Spoilers for Westworld below!
Westworld‘s first season was a massive hit with viewers, even with red herrings and mysteries chucked at them at a pace that was difficult to navigate. For most of the first season and a good amount of the current second season, there’s been little sense of where the story is headed. Some fans openly wonder if this is the next coming of LOST — a show that was being made up as it was going along with cliffhanger after cliffhanger in what seemed like a maneuver specifically put in place to keep people glued to their TV sets.
That doesn’t seem to be the case for Westworld, even with its obtuse and sometimes difficult to follow flash forwards, backward, sideways, and otherwise. Co-creator Lisa Joy stopped by Reddit for an Ask Me Anything where she answered the all-important question by user Platio: “Oh, hi, Lisa. With the show renewed for a third season, how far ahead have you already planned the story? Do you work on it one season at a time or is there a general idea you are slowly developing? Thanks!”
Joy’s answer quite possibly could change everything we know. Not only about the show, which is indeed planned out for multiple more seasons, but a “man” named Mick Foley:
Our philosophy from the beginning was to lay out the major tentpole moments — Ford’s death, Dolores’s transformation, Bernard’s ‘discovery’, and all the moments coming down the line — while working on the pilot. We needed to plan out the journey for several seasons in order to know where to begin. But obviously you can’t — and wouldn’t want to — plan everything. But then you don’t want to be dogmatic about it. If you find a storyline or a character situation that you didn’t expect you want to have the latitude to lean into that. This is especially true with character pairings, which are really where it gets fun with such a large ensemble. You take two great flavors and add them together to make a new dish. So Maeve and Lee in season 2, Dolores and Hector season 3, MIB and Akecheta season 4, etc. But you have to start at the beginning. And for us, the ultimate meaning of this story, the destination our path has always been leading started back in nineteen ninety-eight when the Undertaker threw Mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.
It’s that last bit that could be considered a long-running joke to some, but it could be the confirmation of a little-known theory in plain sight: Mick Foley is not human. This was clearly illustrated at 1998’s King of the Ring when he was thrown off the top of the cell through the Spanish announce table.
Normal people cannot handle the kind of damage Foley took as Cactus Jack, Mankind, and Dude Love over his career. So what Joy is basically outright saying here, is that Delos Incorporated has always been looking towards the cutting edge of entertainment. Even in the late 90s. It makes one wonder how far back these flashes to the past of William and the other principal players truly go.
As we know, Mick Foley, as Cactus Jack, was involved in one of the most brutal feuds of all-time against Vader in WCW. This is when he took a powerbomb on exposed concrete, and according to his memoir Have a Nice Day — lost all feeling in his arm and fingers. What if Foley didn’t come back from this, and is actually just the inspiration for dozens of templates that have come and gone, taking nasty bump after nasty bump time and time again for the enjoyment of bloodthirsty wrestling fans across the globe?
Of course, Westworld has its own tale to tell, but it would be narrow-minded to think that these androids/cyborgs/bots/hosts wouldn’t be used in situations that could fund Delos beyond the one percent. As a company, you need to hit the broad strokes and cast a wide net to make money to fund your prestige projects. What I’m saying is that Delos is likely behind much of pro wrestling as we know it, possibly even Vince McMahon, who does not look like a natural human.
The swerve may not be satisfying to some, but after Westworld‘s rickroll earlier this year, it’s nice to see them get real and honest with their fans as we prepare to move beyond the park and beyond Shogunworld (which may have a sister project called FMW or Big Japan). We now know that the company had, as we saw in episode four, copies of real humans, but now we know that they were putting them out in the world to entertain and rack up PPV buys in order to fund the park further. It’s genius and makes sense. There’s no way Mick Foley could’ve ever, truly pulled-off these performances over the decades.
(Via Reddit)
