Every episode of Westworld season 2 ranked worst to first
3. Episode 205, “Akane no Mai”
The final three episodes on this list are basically interchangeable. But somebody’s got to be in third place, so we’ll start with“Akane no Mai.” We spend this episode almost exclusively in Shogun World, a Delos theme park set in Japan’s Edo period, where warlords and ninjas rule the land.
“Akane no Mai” really had it all. Learning that Lee Sizemore plagiarized himself by creating Japanese versions of Maeve, Hector, and Armistice was good fun. But what really sold this episode was the score by composer Ramin Djawadi, the highlight being a Japanese-inspired version of “Paint it Black,” which plays during not-Hector’s robbery in not-Sweetwater.
We also saw Maeve’s powers grow from simple voice commands to mind control. Yep, Maeve becomes a Jedi Master here, and I’m not even mad about it. But in an episode filled with haunting songs and gorgeous visuals, we shouldn’t overlook the more familiar scenes between Dolores and Teddy in Sweetwater.
This is the episode where Dolores decides to forcibly reprogram Teddy, making him a ruthless killer. The scenes are painful here, but they’ll be magnified in “Vanishing Point.”
2. Episode 210, “The Passenger”
The final episode of season 2, “The Passenger,” was absolutely perfect and was exactly what Westworld as a whole needed, heading into a long offseason wait between now and season 3. Each and every storyline that seemed doomed to be left twisting in the wind until season 3, was perfectly tied up into a neat little bow instead. And, the post-credits scene was so jaw-dropping that it will be the subject of innumerable theories until the series finally returns.
The Door and Valley Beyond were finally revealed, and the good guys like Akecheta and his Ghost Nation tribe actually got to go there before it was closed off forever, as did Teddy…which I guess since Dolores had his control unit, wasn’t that much of a stretch.
But, the big reveal came when Bernard remembered he had created a host version of Charlotte Hale and then placed Dolores’ control unit in there. This meant that at several points during season 2, that Dolores was going around in Charlotte’s body as “Halores” doing things that placed key players in important roles so the final outcome would be that she escaped the park before it was all said and done. This mindblowing timeline hopping twist really does merit a re-watch of the entire season, in order to see where Dolores was masquerading as Charlotte. Brilliant storytelling by showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan.