Westworld, a mega-budget remake of the 1973 Michael Crichton film about a futuristic wild-west theme park where people live out their fantasies, and whose AI staff are possibly becoming sentient, poses all sorts of questions about consciousness, humanity and the divine spark. It plays just as niftily as the film (and all the other creations centring on similar premises, from Blade Runner to Battlestar Galactica) did upon our contemporary fears about technology. But the really pressing question is – will it stack up as a strong enough replacement for Game of Thrones when the Lannister-Stark saga comes to an end after series eight? I hope someone at HBO thought to ask a passing librarian how much overlap there tends to be between George RR Martin and Philip K Dick fans, otherwise someone may be in for a nasty surprise.

Everything’s going a bit Skynet … a robot host in Westworld. Photograph: HBO

But for those of us who just like story – lots and lots of story! – Westworld will hit the spot as hard as GoT ever did. Gosh, there’s a lot going on. There’s the real world full of robot-wranglers, some of whom are jostling for position inside whatever just-possibly-malevolent company owns the park, others of whom are busy tinkering with their charges’ software and trying to decide whether to make the skinjobs more realistic or quit while they’re ahead. “Y’know, before everything goes a bit, like, Skynet on us” nobody ever quite says, but clearly should.

Thandie Newton as Maeve, the theme park’s brothel madam. Photograph: HBO

Then there are the guests, who step off the bullet train into the waiting arms and silicon valleys of their robo-hosts, and who bring their own backstories to the mix. (I am not yet sure what female visitors to the theme park get out of it. There is of course a brothel filled with ladybots for the men, but straight women have only Liz Lemon’s “little elf prince” James Marsden to look at so far, and he’s in love with Dolores, who – well, we’ll get to that.)

Once in the park, of course, there are those AI hosts, increasingly plagued by memories, feelings, and a creeping sense that something is rotten in the state of cyberDenmark, plus lots of baddies. Most of these are official baddies – programmed as such – but one of them (played by a cadaverous Ed Harris) has discerned a deeper, darker purpose to the park than simply letting the rich have their wild-west fun, and he’s gone rogue. Nobody IRL seems to have noticed yet, despite this being very Skynet indeed.

Dolores, played by Evan Rachel Wood, is a non-brothel bot (so far the only non-prostitute female we’ve seen, but I guess you only need one good girl per town/multi-million dollar show, right?) who looks young but is in fact the oldest host in the park. Reality is beginning to intrude upon her programming, which is a relief because at first she seems the dullest thing put on screen since the test card.

Dolores the non-brothel bot (Evan Rachel Wood) and ‘little elf prince’ James Marsden. Photograph: HBO

Overseeing events is the robots’ creator Dr Robert Ford, whose pursuit of cybernetic perfection is about to lead to hopefully at least eight seasons’ worth of lucrative trouble. He is played – beautifully, movingly, effortlessly – by Anthony Hopkins which, given the alt-reality milieu we’re in, leads to another pressing question. Namely, what is going on inside his head? As he gazes into the eyes of another robo-starlet, does he remember the days when he was hailed as the next Richard Burton (back when Burton was the next Olivier)? Does he recall Olivier’s own description in his memoir of “a new young actor of exceptional promise named Anthony Hopkins, who was understudying me and walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its teeth” or does he simply laugh all the way to the bank? Do his costars want to hear his National Theatre anecdotes or his Hannibal Lecter voice?

What is going on inside his mind? Anthony Hopkins plays robots’ creator Dr Robert Ford. Photograph: HBO

We might go further. We might wonder whether the experience is likely to precipitate psychological collapse in its entire cast. “You’re up for a part in which you play someone who has to deliver lines written by others while mimicking human emotion, but then pretend you really can feel it. It’ll be on a real set set in a fake world except for the bits set in the real world and the bits that are CGI, which will be more like the fake world but real. But you just keep pretending to be real even though you’re pretending to be fake while you are, in fact, real. Capiche?” “I … I don’t know.” “Just sign here. Oh, and if you’re playing a robot, the robot can be given another role in the park at any time, so so can you.” “What?” “Just sign here.”

Watch out for those telltale flickers of consciousness in your actors’ eyes, showrunners. A mass existential crisis will play merry hell with ratings.

Westworld starts in the US on HBO on 2 October and in the UK on Sky Atlantic in October.