Every week when we come together to dissect the latest episode of Westworld, we first start by dissecting the episode’s title. Lucky for us, this week we can cut to the chase because this episode’s title, “The Adversary,” is self-explanatory. That being said, who the “adversary” in the episode is, isn’t clear at all. As a matter of fact, every single character in this episode has at least one other character they should not trust. Now that we’ve laid that out, let’s get down to why.
First off, we hope you’ve had your fill of Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) for the moment, because she doesn’t make an appearance in this episode. Yeah, it’s kind of a bummer, but there is so much going on you’re not even going to realize it by the end. You might even start to change teams to a new fave Host. Just saying.
So, we begin our episode with not Dolores, but Maeve (Thandie Newton) waking up and starting her day in her normal loop. She’s wearing a long black nightgown in direct contrast to Dolores white one, highlighting the difference between the vixen and virgin (just something to think about). She gets to the saloon where she has been working as the madam for the “past 10 years” where she greets Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) before quickly grabbing the first customer who walks through the door and taking him upstairs. She antagonizes him into rough sex, so rough that he strangles her to death. Wait, what? Oh, it’s because she wanted to die and wake up in the lab and continue the conversation she was having with Felix (Leonardo Nam).
Apparently they’ve been doing this for a while now and Maeve is learning more and more about Westworld and the whole operation. And for an android who found out they are an android she’s handling it pretty well. But, obviously, she still has a lot of questions. So she demands to be taken “upstairs” to see what goes on behind the scenes. And while she takes in the “dead” bodies being fixed, the new ones being designed, and the “live” ones being programmed, she’s completely captivated. But before Felix can take her back, she notices an ad playing for Westworld on a large screen in which she sees herself holding hands with a little girl. It’s the same scene she has seen before in her own dreams/nightmares. Trippy, much?
Meanwhile, Elsie (Shannon Woodward) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) are discussing industrial espionage, because in last week’s episode, Elsie found a transmitter in one of the Hosts that indicates someone is trying to steal info from them. Not good. Bernard realizes this was an older Host, so to dig a little deeper into the situation, he’s gonna need to go “downstairs.” Down in the super creepy basement where they keep all the out of date computers, while Bernard is looking up info on the Host, he discovers five “anomalies,” a.k.a. other Hosts, that are not registered with the new system. Great. That’s just great.
So, Bernard has to check this thing out and goes into Westworld to find these five unregistered Hosts. He comes across a cabin filled with a family. Amazed by this group he’s never seen before, he asks the father if he’s Arnold. That guy has no idea what Bernard is talking about and tries to take him out. But, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) being the boss that he is, steps out in the nick of time to tell him to stop. The whole family goes right back to what they were doing. Creepy.
In the corner of the room is a small boy who we’ve seen in several very poignant scenes in previous episodes, and who looks exactly like a young Anthony Hopkins. Which makes all the more sense once Ford tells Bernard that this group is him and his family. Ya, apparently Arnold, being the good friend he was, built them for Ford as a present. This is completely weirding out Bernard, even though Ford claims that these “ghosts” are completely harmless and he maintains them himself. He asks Bernard to leave him this (creepy) indulgence. After all, wouldn’t Bernard want to see his dead son again. Ah, hit him where it hurts Ford!
Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen) comes to talk to narrative director Lee (Simon Quarterman), who has apparently been hanging by the pool these last few episodes. She needs him to get it together and start fixing the continuity errors in the park that Ford has created by displacing a bunch of Hosts to make room for his new narrative. Lee isn’t about that, with his ego still pretty bruised from Ford shooting down his last big endeavor. He is more interested in chatting up a hot chick he meets at the bar who, wouldn’t you know it, turns out to be Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), the executive director of Delos Destinations’ board, who is in town to start overseeing transitions in the company. Bet you wish you listened to Theresa now, Lee.
But Thersea has other things to worry about when Bernard comes knocking at her door late at night. It’s not for another booty call, as she had to shut those down earlier in the episode since Ford knows about the little tryst. Bernard is there to tell her he’s concerned about Ford (and his “family”). But, when Bernard get’s a call from Elsie, who has gone venturing into the park to the world’s creepiest theater after finding out it’s the location of a broadcasting center where someone is sending out messages to Hosts, he decides to get out of there fast. Why? According to Elsie, it’s Thersea who is smuggling out data. But apparently that’s not the only problem. Someone has hacked their system and been reprogramming Hosts all across the park, changing their loops, making it possible for the Hosts to lie and to even hurt humans. But before Elsie can get further down the rabbit hole, someone in the creepy theater snatches her away. Ain’t that always the case?
Checking in with Teddy (James Marsden) and the Man in Black (Ed Harris), we find the two headed toward the ever illusive (becoming irritatingly hard to find) Maze. Teddy happens to know a little bit about The Maze and regals the Man in Black (here after referred to as MIB) with the tale of a man who died over and over and over until he got sick of it. So he built himself a house and built a maze around it so that only he knew his way out. Well, a Host could definitely die over and over and over, but I’m still betting good money on Arnold being at the center of The Maze, so let’s make those metaphorical deaths.
The pair come across an encampment of Union soldiers that they need to get by on their way to finding Wyatt (the next clue to The Maze), so they do the only logical thing and take out some other soldiers and rob them of their clothes. They are headed through the camp when someone recognizes Teddy and blames him for killing men with Wyatt in a battle. Teddy, being the good boy that he is, takes responsibility for it and they get tied up. But when it looks like they aren’t gonna make it out alive, he and MIB break free and Teddy takes out THE ENTIRE ENCAMPMENT with a spray of bullets. “You don’t know me at all,” he tells MIB. Uh, guess not.
By the end of this episode, Maeve decides she’s had enough of her current situation, and wants to start rewriting her story. And at this point we don’t blame her. So she asks Felix, and his (kinda) friend Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) to crank her metrics up a notch. A really big notch. Like all the way up the scale, hitting 20 out of 20 on the intelligence metric, notch. And now, she says, we’re gonna have some fun.
HollywoodLifers, who do you think is reprogramming the Hosts? Give us your thoughts below!
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