SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
Maeve
Finally! We got to see Shogun World in all of it’s beauty and it did not at all disappoint. We spent a significant amount of time there and if the end of the episode was any indication, we’re set to spend even more time there in the next episode. Maeve – and Akane – had such a beautiful story in this episode. I like to think of it as an alternate universe, “what if” type of story for Maeve. They are literally the same character.
I don’t think that the “malfunction” that has led to the hosts being free has touched Shogun World. As Maeve and Sizemore discovered, the Shogun was going off narrative because he was broken, not because he was free. The only host in Shogun World who seemed to be free, or at least on the road toward it, was Akane. Her killing the Shogun’s emissary was off-narrative and she wasn’t broken at all.
Sizemore wasn’t kidding when he said that Shogun World was more brutal than Westworld. Sure, from what we’ve seen so far there are far more Delos forces in Westworld than Shogun World, but the fact that there are still some of said forces in Westworld and they seem to have been all wiped out in Shogun World, speaks to that brutality. It doesn’t look like Delos sent more people into Shogun World since then either. We didn’t see anyone who wasn’t a host actually, so perhaps they killed all of the guests?
I should have seen it coming that the Shogun was going to kill Sakura. There was no way that he was going to give her up that easily. Although I did think that he was going to trade Akane for her since he expressed the same admiration of her ability as a dancer as he did for Sakura. It was very obvious that Akane was going to kill the Shogun, however, and with one of her hair sticks. She killed him in a far more violent way than I expected, though; I thought she would have just stabbed him in the neck.
Can Maeve make hosts conscious? It looked like that was what she was doing with Akane. What she is able to do with her telepathic commands is eerily similar to the “voice of God” that led Dolores and other conscious hosts toward sentience. It seemed like she was actively, purposely doing it to Akane a far quicker way than searching for the maze. I was disappointed when Akane rejected it. Now that Sakura is dead, perhaps she will accept? Or join Maeve and company perhaps. Also, since hosts can’t die really, could Maeve or Sylvester and Felix bring her back? And why didn’t Maeve go all telepathic and make the Shogun’s military kill each other before Sakura died?
Dolores
Dolores surprised me in this episode. I was quite certain that she would retaliate against Teddy for disobeying her. She did, but not in the way that I had expected. I was pretty sure that the man was living on borrowed time and that she would kill him for it, but instead she changed his programming. It was like everything she did with him in this episode was a test.
From sleeping with him to determine how she felt about him (whether it was real or her programming) to telling him about the sickness that was affecting the cows her father raised. It was all a test. The latter, of course, testing his mettle and ability to do the hard things; to not be so kind and to sometimes be cruel for the “greater good.” Her changing his personality, I think, was her very misguided way of protecting him and making sure he survives, which we know he doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if her meddling was a direct cause of that, so I guess it would turn out that she killed him.
To me Dolores fiddling with Teddy’s personality settings is worse than had she killed him. She is controlling and manipulating him to serve her desires the same way that the Delos corporation had been doing to the hosts. She gave him no choice and did it without his consent. She’s really not being much of a good guy this season, but I am still holding out hope that by the end, when she’s reached her goal and done what she has set out to do, we’ll understand her actions and see why they were necessary. Maybe not excusable, but necessary.
Bernarnold
I am very confused as to why Delos doesn’t have Peter Abernathy. We saw Charlotte capture him, so she had to have lost him at some point, but he’s so…useless…that I can’t think of how she could have. Especially with all of the armed men she had with her. Perhaps she lets him go herself? We did see her tell Bernard in a flash forward in a previous episode that she didn’t have him and that was before we saw her capture him.
It’s curious that a third of the dead hosts in the valley were “virgin.” I don’t believe that any of them there would have been brand new, unused hosts so they must of been hosts that had been reset or wiped. We got confirmation here that Teddy was the host we’d seen at the bottom of the valley, but it’s not clear whether or not he is one of the “virgin” ones. This new development just makes me all the more curious to find out what happened there and how Teddy got wrapped up in it. Couple that with the fact that the host backups are gone and it’s all the more intriguing.
There’s no doubt in my mind that whatever Robert was constructing at that site thirty years ago will be revealed once Delos drains all of the water out of the valley. They’re about halfway there so it won’t be very long now before we find out. We know that Dolores is heading there so she has to be wrapped up in whatever happened to the hosts somehow and with Bernarnold having confessed to killing them, maybe the two of them worked together. We’ll see.
Random thoughts:
- Telling Maeve that she needed to speak the hosts’ language would have been helpful when the Native American hosts tried to kidnap you all, Sizemore.
- Is the second Clementine not free?
- Maeve is telepathic now?!
- Is this Dolores and Teddy’s first time together?
- Is that carved into her back?!
Westworld airs Sundays at 9 PM on HBO.
