The second season of HBO’s Westworld has just premiered, around 18 months since the last first hit our screens. And it looks as if the year-and-a-half gap between seasons of the show is likely to be maintained for the third season of Westworld too. If not longer.

Co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan has been chatting about the time between seasons in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, and he confirmed that “it’s an ongoing conversation with our friends at HBO, and for us, with a show of this scope and scale, we’re not interested in doing the compromised version. We want the show to get bigger and bigger and more ambitious and this takes time”.

“We want to take all the time we need to get it right”, he said. He also confirmed that there’s an end point in mind for the series, and that “we view each season as a self-contained chapter”.

“We want you excited to come back after 18 months but that you haven’t been left hanging on the edge of a cliffhanger – that doesn’t really feel fair to the audience”.

Season two of Westworld runs for ten episodes. It’s screening on Sky Atlantic in the UK.