Westworld takes place in a twisted theme park populated by incredibly lifelike androids and presided over by their morally compromised human creators. It can be hard to tell which characters fall into which categories until something breaks, which is where the computers come in. There are subtle tricks — twitches, stalls, inconsistent expressions — used to show what happens when robots perfectly designed to imitate humans malfunction and artifice can no longer obscure their nature. The success of this approach can be credited in part to the talented cast, but the show’s VFX supervisor Jay Worth explains that there was also a great deal of post-production work require to create the unnerving, unreal final product.

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Still, Worth doesn’t want to take too much credit. He’s careful to consistently praise the actors, noting that much of the robotic activity was pure performance, and that his staff only helped make parts more convincing where needed. “Everything that Abernathy does in his conversation with Dr. Ford, that’s all actor action,” Worth said. “We made him freeze every now and then. But the actors are really good at not blinking.”

The series still asks the classic question of what might happen if our creations turned against us, yet it is more interested in the consequences for them than in those for us. The human beings of Westworld are, to a considerable degree, supporting players in a drama of android self-actualization.