Westworld – The Adversary

By starrymag | November 11, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

Maeve, Felix, and Sylvester

 

As was expected by last week’s cliffhanger ending, Maeve’s (Thandie Newton) storyline takes front and center in this week’s episode of “Westworld” entitled The Adversary. Like Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Maeve has acquired the ability to remember her past beyond the current “build” that was constructed for her when the character of “Maeve” was created. Now, Maeve is able to wake up her mind to the questions she was never supposed to ask and her body to the world she was never supposed to know existed. When the latter does occur, when she wakes up inside a lab room where a lab technician is supposed to be reconstructing her body, it is to ask him a simple question: what does all of this mean?

 

Surprisingly, lab tech Felix (Leonardo Nam) does not shy away from any of her questions telling her all she wants to know about how and why she is constructed. She has trouble making sense of it, trouble understanding that what separates his “life” from hers is the fact that he was born and she was made. That is until at last he tells her that even the words she uses in her responses, which she believe to be formed from her own free thought and will, are also chosen for her from a patterned script. Maeve takes the tablet Felix that has been holding from his hands and watches as every one of the words she says to him becomes highlighted from a scripted list of words until her ability to improvise a reaction to what she’s seeing becomes emotionally impossible.

 

She locks up and only after tinkering with her codes for a few minutes, Felix is able to bring Maeve back online again. Without skipping a beat, she picks up where their conversation left off and asks Felix if he could escort her upstairs. He does and what she sees horrifies and shocks her. But aside from seeing hosts being made from the bottom up, and aside from seeing them being cleaned up after being left bloodied and “dead” inside the park, the moment of the tour that touches Maeve most is the sight of herself and the little girl (her daughter?) from her memories play out on an advertisement across the wall in Westworld’s HQ building.

 

They finally make it safely back downstairs and inside the lab room where Maeve first woke up only to be discovered by Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum), who relinquishes his threats to report Felix for his obsession with Maeve only after she threatens to slit his throat with a scalpel blade. Maeve agrees to not kill him and to not find some way to report either of them if ever given the opportunity, but only if they agree to do one last thing for her: change her stats in her favor – specifically lowering her pain levels, lowering her loyalty and increasing her intelligence well past the park’s mandated maximum 14 points to the full 20 possible points. They do so and Maeve sighs into her newfound enlightenment while looking both Felix and Sylvester in the eyes and asking, “Dear boys, we’re going to have some fun, aren’t we?”

 

Elsie, Bernard, Theresa, and Dr. Ford

 

Also not having a good day are Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Elsie (Shannon Woodward) who continue to try to ascertain how and why certain hosts have been outfitted with hardware that make them capable of smuggling data outside the park. Bernard’s investigation into the issue leads him to identify a section of the park, Sector 17, where five hosts unaffiliated with the park’s new program seem to be experiencing anomalous activities.

 

Bernard goes to this section of the park only to discover it outfitted with a quaint cottage more in the realm of a 1940’s English countryside rather than the Wild West we’ve come to associate with the typical landscaping of the park. Inside the cottage, Bernard finds a family of four hosts and a dog – a replica of Dr. Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) childhood family – going about their daily lives. They are some of the park’s oldest models, created by Arnold, and have only been kept functional thanks to Dr. Ford’s care and (let’s face it) his abuse of power and obsession with the past.

 

Concerned about this abuse, Bernard decides to visit Theresa (Sidse Babbet Knudsen) in the hopes that he can confide in her with his concerns about Dr. Ford. But his confidence in her dwindles the moment Elsie calls to tell him that she has discovered Theresa to be the one responsible for smuggling park data.

 

Once he leaves Theresa’s room, Bernard calls Elsie back and she tells him that while Theresa has been using the park’s old programming system to re-task older hosts with the goal of smuggling data. “Others” have been accessing it as well in order to make modifications to hosts’ prime directives, which could allow them to lie to or even hurt park guests and staff members. While this is shocking in its own right, Elsie’s biggest shock bomb happens when she tells Bernard that she suspects Arnold, a dead man, to be responsible for the hosts’ prime directive alterations. This is a possibility neither want to accept.

 

Before they both hang up, Elsie tells Bernard she will bring him a copy of the data she’s found. But when an unknown assailant attacks her from behind, we have to wonder if that data will ever find its way to Bernard untampered and intact.

 

The Man in Black and Teddy

 

After being told by a couple of passers-by that the road ahead is blocked by soldiers, Teddy (James Marsden) leads the Man in Black (Ed Harris) down a much more “treacherous path” that gets them closer to their destination although it too is blocked by the same soldiers. In an attempt to slip past the soldiers’ camp unnoticed and unharmed, both Teddy and The Man dress in soldiers’ uniforms and begin to walk through the fray until one soldier recognizes Teddy’s face – the face of a deserter.

 

He aims his gun at Teddy who dispatches both him and the soldier to his left before The Man in Black can even react. They are eventually captured, but Teddy manages to break free from his restraints. He immediately mans the troop’s Gatling gun mowing down every last soldier while a wide-eyed Man in Black looks on with utter shock and surprise. It seems the “Wyatt” back story Westworld HQ loaded into Teddy’s mind turned him into a killer and after today, it’s safe to say that the Man in Black doesn’t know Teddy at all. Then again, I’m not sure if the behaviors and thoughts of the park’s hosts will ever qualify any guest as able to fully be able to “know” a host ever again.