The decline of the west

Note: Spoilers follow for the season finale of Westworld.

Over time, as a society, we’ve more or less figured out how we’re all supposed to deal with spoilers. When a movie first comes out, there’s a grace period in which most of us agree not to discuss certain aspects of the story, especially the ending. Usually, reviewers will confine their detailed observations to the first half of the film, which can be difficult for a critic who sees his or her obligation as that of a thoughtful commentator, rather than of a consumer advisor who simply points audiences in the right direction on opening weekend. If there’s a particularly striking development before the halfway mark, we usually avoid talking about that, too. (Over time, the definition of what constitutes a spoiler has expanded to the point where some fans apply it to any information about a film whatsoever, particularly for big franchise installments.) For six months or so, we remain discreet—and most movies, it’s worth noting, are forgotten long before we even get to that point. A movie with a major twist at the end may see that tacit agreement extended for years. Eventually, however, it becomes fair game. Sometimes it’s because a surprise has seeped gradually into the culture, so that a film like Citizen Kane or Psycho becomes all but defined by its secrets. In other cases, as with The Sixth Sense or Fight Club, it feels more like we’ve collectively decided that anyone who wants to see it has already gotten a chance, and now we can talk about it openly. And up until now, it’s a system that has worked pretty well.

But this approach no longer makes sense for a television show that is still on the air, at least if the case of Westworld is any indication. We’re not talking about spoilers, exactly, but about a certain kind of informed speculation. The idea that one of the plotlines on Westworld was actually an extended flashback first surfaced in discussions on communities like Reddit, was picked up by the commenters on the reviews on mainstream websites, led theorists to put together elaborate chronologies and videos to organize the evidence, and finally made its way into think pieces. Long before last night’s finale, it was clear that the theory had to be correct. The result didn’t exactly ruin my enjoyment, since it turned out to be just one thread in a satisfying piece of storytelling, but I’ll never know what it would have been like to have learned the truth along with Dolores, and I suspect that a lot of other viewers felt the same twinge of regret. (To be fair, the percentage of people who keep up with this sort of theorizing online probably amounts to a fraction of the show’s total viewership, and the majority of the audience experienced the reveal pretty much as the creators envisioned it.) There’s clearly no point in discouraging this kind of speculation entirely. But when a show plays fair, as Westworld did, it’s only a matter of time before somebody solves the mystery in advance. And because a plausible theory can spread so quickly through the hive mind, it makes us feel smarter, as individuals, than we really are, which compromises our reactions to what was a legitimately clever and resonant surprise.

Westworld isn’t the first show to be vulnerable to this kind of collective sleuthing: Game of Thrones has been subjected to it for years, especially when it comes to the parentage, status, and ultimate fate of a certain character who otherwise wouldn’t seem interesting enough to survive. In both cases, it’s because the show—or the underlying novels—provided logical clues along the way to prepare us, in the honorable fashion of all good storytelling. The trouble is that these rules were established at a time when most works of narrative were experienced in solitude. Even if one out of three viewers figured out the twist in The Usual Suspects before the movie was halfway done, it didn’t really affect the experience of the others in the theater, since we don’t tend to discuss the story in progress out loud. That was true of television, too, for most of the medium’s history. These days, however, many of us are essentially talking about these stories online while they’re still happening, so it isn’t surprising if the solutions can spread like a virus. I don’t blame the theorists, because this kind of speculation can be an absorbing game in its own right. But it’s so powerful that it needs to be separated from the general population. It requires a kind of self-policing, or quarantine, that has to become second nature to every viewer of this kind of show. Reviewers need to figure out how to deal with it, too. Otherwise, shows will lose the incentive to play fair, relying instead on blunter, more mechanical kinds of surprise. And this would be a real shame, because Westworld has assembled the pieces so effectively that I don’t doubt it will continue to do so in the future.

Watching the finale, I was curious to see how it would manage to explain the chronology of Dolores’s story without becoming hopelessly confusing, and it did a beautiful job, mostly by subordinating it to the larger questions of William’s fate, Dolores’s journey, and Ford’s master plan, which has taken thirty-five years to come to fruition. (In itself, this is a useful insight into storytelling: it’s easier for the audience to make a big conceptual leap when it feeds into an emotional arc that is already in progress, and if it’s treated as a means, not an end.) If anything, the reveal of the identity of Wyatt was even more powerful—although, oddly, the fact that everything has unfolded according to Ford’s design undermines the agency of the very robots that it was supposed to defend. It’s an emblem for why this excellent season remains one notch down from the level of a masterpiece, thanks to the need of its creators, like Ford, to maintain a tight level of control. Still, if it lasts for as long as I think it will, it may not even matter how much of it the Internet figured out on first viewing. For a television show, the lifespan of a spoiler seems to play in reverse: instead of a grace period followed by free discussion after enough time has passed, we get intense speculation while the show airs, giving way to silence once we’ve all moved on to the next big thing. If Westworld endures as a work of art, it will be seen just as it was intended by those who discover it much later, after the flurry of speculation has faded. I don’t know how long it will take before it can be seen again with fresh eyes. But thirty-five years seems about right.