But after the show's overlong and sloppy second-season finale, it's clear the Westworld formula needs some work. It's a series that's infatuated with laying out a mystery, but it's less concerned with keeping audiences on board as it meanders toward a conclusion. The best way to enjoy the show, it turns out, is as a game. Following the minutiae of fan theories and contributing your own is far more rewarding than waiting for answers from Westworld's creators. And that's especially true when those revelations fall flat.

When its first season kicked off, Westworld's unique narrative style felt refreshing. It was a show that got video games. The park itself felt like a live-action version of Red Dead Redemption and similar open-world titles. But while it started strong, laying out a compelling story of artificially intelligent robots ("hosts") searching for their humanity, the show took its sweet time getting to an explosive conclusion.

And those final twists were worth the wait: It turns out the park director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), wanted the hosts to break free from their programming to achieve sentience, even if it cost him his life. William (Jimmi Simpson), the nebbish newcomer at the park, was actually part of an earlier timeline before he became the badass Man in Black (Ed Harris). Maeve (Thandie Newton), the cunning prostitute, was on the verge of escaping the park, until she turned back to save her lost daughter. Drama! Intrigue!

But this season, it felt like the creators were more interested in toying with their audience. In a bid to satiate fan theories and stop spoilers, Nolan announced during a Reddit AMA that he planned to release a video revealing the season's entire plot to select fans. Naturally, that news sparked a frenzy -- it would have been something entirely new for a TV show. Nolan likened it to how Game of Thrones readers already knew much of that story ahead of TV viewers. But, of course, that spoiler video ended up being an elaborate troll. The Westworld cast Rickrolled us (a truly timely joke in the year 2018), and then we get an eyeful of a dog in front of a piano for more than 22 minutes.

I don't blame Nolan for poking fun at his audience, especially given how hard fans worked to decrypt the first season of Westworld. But throughout season 2, it also felt like the creators were more determined to preserve the show's mystery and misdirect audiences at the cost of decent storytelling. Characters like Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) became cyphers without clear motivations.

Nolan and Joy once again juggled multiple timelines, which made it hard to keep track of some narrative threads. And the show's sophomoric philosophizing about the nature of life and free will -- which typically involved one character talking at another for way too long -- bordered on self-parody. If you're left grasping for an in-depth explainer after almost every episode, something is wrong. But hey, at least we finally got Shogun World. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"[Westworld] recognizes that it's a remix of an often-told story and so constantly drops allusions and homages not just to tales of robot revolutions, but to all sorts of classic tales," said Dwayne De Freitas, co-host of the podcast Violent Delights, in an interview with Engadget. "In doing so, it seeks not simply to add to the pantheon of AI science fiction, but to become the deepest, classiest, most quintessential version of this apocalyptic AI genre. There are problems with retreading over blazed paths. Westworld gets around that by featuring twists, turns, loops and a host of other literary techniques to keep the audience guessing about that journey. It's been constructed in a way that's constantly demanding focus; constantly asking the viewer: Are you paying attention?"