Two years from now there is going to be a Westeros-shaped hole in our hearts with HBO pulling the plug on Game of Thrones, but if there’s any show that HBO can conjure that comes close to facing-off with the dragon it’s Westworld.

Designed as an heir to Thrones, Westworld has a monstrous $100 million budget, has been almost three years in the making and has one of the greatest actors living today at the core of it's mechanics.

Set sometime in the not so distant future, Westworld is a theme park where people high prices to enter into a virtual reality that brings them into America’s heartland filled with highly sophisticated robotic “hosts” who all have their own story-lines they relive day after day. Basically a westernized version of Skyrim, only you get sucked into the action. From the premiere we learn that the hosts can be killed, tortured, shot, stabbed or raped by the “newcomers” and wake up the next day not remembering a thing.

In the premiere episode "The Original" we are introduced to Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) sitting lifeless and naked in chair dead to the world with a close-up of a fly crawling across her eyeball. In the next shot we see Dolores again, only this time she is clearly alive and waking up in Westworld, saying hello to her father and riding into town where she has a run in with newly arrived love interest Teddy Flood (James Marsden) who just can't seem to stay alive.

This happens again, everyday of Dolores' life with slight variations. The first instance we see Dolores bringing Teddy home to witness her family getting slaughtered by bandits and The Gunslinger (Ed Harris, we'll get to him a lot more later). The Gunslinger challenges Teddy to a shoot-out and, surprisingly, Teddy looses because The Gunslinger can't be killed.

Even though he fits right in with the rest of Westworld's robots, The Gunslinger is human.

He is trying to figure out the deeper meaning behind the "game" and deeper meaning of Westworld while creating havoc in his path. Of course, it's HBO, so Dolores' nightmarish day ends with her being dragged into the barn by The Gunslinger and HBO let's our minds figure out the rest. Although her life is an endless cycle of tragedy, she is the standout character of the episode because she starts each day with a sense of hope, something the masterminds of this theme park don't seem to have.

When we are pulled out of Westworld we are thrown into a completely different kind of world. One filled with sad, cynical humans who seem to spend all their days perfecting the mechanics of Westworld and looking after the two-hundred plus synthetic, twitching bodies of the hosts all created by Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). We only see him briefly, but the role of mysterious mad-scientist fits Hopkins perfectly. The other humans we meet are Jeffery Wright's Bernard Lowe, the head of programing (who is reminiscent of Wright's Beetee from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) that gets all the blame when the hosts begin to act outside the norm from their programing. Luke Hemsworth as Ashley Stubbs, the head of security who seems like she wants to be as far away from Westworld as possible and Simon Quarterman as Lee Sizemore, a plucky writer who creates the stories in Westworld.

So is it the next Game of Thrones? I don't think so, but does it really matter? It's a good show for HBO. It's fun, interesting, aesthetically gorgeous and something that hasn't been seen on television before.