Below are a collection of interviews for the finale of Westworld's 2nd season, please clicks the links accordingly to read the complete analysis of all functions that made up the finale.
Entertainment Weekly
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you know who each of those balls represent in Dolores’ purse? Or is your cast on edge about which characters Dolores found worthy of survival?
JONATHAN NOLAN: We’ve had some interesting conversations. It’s a large ensemble cast and sadly we’re saying goodbye to some people at the end of this season. But as always with this show, who remains and who doesn’t is something we’re having a lot of fun with. There’s going to be a bit of a wait for a third season but we want to surprise and hopefully delight people with the way things progress.
Is it safe to assume — and perhaps it’s not — that Zahn McClarnon’s character, the Ghost Nation leader Akecheta, and others who went through the portal to the virtual Eden are not going to continue on?
I think that’s on the safer end of things to presume. But there’s a big story we’re telling here so … yeah.
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Variety Interview
“Ford has been preparing this for an awfully long time … he’s not the author of this evolution, but he’s an underwriter of it,” says Nolan. “And in doing that, it always seemed to us that it would be incredibly important that he would have laid in place one or two final pieces of insurance to make sure [it worked].”
“We’ve seen, from the pilot, Stubbs knows a little bit more about these hosts than you would expect this callous security chief to know. There’s an odd form of paternalism in play there whenever he deals with them. So we felt like Ford would have laid in place everything he could to ensure that the hosts wanted to remain in the world would have gotten as good a chance to survive,” Nolan says. “Who better than Stubbs, hiding in plain sight, to be one of the most important pieces of insurance there?”
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The Hollywood Reporter Interview
What does the future of Westworld look like with the whole world as your oyster? Now that you have two of your main host characters outside of the park, is there a main setting anymore, or will the scope be a lot wider in season three?
It's going to be a whole new world. And we technically have three [hosts], because Hale is out there, too, or someone who certainly looks like Tessa Thompson! We'll come to see who's really there and what that character is in the future. This series is about reinvention and scope. The first season was a more intimate look at the park from within the loops. In the second season, the hosts broke out of their loops and were able to explore more of the park. In the third season, they've broken out of the park itself. We're in a new terra incognita. From the beginning, when Jonah and I were thinking about the series as far back as the pilot, we knew we wanted to explore other worlds in the park, and we also knew the one world we would start to see little glimpses of throughout the first two seasons was the real world, and that we would get there eventually — and when we did, it would be a whole new experience.
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Deadline Interview
We see the Man in Black digging in his arm, and he’s not in a lot of pain. Does that make him a host? We see that there’s actually a back-up of him that exists.
JOY: This season we’ve been seeing him in a lot of pain and as he digs into his arm, he suffers from madness. He himself doesn’t know if he’s a host or not. We’ve basically had two time lines this season in the classic film noir structure. We’ve seen him playing the game and figuring his footsteps to the Valley Beyond, but he’s become confused on his side of reality, questioning his nature. If you immerse yourself in the game for too long, do you lose the sense of what is real and not real? He struggles with this and it leads to the moment where he kills his daughter Emily thinking she might be a host. He was in fact mistaken, and he’s digging into his own skin for answers and doesn’t find any wires by the time Dolores arrives. By the end of this time line, he’s being shipped out into the real world. He did kill his own daughter, he’s in the prison of his own skin, locked in his own confusion and guilt.
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