So Smart They're Dumb Spoilers for the first episode of Westworld below. We've only just begun exploring this theme park. So, no, David isn't really a host. In fact, he's a guy who works in a Westworld-like theme park called Delos, created by a visionary named William being guided by the mysterious, unscratchable David. They go deep into the park, with David promising to fulfill the host's hidden desires. It's weird, but also a little beautiful. When I learned that I had to go back out into the park, I tried to leave, because as strange and immersive as Delos seemed to be, I was pretty certain that I'd already seen the same thing. And then I sat down at the park's cafeteria and started watching it again. All my fears melted away, and once again, I wanted to see more. Afterward, I talked to the show's creator, Jonathan Nolan, about why the show is so successful. (Hint: It's that desire.) io9: Delos is a place where people can, to quote a tagline, have their deepest desires fulfilled. How did you end up creating a narrative that was so much about fulfilling people's needs, but didn't include any characters who were actually pursuing their goals in the story? Jonathan Nolan: It started out as a pretty straightforward premise for our first season. [The show] was going to be about Dolores, Arnold's daughter, who went back in time to the first and second World Wars to try to save someone. She comes into the present with this idea that if she can go back and kill the exact thing that caused her childhood to go wrong, then she can get her childhood back. That's where we got her when we started writing her. The first season ended with a very different version of her because it turns out there's no way to get back to the past. io9: Her mother, Delores, is one of the hosts that you've created for the show. Did you plan to create a character who was a perfect opposite of Dolores? Was there something about what you created that made you realize you had to make another Dolores-like character? Nolan: No, because we didn't know we'd be creating Dolores, for a long time. The plan in the beginning was that Arnold would go into a black room and have the first experience. But that turned out to be more and more complicated to do, and we'd sort of started getting into trouble making Arnold, because we wanted to give him more of a character. What we realized in the middle of writing [this first episode] was that instead of Arnold going into the black room, Dolores should go in there. It makes her more dynamic. io9: How much were you worried about having to introduce these other hosts, who are just as interesting as Dolores, but don't have any of the same emotional issues or challenges that Dolores does? Nolan: We had to introduce them because of what's in her head, what she's trying to solve in the first episode. When we came out with the show, it was going to be all her story. We were going to show the audience the history of her and the background of why she would come to want to fix this problem. But we felt that we needed more of a backstory, because we wanted the audience to empathize with her as an actual character. In the end, those other characters are the characters that we needed to tell the story of her. io9: When Dolores wakes up in the first episode and decides that she wants to kill herself, how do you respond to the criticism that, "Isn't that kind of horrible, that the person who has the greatest desires is also the person that wants to die?" Or, "Isn't that the person you're supposed to root for?" Nolan: That's a very interesting question, because of course we do. I think that's a fair question, but we thought of it in a certain way. I don't know if you have ever been watching The Wire. It's like the world's biggest drama on HBO. And the great thing about The Wire was that you cared about every single character. Every character mattered. No character was a non-character. io9: So, on The Wire you spend a lot of time trying to get the right ending, but in this show, you're creating this world where it is possible to get what you want, but you never have to deal with the thing that you really want. Nolan: We're creating these worlds where there's no consequence. And not just in a trivial sense that we want to show the audience something, but in the sense that people have no emotional understanding of each other, or even what they want. So, you have this world where you can come here and there's no consequence. You can have these huge wants, and then you can have your desires satisfied, and the whole world can turn out to be a utopia. But that's not who we are as human beings. io9: So, do you think there's a possibility that you could create a real "Western," as you say the world of Delos is in the trailer? That it would develop into its own culture? Nolan: Absolutely. We've talked about doing a sequel to this show, but it would take place in this world. But, it would be a very different show. We're not doing the Western. The Western will not have the same characters. It won't be this show. It will have its own characters, I'm sure. It will probably be just as wonderful. io9: Why do you think you've been so successful in creating a world that is so immersive, that does exactly what you want it to do, but people are still finding that compelling? Nolan: I don't think there's anything particularly unique to us that's leading to this kind of success. There are a lot of shows that are much more compelling than us. I think people find that they like this world. The whole show is a metaphor for what they're going through every day. I'm not as good at it as [showrunner] Lisa [Joy] and Lisa's amazing at creating this world, and making it real and yet surreal. That's hard. But the show is a mirror for how people think. The problem is that there are things that we want that we don't necessarily have to want. Those things seem so obvious to us, but those are things that the entire show is fighting against. io9: Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too, in this world? Do you think it's possible to live this carefree, hedonistic, utopia-like existence, but have your wants really get fulfilled? Nolan: I do think it's possible. I think that if we had the technology and the budget to do anything we wanted, and the world were open enough, then I think we would probably try. People are certainly capable of living their whole lives that way. But again, the whole point of the show is that there's a flaw in this world, and that's the problem of wanting something that you can't have. io9: Speaking of wanting things, I also want to ask about what it would be like to see people actually doing what Dolores does. Do you ever find yourself wondering what the people who've seen this story before would think of it, when they watch it for the first time? Nolan: It would be interesting to see what the difference is between what the audience does and what we see on screen, because we tend to see it so many times, and we get to see it with everything in frame. But the show to us has a whole level of subtext to it. It really has different layers. I'm lucky that I'm not usually making things that are so complicated that I can't even understand them myself. It's nice to find things like this. The show is probably very much like it's described. It's really an homage to the great Westerns of the '30s and '40s and their version of a utopian West, which they always made, whether it was the West or whatever. And then it's just being set in a world now that people are trying to imagine. We're in that time period, but we're in the future, so the version of the West they've created has a little bit more of a bite, so to speak. io9: Speaking of wanting things that you can't have, are there things that you wish that you could get out of this show, but can't? Nolan: We would love to do a second season. I'm not sure there's any way that we could do a second season without solving the problem, but I'm not the one to know. io9: What do you think it would be like, if you could see the other version of the stories that we've just watched? Like, the one in which something goes horribly wrong? Nolan: We've talked about all of those endings. In a certain way, every time we see something that goes wrong, it seems obvious to us that something worse is going to happen. But then again, it may turn out that this is our life, this is our world. We won't know until the end