Westworld Season 2: Any Character Could Return

This post contains spoilers about Westworld.

The first season of HBO's celebrated sci-fi/western Westworld wrapped up on Sunday with a thrilling, 90-minute finale that answered a lot of our questions--and posed some new ones as well. Now, husband-and-wife showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have shared some new insight into what to expect from Season 2.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nolan first teased that, while Anthony Hopkins' characters, Dr. Ford, might have died at the end of Season 1, he could return in the future. "We were very lucky to have one amazing season with Anthony Hopkins," Nolan said. "We loved working with him. As for the show, where it goes, the characters--we've well established we're playing in a more advanced ruleset in terms of death and resurrection than other [projects] I've worked on. So I would say: Assume nothing."

Asked if there are any characters that are definitely not returning for Season 2, Nolan said anything is possible, due in part to the fact that the hosts can't always tell what's real and what's a memory.

"I think with this show we like surprising people," Nolan said. "And we like playing with them. We've established the show can track forward and backward in time. … As we've established, the hosts can't distinguish their memories and realities. There is always an opportunity to revisit some of these characters."

Also in the interview, the subject of where in the heck the Westworld park actually is came up. As you might have guessed, Nolan and Joy aren't giving anything away--yet.

"I think part of the fun of figuring out where they are is something that we're going to… it'll be fun," Joy said about the park's location.

Nolan added that he doesn't want to create the "world's largest mystery" about the parks location, especially when there are compelling stories to be told about the characters. Viewers don't know where the park is physically located because the hosts don't know.

"I think the rule we've built from the beginning--whether it's frustrating for the audience or not; hopefully it's not--is you really only know as much as the hosts know," Nolan said. "Our worldview is limited to theirs. They don't know where they are yet. We tried teasing that in the finale, but it doesn't seem fair that the audience would know if they don't."

The Westworld Season 1 finale also teased that Westworld is just one of the parks that people can pay to virtually visit. There was a reference to a Samurai World in the episode, and this might be only one of the other parks.

"We're definitely teasing there are other worlds," Joy said. "How many other worlds and what is the nature of the other worlds is something we'll start to explore more in Season 2. But it was definitely fun filming those samurai [scenes]."

The full Entertainment Weekly interview is stacked with incredibly interesting insight from Nolan and Joy about Season 1 and where things might go for Season 2, which debuts in 2017 or 2018. Go read it here.

Westworld's Season 1 finale, "The Bicameral Mind," had the strongest ratings of the entire season, HBO announced on Monday. For the entire first season, Westworld's viewership passed the numbers for Game of Thrones Season 1, suggesting HBO has another hit on its hands.

For more on the finale, check out GameSpot's new, spoiler-filled feature, "The 7 Best Moments From the Season Finale," as well as the similarly spoiler-y video below.

In other news, it's been confirmed that Westworld writer Halley Gross is writing The Last of Us: Part II alongside Neil Druckmann.