W

hen I was little, I used to fantasize about building a miniature town in my parents’ bedroom. Theirs was the largest room in the house we lived in and some days I would stand in the doorway dreaming up such possibilities.

The town would be populated by miniature people, of course. And they would go about their days unaware of the fact that they were living inside my parents’ bedroom or, for that matter, that the only world they knew, the world in which they lived, was artificial in nature.

Then, I had another idea. What if the life they were living was based on the stories I was writing? What if, say, in some corner of the town there was a white mailbox, into which slot I could enter the day’s “episode” for the population to “act out”?

And what if there was a special telescope through which I could observe their performance? (Did they stick to their script, did they improvise?) Except, of course, the population wouldn’t see it as an episode, and instead they would accept it as fate. And it wouldn’t be much of a performance, either. It would be life lived.

This year, HBO released a new series which many believe would evolve into another Game of Thrones — a big-budget series with potential to change the landscape of TV shows.

The basic premise is nothing new to science-fiction buffs: What if robots were to take over the world? Some of the best-known sci-fi writers — from Isaac Asimov to Ray Bradbury to Philip K. Dick — have explored this idea repeatedly in their stories.

And when Michael Crichton, best known for the ever-popular Jurassic Park series, tried his hand at the same idea in 1973, it became Westworld, a sci-fi thriller set in the American west.

Yul Brynner played a lifelike android who works in a futuristic amusement park built to appease the human desire for adventure, violence and sexual encounters. The androids eventually malfunction and end up killing park visitors. It’s Planet of the Apes meets I, Robot. In each case, the humans lose. We are too gullible for our own good and too greedy.

When word began to spread of HBO’s intention to adapt Westworld as a TV-series, fans of Crichton’s original film could barely contain their excitement. For one thing, it’s HBO. For another, the show is adapted (and developed) by Jonathan Nolan, who is also responsible for Memento and Interstellar.

But I digress.

As a TV series, Westworld is not the type of show you can binge-watch. Okay, that’s a lie. You can totally do it. (Seriously, who’s going to stop you?)

However, now that the show has reached the end of the first season, as many viewers — especially Reddit users — will attest: Westworld’s complexity is an acquired taste, where each reveal contains more mystery than answers; and where answers are not sought, but rather experienced.

Like any other work by the Nolan brothers, the appeal of Westworld is more or less the same as that of Alice in Wonderland. You, the viewer, are conditioned to stumble upon a rabbit hole and stay there for however long they want you to stay there. After a while, you learn to accept the fact that maybe, just maybe, the rabbit hole is not so bad. It has its perks. We humans are so fascinated and plagued by our own existence that we will do almost anything to understand it.

“There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive,” said Robert Ford, the park’s creator in Westworld, played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins. He wasn’t talking about robots, but rather human beings.

Still, the genius of the show extends far beyond the original feature. It is no longer about humans versus robots; and instead, it provides a curious study of how we view ourselves. It serves as a mirror of sorts, through which we are meant to scrutinize our own reflection and (hopefully) find a sense of balance between what is real and what isn’t.

As a writer who is used to creating fictional worlds and living in them for months (even years) at a time, Westworld is a healthy reminder of the power of our imagination and what we can achieve. Yet I do wonder what would have happened if the fantasy in which I had to construct a whole new world in miniature size came true. It would have been a great source of entertainment for me. But then what would that say about me?