On the eve of the first season finale of HBO’s Westworld, I find myself looking ahead, past the episode right in front of me to as-yet unexplored territory. That reaction seems to be the norm with this show. Better to speculate on what’s next than to luxuriate in the now. Television shows often toy with their audience by giving them only part of the ultimate picture, or swerving into unexpected storytelling territory mid-stream, but Westworld is unique in how committed it is to keeping its fans in the dark. How long can the writers hope to maintain this shell game approach to plot and character?

Unlike similar puzzle box shows such as Lost or Twin Peaks that have a central mystery (what is the island/who killed Laura Palmer?) Westworld has a variety of micro-mysteries to answer. Most of them have been solved already, and most of them were deduced by the hive mind of internet fandom. People pegged Bernard for a host weeks ago. They also correctly guessed that he was a copy of Arnold. Each week, more evidence appears for the pet theory of some Westworld fans: that we are watching two separate timelines divided by 30 years. Westworld is barreling towards resolution, at least for the issues we are aware of. We’ve been told that there are five seasons planned out, but the claustrophobia of a show set in a theme park that exists outside of time makes it hard to envision that plan.

That shouldn’t matter, and yet the maddening part of Westworld fandom is the desire to be given morsels of truth in between all the questions. Episode eight, titled Trace Decay, revealed very little on the heels of the Bernard-is-a-host scene. Because the narrative (Westworld’s favorite word, by the way) crawled along in Trace Decay, it was easier to ding it critically whereas other prestige dramas get a bit more leeway for digressions or slow-moving stories. Mad Men could get away with an episode where Don takes his family to Disneyland. Breaking Bad could drop The Fly episode in the mix; while the Sopranos allowed Chris and Pauli to hunt a Chechen solider in the woods and never mention it again. Westworld is set up in such a way that without the peeling back of another layer of obfuscation, the entire experience is seen as a bit of a letdown. Whereas Westworld’s forebears made their intentions known as early as the first 20 minutes of the pilot, we still really don’t have a clue where this show is headed or what its ultimate intentions are even after nine episodes.

That’s partly down to the fact the show still doesn’t have a standout protagonist. Even in the insular world of the park, there can be characters the audience can identify with. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, though, have crafted a series in which absolutely no one can truly be that figure. They seem to revel in subverting that old fashioned notion of how to tell a story. Sleepy Teddy riding into Sweetwater on the train – the noble outsider with a rigid sense of morality – ends up being a robot programmed to serve that very purpose. Same with po-faced Bernard. Park guest William may or may not be the sadistic Man in Black, but regardless of the validity of that theory, he absolutely blew a gasket in episode nine and might be trending toward a more sinister mindset. Even saintly Dolores is revealed to have murdered Arnold, her creator and would-be liberator.



‘Do you have any family discounts for Disneyland?’ … Jon Hamm as Don Draper Photograph: Michael Yarish/AP

Westworld is truly unique in its insistence on eschewing the easy good-versus-evil tale. For all its hype about killing your idols, Game of Thrones is ultimately about the noble Starks and Daenerys Targaryen joining forces to take revenge and save the Seven Kingdoms from the White Walkers. It’s a fantasy story, above all else. What is Westworld other than a story about stories? For this show to thrive in the years to come and to take Game of Thrones’ place as HBO’s signature drama, it will need to answer that question. It stands to reason that soon we’ll see the world outside the park. We’ll learn where the hell Westworld actually is. Is it even on planet Earth?

The question is, when we do see the full breadth of the chessboard, will viewers still care?

While Thrones immediately laid out a vast universe for the characters to traverse (thanks in no small part to George RR Martin’s obsessively detailed source novels) and for audiences to lose themselves in, Westworld hooked people by holding back. The question is, when we do see the full breadth of the chessboard, will viewers still care? Lost chose to pile on mystery after mystery, then wiping it all away with one curious decision in the finale. Westworld might still choose to steer itself in that direction, but if I were forced to speculate on where this is all going (and like I said, that’s sort of the point of Westworld) then I would not be shocked to find that each season of the show is structure in a drastically different fashion.

There’s no reason that each year of this show has to be identical to the last, or that it all has to take place in the park. Whatever the Delos board subplot ends up being, it’s likely to fundamentally alter what we think we know about this program. The robot rebellion that is the core of the plot of the movie Westworld is based on is probably either besides the point, a colossal red herring, or something that will wrap up relatively soon. Of course, I’m just guessing. We’re all just taking shots in the dark, but that’s the joy of Westworld as it is right now. If Nolan and Joy can somehow keep this level of viewer engagement going and deepen the mystery without frustrating the faithful – USA’s Mr Robot is dangerously close to doing just that – then it’ll be quite an achievement.