Can a show about robot cowboys be thought-provoking? Jonathan Nolan has some big plans for his new HBO version of Westworld, co-created with Lisa Joy (Burn Notice). “We wanted to go flat-out, full scope, sleeves-rolled-up plunge into the next chapter of the human story,” Nolan told Entertainment Weekly in June. Now Westworld cast member James Marsden has revealed exactly what such a large scope entails in a new EW interview .
According to Marsden, Westworld has a plan in place that extends well past the first season. Describing the release date delay, Marsden said, “It wasn’t about getting the first 10 done, it was about mapping out what the next five or six years are going to be. We wanted everything in line so that when the very last episode airs and we have our show finale, five or seven years down the line, we knew how it was going to end the first season.”
So what’s the story we’ll be following for five or six years (assuming Westworld doesn’t suck)? According to Nolan, “we wanted the story of the origin of a new species and how that would play out in its complexity.” Hopefully the birth of this new species will go better than it did in The Animatrix.
Mapping out a future “in which we stop being the protagonists, and our creations start taking over that role,” as Nolan describes it, is monumentally ambitious. So it’s good to know they have a plan to pull it off, and presumably take us beyond the theme park in future seasons of Westworld. If only Jurassic World had learned the same lesson.
Westworld premieres on HBO Oct. 2.
