Westworld’s biggest twist came with a nasty side effect

This post contains Westworld spoilers. Proceed to the center of the maze with caution.

The ninth episode of Westworld was everything fans asked for. After eight hours of puzzling setup, the writers doled out answers like cheap Halloween candy. There are multiple timelines! Bernard was built in Arnold’s image! The center of the maze is an elevator to Arnold’s lab! Weeks of speculation, finally validated!

Maybe the cottage industry built atop Westworld spoiled the fun. There’s an argument to be made against the breathless theorizing. (I’ve admittedly been a part of that.) If each episode hadn’t been scrutinized by dozens of podcasts, hundreds of blogs, and thousands of Reddit comments, then these late-season reveals might feel surprising instead of inevitable. But great mysteries are good even after you know the twist. For example, The Prestige, co-written by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan. A movie about magicians, filmmakers, and a mutual love for a well-performed sleight-of-hand, The Prestige is more enjoyable on repeated viewings. Its twists are manipulative, but they build directly onto the movie’s themes, enhancing the central ideas instead of diverting from them.

Theorizing is fun, and a number of shows have played with fans’ curiosity to great effect, including HBO’s own Game of Thrones. Even comedies like Arrested Development benefited from intense fan scrutiny. And while those shows’ merits are debatable, it’s hard to say their failings stem from letting puzzles supersede narrative coherency.

But the writing staff of Westworld invited this Zapruder-esque behavior, larding the show with countless clues and Easter eggs that could only be discovered by a team of thousands freeze-framing their way through 60 minutes of television a week. The creators simply went overboard. Westworld was constructed, as other writers have noted, as a game to be played by its viewers. It’s akin to resolving a dinner-theater murder-mystery instead of absorbing clearly presented, albeit non-interactive, drama.

For example, Bernard’s epiphanies in episode 9: Once Ford unlocks memories inside the mind of his loyal bot, Bernard and the viewers discover that a number of scenes from previous episodes were designed to conceal the truth — or in one particular case, outright lie. The shadowy figure that attacked Elsie? It was Bernard. That photo of Arnold that Ford showed Bernard? It featured a third person we (and Bernard) weren’t shown the first time around.