Westworld season 2, Episode 5 Recap: “Akane No Mai”
Tonight, Maeve and her gang visit Shogun World, a park for guests who find Westworld too tame (let that sink in for a minute). Bernard is still pretending to be human in front of Delos security, and Dolores decides to get Teddy turnt during a visit to Sweetwater. This was a fun episode of Westworld.
We open in the Delos Mesa HQ, where Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård) has his team sorting and piling up the host corpses recovered from the large body of water seen in the premiere episode. And guess who’s there: yep, it’s Teddy (James Marsden), serving his purpose even after the hosts got woke.
All of this is happening in Timeline A, by the way, weeks after Dolores’ uprising. After this opening bit is over, we spend the rest of the episode closer in time to that uprising, in Timeline B.
Anyway, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) is there overseeing technicians as they remove host brains so they can find out what happened. Curiously, a third of the hosts’ brains seem to have been wiped clean, as though they’d never been in the park. Clearly, something is still afoot. I’d bet a drink at the Mariposa Saloon that Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is in a host body somewhere, continuing to manipulate things. Of note: Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) isn’t in these scenes, so something must happen to her between Timeline A and now. #WhereisElsie
Speaking of Timeline A, we go back some weeks to the moment from the end of Episode 3, when a samurai warrior attacked Maeve (Thandie Newton) and her posse. Maeve pulls a Neo and dodges his swing. This isn’t her only newfound power, but more on that later.
The Samurai’s name is Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), and he brought along some friends. They quickly capture Hector (Rodrigo Santoro), Armistice (Ingrid Bolso Berdal), Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) and the two knucklehead technicians: Felix (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum). Musashi wants to kill his prisoners, but Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto) steps in and stops him. When she does, her hat moves, and we see that she has a snake tattoo on her face. It catches Armistice’s eye.
Hanaryo convinces Musashi to take their prisoners to the nearest town, where they’re planning a heist. On their way, Sylvester asks Felix if he can talk to these new samurai hosts, all of whom speak Japanese. “I’m from Hong Kong, asshole,” Felix replies. These two are the living embodiments of the cartoon cats they are named for and I’m here for it.
Anyhoo, If this narrative is starting to sound familiar, then you’ve been paying attention, because it’s the same as Hector’s bank heist narrative in Westworld. It’s becoming clear Lee Sizemore isn’t very good at his job as the Delos lead narrator, or at least, he’s not opposed to reusing his ideas. To drive that point home, composer Ramin Djawadi even scores the heist scene in this episode with another cover of “Paint it Black,” this time sounding like it’s played on the Japanese shamisen.
Maeve and company start noticing the similarities, too, as when Armistice and Hector spy a Mariposa butterfly symbol etched in the sand outside a building. The narrative proceeds as planned, with Musashi (Shogun World Hector) killing the town’s lawman and handing Hanaryo (Shogun World Armistice) a bundle that holds a bow and a quiver full of arrows. She begins killing anyone who gets close as Musashi enters the building.
Inside, he finds Akane (Rinko Kikuchi), the establishment’s Geisha Madam. That makes her Shogun World Maeve. Also present is Sakura (Kiki Sukezane), one of Akane’s employees. Proceeding according to his narrative, Musashi kills a john while his men pull the safe down from the second floor. Outside, Hanaryo dispatches more men, one of whom would have got her had Armistice not yelled a warning. Hanarya approaches Armistice and looks closely at her snake tattoo. “Even a snake can prove itself a dragon,” she says. Thanks, Westworld; the internet can always use more Game of Thrones/Westworld crossover memes.
Maeve, who earlier learned courtesy of Lee that her Jedi voice commands weren’t working because she wasn’t speaking Japanese, switches over to the local language and convinces Musashi that they can all be friends. He agrees, and the next time we see them, Maeve and company are dressed like the locals, enjoying traditional Edo period entertainment while sitting on the floor.
Maeve is anxious to be on her way and search for her daughter, but Lee tells her to be patient; things work a little different in Shogun World. Namely, the hosts here are more offended if you reject their hospitality, and afterward more likely to go ape on you. During this respite, an emissary of the Shogun (Masaru Shinozuka) pays the group a visit and says his boss demands Akane give him Sakura for his own pleasure and entertainment. Here’s the quest, right on schedule. Akane isn’t having it and kills the man with a cleverly hidden knife pen from her hair. The quest is now off the rails.
At this point, I think it’s important to mention that Hector realizes that Musashi is the Shorun World version of him, and he does not like it…at all.
That night, the Shogun sends ninjas to attack the Geisha house, something else Lee notes isn’t supposed to happen in this narrative. Clearly, the hosts are starting to go off-narrative in Shogun World just as they are in Westworld and the Raj. But who cares? It’s ninjas and it’s awesome. Maeve, displaying another new power, has a vision of the attack before it happens and narrowly avoids an arrow. Hector has his gun ready and starts firing; he almost kills Musashi (Is that a kind of suicide? Or just self-loathing?), but holds back.
The ninjas attack in force. One puts Maeve in a choke hold, rendering her unable to command him with her voice. However, her new powers manifest themselves as she’s able to mentally command the ninja to impale himself on a nearby arrow stuck in the wall..and he does. Maeve is a Jedi = confirmed.
Armistice and Hanaryo kill the rest of the invaders but tell the group that a few of the Shogun’s ninjas made it out with Sakura. Also, some of them saw Maeve use her mind bullets on the ninja and start to call her a witch. No such thing as bad press, right? Anyway, Jedi Maeve has a plan to get Sakura back.
Maeve and Akane dress as Chinese emissaries and present themselves to the Shogun in his camp, accompanied by Lee and the two cartoon cats (Felix and Sylvester). Along the way, they see that the Shogun’s men have killed all the Delos security forces sent to quell the host uprisings; they’ve hung the bodies on trees. As Lee is taking a bachroom break near one, he notices a still-active Delos communicator hanging on one of the corpses and grabs it. I’m sure this will come into play down the line.
A little later, the group appears before the Shogun. Maeve tries to use her voice powers on the Shogun and his men, but Lee realizes the Shogun has cortical fluid leaking from his ear, meaning that he’s malfunctioning. As for the men, the Shogun had them cut their ears off so the witch’s words wouldn’t affect them. The writers had to go a long way to justify why Maeve’s powers wouldn’t work in this situation, huh?
Anyway, the Shogun knew the group wasn’t from China, and tells them the only way they can be free is if Akane, on whom he seems to be nursing from way back when, dances with Sakura that night. Incidentally, this episode’s title is “Akane No Mai,” which translates to “Akane’s Dance.” We’ll see why in a minute.
Meanwhile, in Westworld, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and her army enter the town of Sweetwater to repair the town train and use it to find her father Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum). Angela (Talulah Riley) arrives with one of the Delos men who took Peter; he says they’re transporting him to the Mesa. Dolores tells her men to repair the train and to strip it down to make it faster. The robots are headed for Westworld headquarters.
Meanwhile, Dolores and Teddy stop by their old watering hole, the Mariposa Saloon, where a new version of the host Clementine (Lili Simmons) is going through her narrative. The original Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) sees this and starts to freak out before Dolores tells her to help the others repair the train.
Ah, now time for some romance, Westworld style. Dolores takes Teddy to a field near her old ranch, and Teddy suggests the both of them walk away from all this craziness and start a life together. Dolores tells him a story about a time her father’s cows got sick. What would he do, she queries, to stop the disease from spreading? Teddy says he would quarantine the healthy sick cows in a shelter. Dolores is touched by that, since Teddy is a “kind man,” but says that her father burned the sick cows, and that it did the trick. Pray for Teddy.
That night, after Dolores and Teddy have sex, she tells him she wants to show him something. Pray for Teddy harder. Dolores takes him to an empty store and explains that things have to change if they’re ever going to achieve her goal of world domination…or something along those lines. She shows Teddy a rotting corpse of something with flies all over it. She apologizes to him, and he realizes this isn’t the romantic moonlit walk he was promised. There aren’t enough prayers in the world.
Dolores has her men hold Teddy still and has Delos technician Phil (Patrick Cage II), whom she picked up a few episodes back, to come in and reprogram Teddy’s brain, despite being told it could severely harm him. Dolores doesn’t care. Do it, Phil.
We finish the episode in Shogun World, where Maeve watches Akane and Sakura prepare for their dance. Sakura is scared, but Akane comforts her by telling her the same story Maeve used to tell Clementine in season 1, the one about how she left her old world behind and crossed the shining sea, and a voice told her she could be anything she wanted to be. Maeve finishes the story for Akane, and the two have a moment where Maeve tries her new Jedi mind powers to “free” Akane from her narrative. Akane stops her, for now, and it’s time to dance.
But before it starts, the Shogun says something needs to be different. He walks up to Sakura and runs her through with his katana. Akane is horrified — it seems like Sakura holds the same place in Akane’s heart as Maeve’s daughter does in Maeve’s — but she regains control and begins her dance. Gracefully, she glides her way closer and closer to the Shogun, touches his face with one hand, and pulls the penknife from her hair with the other. She then stabs the Shogun in his neck, sawing it off until his head is hanging by a bit of skin.
With their Shogun dead, his men force Mave and Akane onto their knees for execution. Mave uses her Jedi mind powers to force them all to kill each other, which is quite a leap for her. Before they’re all dead, one of the Shogun’s men rings a gong summoning the Shogun’s army. Lee hears the men coming and asks Meave what she plans on doing. Grabbing a katana, Maeve faces the approaching army and says, “I told you, I found a new voice. Now we use it.” Roll credits, because we all love cliffhangers.
“Akane No Mai” was a good time. Apart from enjoying the new scenery in Shogun World, we saw how Maeve is evolving into a powerful being, one who uses her abilities good. Back in Westworld, Dolores is using her influence to force everyone around her — including her most loyal companion — into submission, in order to further what increasingly look like her nefarious plans. Are these two being set up for a conflict?
We’re halfway through season 2 now, and I can’t wait to see how the last five episodes unfold.
Next: Watch the trailer for “Phase Space,” the sixth episode of Westworld season 2
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