Why Westworld is a worthy successor to Game of Thrones

HBO announced last week that Westworld would return for another season.

The hit sci-fi series from real-life couple Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, and based on the idea originated by bestselling author Michael Crichton, has proven to be a worthy successor to the mega-series Game of Thrones.

The renewal comes as the show is enjoying peak viewership worldwide and sustained critical acclaim. The current season airs its finale episode on HBO on Sunday (Monday, Manila time) but fans of the series can watch the series (including seasons one and two) anytime on HBO Go.

“We are very proud of the world that we have built,” Jonathan told this writer in early March during the junket for the series in Los Angeles. Jonathan and Lisa joined us by phone conference. “When you do this thing, your hope is that you’ll be successful. We felt from the beginning that we wanted to make a show that invented itself and reinvented itself when it got the opportunity.”

Thandie Newton as Maeve Millay

Season 3 is worlds away from the original Westworld.

“We are well beyond the scope of the original film. This is really now uncharted waters for us, for the cast, for the crew. This is taking Crichton’s ideas and expanding them to our vision of where we think our future is headed.”

The current season takes place three months after the events of season two with the major characters finally getting to live out their dreams of revenge. Dolores has successfully escaped and lives in a futuristic Los Angeles where she meets a new character and learns how artificial beings and lower-class humans are treated in the real world.

Tessa Thompson as Charlotte Hale

In Season 3, the prevailing theme focuses on the dangers of data collection and personality development based on an algorithm — a frightening reflection of what social media and the Internet can do today.

“I think the future is here,” Lisa confirmed. “We are in it! With apps that tracks our movement and social media apps that tell you exactly who our network companions are and what kind of interactions we have with them, you can create a very holistic profile of a person through our current technology.”

We had the interview with the cast and crew of Westworld mere days before the US and the rest of the world went into lockdown. The stars of the series were present at the junket, however, but it was evident how everyone was wary about the growing epidemic. In between conversations about the current season, the topic would veer into the threat of the disease. Aaron Paul, who is joining the cast this season, even had with him a big bottle of sanitizer as he went around the interview rooms.

During our interview with Jonathan and Lisa, Jonathan declared the slow US response to the COVID-19 threat a “disaster” and made an analogy of how advanced technology is used in nefarious ways in Westworld and how the same technology is being abused in real-life to advance propaganda and fake news.

“The sad thing is, all these things are technologies that are about humans yearning to interact with each other. All these are good things and there are undeniable benefits, there is beauty in what these technologies can create but overall, at this point, they’re highly immature, they’re completely unregulated — the government totally abandoned any attempt to regulate any of these technologies.”

But, despite the bleak future conjured in Westworld, Jonathan remains optimistic about the future. “I am optimistic. I believe in humanity. I believe in our ability to eventually grapple with the problem, come together and find solution — I have to! But it’s challenging in a moment like this.”

Not surprisingly, the three leading ladies of the series share the same sentiments of Jonathan and Lisa.

“I’m afraid we live in a time where data have surpassed oil in terms of its global value,” Tessa Thompson, who returns to the series as Charlotte, said. “I think it is scary and I am afraid because I am not prepared to change the way that I live entirely to make sure that I have privacy in those spaces. Yeah, I feel completely afraid.”

During the interview, the activist actress brought up the dangers of PredPol or Predictive Policing, a data-driven crime-deterring technology designed to prevent crime, which she fears “essentially decides that a certain neighborhood is likely to have crime so they go looking for crime and profile people that are invariably people of color, yeah, it’s terrifying.”

“You have to find a way to marry the two,” Evan Rachel Wood interjected. The beautiful actress returns to Westworld as an emboldened Dolores. “It is hard to live in a system that is rigged against you and Westworld touches a lot of that this season but we are very much living in a system that does that already.”

“There are incredible things that I think we can do with technology and social media,” Tessa added. “I’ve looked at young people being such incredible activists how we treat the planet. I look at the ways in which our ideas about gender are being upended and it seems really inspiring to me that if you are a kid that lives in a small town and you feel like you are inside a skin that doesn’t fit comfortably around you, you can find a community online with other people that feel that way, and you feel less alone. I feel those are beautiful things about technology and social media and we have to know both sides and make sure that we are developing our ethics around how we use these things.”

There is another layer to Westworld that is just as powerful as the warnings being waved with how new technology can be abused.

“Power being in the hands of the few and what they choose to do with that,” Thandie Newton declared. “The value of human life; how some lives are valued more than others and people are betrayed into thinking they are being valued when actually they are not. Let’s face it, colonial expansion throughout the world relied on keeping people naïve about what they were given in return.”

What Thandie said echoes what her character goes through in season three. Maeve, her character, wakes up in a WWII simulation of Delos Park filled with Nazis. She is able to break free and follow Dolores into the real world only to be duped and used again. To borrow the tagline from Westworld, free will is not free, indeed.