LOL: Jonathan Nolan Reveals 'Westworld' Deleted Scene Explaining A Not-So-Big Mystery
Westworld crossed a point of no return with its most recent episode, dropping a game-changing revelation and removing a key player from the chess board altogether. And in real Westworld fashion, each answer only inspires new questions, deepening the rabbit hole and giving fans more material to explore.
While the biggest mysteries remain unsolved, showrunner Jonathan Nolan has gone ahead and answered one of the show's most minor and inconsequential questions in a surprising and humorous way.
Like so many Westworld conversations, this one begins with a Reddit thread. This one was started by user mattdezine and it's titled "The real question no one is asking..." He then linked to image:
The question is a joke, of course. He's referencing the pilot episode, where we meet Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), an increasingly self-aware robotic Host and the closest thing Westworld has to a lead character, and watch her live out her programmed "loop," which typically involves her finding the same scenic view and producing a painting. And since Dolores is one of the oldest Hosts in the park, she's gone through her loop thousands of times and has presumably created many copies of the same painting. It's an amusing, albeit minor little aside on a forum that otherwise spends its days exploring more ambitious.
And then Nolan, who runs the show alongside Lisa Joy, showed up with a response that would be familiar to any Westworld fan: "Doesn't look like anything to me." And then he linked to this:
No, your memory does not deceive you – that footage is not from an episode that has aired. But it does answer that what Westworld park technicians have done with roughly 10,950 paintings! They let them stack up in the Abernathy farmhouse, presumably because the Hosts have been programmed not to notice them. While Nolan would never dare enter a thread about a more important mystery and provide unseen footage from the show, him doing it as part of a joke thread is kind of fantastic.
The question now is where this footage comes from. While it could come from one of the three hours from the show's first season that haven't aired yet, it seems unlikely that Nolan would share even a snippet from a future episode. This is most likely a deleted scene, possibly from the pilot episode and specifically from the sequence where park techs search Dolores' farmhouse after her father discovers a modern photograph and suffers a catastrophic breakdown.
The next episode of Westworld, which was just renewed for a second season, airs this Sunday. And remember: the show's creators are watching you theorize!