‘Westworld’ Showrunners Are Cool With Fan Theories Being Correct

Looking back on both the first season of HBO’s “Westworld” and the conversations that have surrounded it for the past 10 weeks, it brings to mind how many fans were spot-on in their predictions for a lot of the major events and revelations that were coming.

The most notable of those is the reveal on Sunday’s finale that William (Jimmi Simpson) and the Man in Black (Ed Harris) were, in fact, the same person and that we’d been simultaneously seeing stories from several different time frames.

Maybe “revelation” isn’t the right word — “confirmation” is more correct, because fans had accurately theorized that plot point after the second episode, when William was first introduced.

“We very consciously and deliberately dropped a trail of breadcrumbs,” Joy said, both in the writing and the performance and the set design and even in the editing for the audience to be able to explore and understand the world in the same way in which the characters within it, the hosts within it, were learning the truth of their world.