encountered an interesting new knot. The moment you enter the site, providing you’ve navigated the annoying redirect to the corporate Sky page, you’re presented with a glitch. A message from an unknown user appears, reading “Is anybody out there? Something’s gone wrong. Can you hear th …”, before a system override kicks in and a registered user writes “All is well. Celebrations continue”. The site then references something called Journey Into Night, which happens to be both the title of the next scheduled episode and the name given to Robert Ford’s robot uprising.
What does it all mean? As with everything else concerning Westworld, Reddit has already dissected it for clues; and, as with its early deduction of the dual timelines utilised in series one, it’s probably right. The unknown user, it is claimed, is likely to be park programmer Elsie Hughes. Despite onscreen hints that she was murdered during the last series, an astonishingly deep dive into the website seemed to suggest otherwise. This could mean that series two revolves around Elsie’s attempts to contact the outside world from within a land governed by haywire robots.
Then again, another poster suggested that all of Westworld takes place in an underwater bubble, mainly as a giant snowglobe for dolphins, so let’s not get too carried away.
Whatever the answer, the important thing is that Westworld is devoting valuable resources to offscreen storytelling. This has become something of a rarity. Back when the internet was young and exciting, films and TV shows couldn’t wait to expand their palette to the internet. Most notoriously, the still active Jurassic Park 2 website is full of internal emails from InGen staff where, among other things, audiences can read about dreams scientists had about Barney the Dinosaur. Then, a few years later, Lost went about stuffing the internet with all sorts of fake websites about the Hanso Foundation, Oceanic Airlines and the Dharma Initiative, which regularly hid clues about the show within their source code.
These were all peripheral to the main narrative – a contextual understanding of 1990s kids TV shows wasn’t required to enjoy Jurassic Park 2, for example – but they existed to reward the obsessive few. If you really wanted to, you could dive so deep into the mythology that you ran the risk of getting lost in the weeds.
This seems to be how Westworld wants to operate, too. In an age where online content is now largely limited to botched Facebook Live publicity stunts, it’s refreshing to see Westworld aggressively position itself as a cult programme that demands the closest possible scrutiny.
And I say this as someone who wasn’t necessarily in love with the show itself. Although enjoyable, I found Westworld to be too enamoured with its own intelligence to fall truly head over heels with. But, in a way, by doubling down and encouraging viewers to speculate and theorise via officially sanctioned websites, Westworld might have redeemed itself. Other shows like Twin Peaks or The Leftovers are happy to load everything on to a mother vehicle but, by hiding cryptic message after cryptic message on its site to the delight of about 20 Redditors, Westworld has just outed itself as a puzzle to be decoded. That makes things much more exciting.
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