Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The second season of Westworld promises chaos and delivers. If the first season is a mostly neat weave of multiple threads set in different times, the second season gives us a messy tangle.

The chaotic storytelling started right off with the first episode, Journey Into Night, which on its own, did not make much sense other than setting up the various storylines for the season. We soon find out over the coming weeks that each episode might completely ignore the cliffhanger set up in the previous episode, and advance storylines two episodes ago instead.

This form of narrative has the upside of bringing in something fresh in each episodes, but has become tiresome to watch five episodes in at least for me. The "Previously on Westworld" recaps now no longer recap the previous episodes; they now recap whatever that is related to the plot in the upcoming episode, from two or three episodes ago or even from season one, in a feeble attempt to help the viewer make sense of what is shown next.

It only works because this is Westworld, a show for which scrutiny, speculation and theorizing is part of the game. I don't think I could have connected the sometimes six episodes apart (literally!) plot without watching the first season twice. The New York Times even felt the need to run a little refresher on who Elsie is.

I can't help but feel that the show could pull off this kind of storytelling (barely) for the second season because of the trust it has established in the audience with the first season. It had promised the viewer, in a "show not tell" fashion, that it can present sprawling storylines throughout the entire season and tie them together neatly at the end. It also set up the norm that the show is best enjoyed when the viewer works hard to connect the dots herself, and believe that under the chaos there is an orderly narrative for her to make sense of.

After all, halfway through the first season the plot had just been as confusing: William and Logan were on a trip on their own, Man In Black was doing whatever he was up to, we did not know what Ford's new narrative was going to be, Bernard (yes, that's what we were thinking) was having secret chats with Dolores, and Delos/management did not look like much to us.

This time, however, adding to the sense of confusion is how each storyline is themed differently yet distinctively. William/Man In Black enters a dangerous dance with "cheating the devil", Dolores looks hell bent on becoming some kind of divine leader, Bernard and Elsie carries on the sci-fi torch of the first season, Delos management shows up in the park discussing corporate interests and intellectual property, and Maeve is basically becoming a superhero in a samurai film.

While the first season is mostly a sci-fi show about artificial consciousness with some western flair, the second season has really become all sorts of thematically different things stuffed into the same 10-episode space. Now each storyline is delivering something different, and if someone came to the show for one thing, they might not care much about the others.

It is fun thing to watch. After every episode someone will comment on how some storyline (most often, the Man In Black storyline) don't work for them, while other people will be asking more of the same thing somewhere else. Even Dolores's storyline has its share of haters.

Me during Dolores scenes vs. me during Maeve scenes. #Westworld pic.twitter.com/vV3YIvaJmD

— David Medrano (@dmed08) May 21, 2018

It really speaks to something broader about Westworld: Are you here for entertainment, the world-building, or the questions that the show poses to the viewer?

No matter which one you pick, there will be a large swath of season two that feels irrelant to you. The New York Times review, for example, talks about how the reviewer welcomes a "more sportive, less self-serious" season of the show, and that the first season's ideas about consciousness, exploitation and seduction was not particularly effective because it lacked "fully drawn characters" to embody them. It welcomes the new parks and criticizes the Man In Black plot.

For me, however, the first show's questions about artificial consciousness is exactly what I came for. For me, among the new storylines, Maeve's is the least relevant because it has no stakes: it is, for now, just a robot's adventure in fabricated worlds with little real-world consequences, however fantasticly done Shogun World is. The Dolores storyline is getting tedious, for sure, but it has stakes in the sense that Dolores is plotting a rebellion against humans in the real world, which she has seen in the past.

And we are already five episodes in. My worry at this point is not about whether the showrunners can tie the plot together satisfyingly, but in whether this broad spectrum of ideas and subjects can be reined in satisfactorily. Will Shogun World be part of the story all the way out to last season, or will we only ever get a glimpse of it? How do you conclude the origin story of a goddess or the chronicle of a devil in a fraction of five episodes? I don't know.

But I am ready for it. The best observation from the New York Times review about the show, I think, is this:

“Westworld” still treats itself more as a game to be beaten than as a story to be told.

The review considers it a downside but for me, this has been a tremendous source of enjoyment. I listen to podcasts about the show, read theories about the show, yet the showrunners still delight me every week by outsmarting our collective minds.

Earlier today, Evan Rachel Wood tweeted:

Just a warning for the weekend guys.
The 2nd half of #westworld season 2 is about to go up about 10,000 points on the ‘holy f*** meter’

— #EvanRachelWould (@evanrachelwood) May 26, 2018

I am very much ready for this ride.

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I want to take a minute to appreciate some brilliant lines from season one from Dr. Ford that has taken on a new layer of meaning in season 2.

You can't play God without being acquainted with the devil.

Well we now know what the devil means, don't we?

I simply wanted to tell my stories; it is you people who want to play God.

This is a line from his conversation with Teresa, the corporate management head of the park. While Ford enjoyed being the god of his world, we now know that Delos had wanted something more.