Yesterday while traveling along the interwebs I stumbled upon an interesting story. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Westworld had dropped a brand new trailer out of thin air. Those are my favorite kind of trailers for those keeping score. I look at it this way. I’m searching the interwebs to see what’s new and exciting and then BOOM there’s an unexpected trailer for something awesome. That’s how I felt about the release of Westworld’s latest trailer. That and their use of that amazing “Heart Shaped Box” cover… it lives on my current rotation playlist. All of this is beside the point.

Back to what I stumbled upon… actually, do you guys remember Stumble Upon? It was this app you could put on your internet browser that you told all the things you were interested in finding on the internet. There were sports, comics, movies, animals, and other such popular internet goodies. Once you were done selecting all the things you liked a button would appear on your browser that you would click and it would take you to all these random websites based on what you like. And the more pages you liked the bigger the catalog of random sites would become. The whole idea was really awesome and I would spend hours on the interweb just clicking and discovering new things. I kind of miss Stumble Upon… again this has nothing to do with today’s topic. Like, at all.

As I was saying, apparently showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy of Westworld had gone on Reddit and started a poll concerned over spoilers. There is no doubt that the world we live in is filled with spoilers or the promise of spoilers. If you don’t see something within those first three days… man, good luck not having whatever that is ruined. The internet can be a terrible place when it comes to that. Hell, I went on Twitter after I saw The Last Jedi and there were a number of monsters just posting key plot points, out of context, just to ruin the film for some random person who happened to make the mistake of going on Twitter. That’s seriously one of the worst things you can do to another person. Ugh. It just makes me sad. Being so hyped up and excited for something and patiently waiting for it only to have some asshat ruin it for you in a blink of an eye. In short, I am not pro spoilers.

The creators of Westworld tried to get ahead of that though. All they asked was a simple question. In the interest of getting ahead of people who are trying to spoil the second season, they wanted to know if the fans who wanted to be spoiled would want a twenty-five-minute video breaking down all of season two… before it was released. This way the fans who wanted to know things would know them and be able to discuss with each other while the fans who didn’t want to know things could just watch the show as it came along. In order to make this a reality all that was required was 1,000 upvotes or whatever Reddit uses… I know, I need to get on Reddit but I’m still just getting used to Twitter. Give me a second, alright?!

This whole thing sounded dodgy as hell to me. There was no way that this could possibly work. As soon as information was out there it was going to be everywhere and I worried about the fans who didn’t want to be spoiled. There is no doubt that the spoilers would have been everywhere within twenty-six minutes. There would be no safe place for fans who didn’t want to spoil. You couldn’t just search Westworld on social media without living in fear. All it would take is one person to post one line and everything would be ruined… before the show even comes out. I was not about this life but was curious to what they were thinking. A couple of sites that I read said it was a forward/proactive way to address spoilers. I, on the other hand, thought it was a gamble that was going to blow up in their face. On top of that, I couldn’t see HBO being in favor of something like this. The whole point is to draw eyeballs to screens. If half the fan base wanted to be spoiled then HBO loses half those eyeballs. This experiment sounded like a mess.

I came here today with full intentions of discussing this “proactive” attack on spoilers. Essentially turning it into a discussion where you guys either agreed or disagreed with me. You know, one of those things where I ask if you would want to be spoiled or would you watch the twenty-five-minute video.

As I opened up my blank document to start writing I posted my Legion preview for Fan Fest to Facebook an article caught my eye concerning this very topic. It turns out that Nolan and Joy weren’t serious after all. Obviously, they got their one thousand upvotes and responded today with a twenty-five-minute video as promised. The rest, well… I’ll have you take a peek.

That’s right, Westworld just pulled a good ole fashion rickrolling on the fan base and I couldn’t be more relieved. In no way did this plan make any sense to me and looked to be something that was going to ruin the season for a number of fans. Myself included. I can deal with this type of trolling, even though it sort of seems out of nowhere. It got the desired chuckle out of me while maybe emphasizing the importance of not spoiling for others?  Not really sure what was accomplished here other than the showrunners having a laugh at the expense of some fans. I’m just happy that I don’t have to worry about running into spoilers while I search the interwebs.