(CNN) This review contains spoilers from Sunday's "Westworld" season finale.

"Westworld," appropriately, had a maze at the center of its story, since its arcane and elaborate plot often resembled one. Yet while the HBO series departed from its source movie -- in ways both ambitious and occasionally frustrating -- the 90-minute finale seemingly circled back to it.

Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (who wrote Sunday's episode, with Nolan directing) have incorporated callbacks to Michael Crichton's 1973 film during the 10-chapter run. In some respects, though, this "Westworld" came to owe as much of a debt to "Inception," the movie by Nolan's brother Christopher, as it probed ever deeper into levels of consciousness, and at what point the realistic robots (or "hosts") in the show's space-age amusement park achieve true sentience and life.

For committed fans, the show presented a kind of puzzle, with many of their theories explicitly validated by the exposition-heavy finale. That included the fact that the mysterious Man in Black (Ed Harris) and the vulnerable park newcomer William (Jimmi Simpson) were the same person, several decades apart; and that the much-abused robot Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) had killed Arnold (Jeffrey Wright), the park's co-founder, who was plagued by doubts about the morality of what he and his partner were doing.

By inviting those guessing games -- and actually building toward them in a way that at least partially rewarded amateur sleuths -- "Westworld" has picked up a proud tradition established by "Lost," another series that counted J.J. Abrams among its producers.

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