‘Westworld’ recap: Can’t keep my hosts to myself

Or have we been with Arnold the whole time? When he went there (alone, natch) to find out what was going on, he discovered a family of four: the young boy we’ve previously seen in the presence of Dr. Ford, his brother, and their parents. It could refer to Theresa Cullen, who has been stealing data from the park via a reprogrammed host.

Maybe this is just me, but I found this week’s focus on Maeve to be really refreshing. Let’s take a look.

It’s no coincidence we get our first mention of Arnold in the same episode that we hear about Wyatt, the newly constructed villain meant to give lonesome cowboy Teddy a motivating backstory. The signs of the maze are scattered throughout the park, tattooed under the skin of hosts, carved into wood, and in tonight’s episode almost branded into the synthetic flesh of the new, dark backstory version of Teddy. “A fiction which, like all great stories, is rooted in truth”.

The Man in Black (Ed Harris) and Teddy (James Marsden) have a run-in with a battalion of soldiers, while Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) makes an unsettling discovery about Ford.

It could just be a homage to the late, great, Brynner, who arguably made the first Westworld what it was.

In episode six, Dr. Ford walks through Las Mudas – the same town where Dolores saw the maze drawn in the dirt by Lawrence’s daughter.

“When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend”.

As we follow Maeve’s interaction with bumbling techs Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) and Lutz (Leonardo Nam), we find out a LOT about the programming schemes in the hosts. Ford did tell him they could talk about it later if he wanted, so we could be jumping the gun on assuming Bernard is dropping the subject. As far as she can tell, Arnold’s been meddling with older host models, breaking their loops and changing their programming. Is someone carrying out Arnold’s mission in his name?

If there was anything that didn’t work in this episode, it was the increasingly unbearable Lee Sizemore, whom Simon Quarterman played like a giant cartoon when he literally pissed on the Westworld map and acted like a drunk jackass. “He died right here in the park“. There’s a theory that everybody on this show is secretly a host, though I personally don’t believe that (mainly because it would make the story less interesting but also because the body shop dorks wouldn’t be secretly prostituting the hosts and telling Maeve all this if they were under Ford’s control). The hosts are tools for an unknown project that Ford’s working on, but if aware, they’d see it as slavery. She’s signed into the remote server and royally screwed with the hosts.

“In the beginning, I imagined things would be perfectly balanced”. Arnold, his supposedly dead partner, is either still alive and well and living somewhere inside the Maze – or he’s operating from beyond the grave thanks to buried lines of code that not a single scientist or technician has noticed since his death 30 years ago. “I lost the bet”. So what do you think – does not compute, or order received? “In here, we were gods”.

The behavioral tour feels like it’s gone on too long now. Seeing this show’s version of Kenny from South Park suddenly, calmly mow down a ton of men was suitably jarring, and MIB’s line, “You think you know someone“, the flawless comical retort. The hosts in this little cottage include the young boy in the vest that Ford met wandering the park earlier in the season, confirming my (and many other viewers’) speculation that this character was a young version of Ford himself. But it also registers a deeper dichotomy between the mechanical hosts and the more organic ones.

That included a significant part for Leonardo Nam’s Lutz, whose major screen time last week set up his storyline this week with Maeve (Thandie Newton), the other Westworld robot beginning to discover that her reality is an artificial construct created to serve others. After threatening to gut Sylvester like a trout (well-deserved), she wryly commends him for his entrepreneurial spirit, because it turns out he’s been pimping out the deactivated hosts to his lonely lab colleagues, making himself essentially the real-world equivalent of a brothel madam. “Arnold. The person who created you”. She asks if Arnold is back there before a figure grabs her from behind.