Ronins, ninja, gaishas and big sticks with metal nobbles on top: Shogun World has everything a fan of Edo Japan might hope for. It’s a park that offers “an experience expressly designed for guests who find Westworld too tame”, according to Lee Sizemore, but it’s also oddly familiar. The hosts that Maeve’s group of renegades encounter in Shogun World are in effect copies of themselves.
Sizemore puts this doubling down to laziness, on his part. “Try writing 300 stories in three weeks,” Westworld’s Head of Narrative tells Maeve. Now if it wasn’t already clear that Sizemore is a bullshitter of the highest order, you might be tempted to call him up on that. Fourteen stories a day, with dialogue? Not even Hollyoaks can manage that. But, anyway. In Shogun World, Musashi is Hector, Akane is Maeve, Sakura is Clementine and even Armistice has an act-a-like with a big tattoo on her neck.
The beginning of this episode finds our gang of Westworld escapees in the custody of their Shogun World twins. They soon find themselves upgraded to the role of guests, however, and taking part in a storyline known as Army of Blood. There is a complication, of course, as the story appears to be being improvised by the performers. This becomes especially apparent when Akane is asked to hand young Sakura over to one of the Shogun’s henchmen but stabs him in the eye instead. Next thing you know, the Shogun has sent a team of ninjas to nick Sakura in the dead of night. After that, our mirror image heroes have no choice but to march to the Shogun’s rather shoddy-looking camp and try to get their girl back.
They don’t succeed. Sakura is stabbed violently by the Shogun in the middle of a traditional dance routine and dies on stage. Akane is forced to watch this happen and responds by cutting the Shogun’s head off with a hair pin. A fight not surprisingly ensues. Akane and Maeve are captured and set up for execution. “Arigato Maeve,” says Akane, and that most unusual of things in Westworld – an actual friendship – appears to have blossomed at the last.
Then something even more unusual occurs. Ever since season one, and the maxing out of her abilities on the iPad of Power ™, Maeve has had the ability to persuade other hosts to do her bidding, just by talking to them. Now it appears she doesn’t even have to talk. By concentrating her mind/CPU, Maeve persuades samurai to turn against samurai, saving herself, Akane and the rest of the gang in the process. This power, it should be noted, comes with the same sound effect we have heard when other hosts have been breaking out of their loops. Can Maeve not only control fellow hosts, but liberate them too?
Back in the park and it’s remix time for Teddy. After a few rewinds I note that the winsome cowboy who has also had his attributes jiggled by the iPad of Power ™, now has maximum scores in aggression, coordination, cruelty and preservation. I think this means that Teddy is now the ultimate bad guy. Who needed a character with a conscience anyway?
Teddy was given the “Joe Pesci becomes a made man in Goodfellas” treatment after being led up the garden path by Dolores. His soulmate, the female robot to whom he was supposed to keep looping back for all his days, had decided that, really, he wasn’t for her. She took him into the kitchen, picked up that can of condensed milk which meant so much to both of them, then had him collared by her goons and reprogrammed by her tame Delos technician.
To make matters worse Dolores made sure to get her oats first; taking Teddy to bed(dy), in the first host-on-host action we’ve seen since Maeve got it on with Hector. It was a tender moment, but one that only presaged betrayal, and was very callous, if not entirely unexpected. Teddy’s been a drag on Dolores’s bloody ambitions throughout this season and things came to a crunch when she spotted him disobeying her instructions at the battle of Fort Forlorn Hope.
Some may say that the remix was Wyatt’s doing and the bedding Dolores’s. But as we move on it seems less like Dolores is switching between one persona and another and more like a new Dolores has assimilated aspects of both previous roles. She remembers her former life fondly and wants to honour it, her father in particular. But that life has now ended and, you know, violent ends and all that.
Now that Teddy has been dealt with, Dolores is taking her gang on the train to La Mesa AKA Delos HQ. There they will cause no end of trouble, if the episode’s opening scene is anything to go by. We see Bernard doing that furrowed brow thing of his, standing amid a crowd of corpses trying to work out what the hell had happened. As he does so, Delos’s top executives/armed mercenaries are cutting holes in hosts’ heads trying to find out what happened to them. They want to playback their memories, but it turns out there’s no data in there. It’s like they never had any data stored in the first place, in fact. And their backups have been destroyed too! Who’s been wiping the hosts? And if they’re wiped, how can they fight? As one Delos grunt says to another in rather convoluted terms: “How did these disparate threads come together to create this outcome? Work this out and we’ll know how the story ends.” Indeed.
Notes from the prairie
- The guy who plays Musashi, Hiroyuki Sanada, also played a character in Lost. He was Dogen, a Japanese character who appeared in a handful of episodes and ended up being murdered. I never followed Lost after it left terrestrial TV but I know it’s the ur-text for puzzle shows like Westworld, so thought it might be worth noting.
- Popular music played on anachronistic instruments of the week alert: Shogun world introduces a whole new range of traditional instrumentation and so we get a string version of Paint it Black (perhaps the three-stringed banjo-shaped Shamisen?) and then, during the final fight scene, we get the hook from Wu Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M (itself a sample of the Charmels’ As Long As I’ve Got You).
- Reddit loves Westworld and the feeling is mutual. Producer Lisa Joy did a gushing AMA on the site this week answering questions about the series in general and last week’s episode four, which she directed, in particular. There wasn’t much in the way of revelation, but Joy did take care to use her first answer to tease some possible future events. Explaining how the producers structure the show, and suggesting it’s all about pairings, Joy said that following on from the matching of Maeve with Lee Sizemore in this series, we should look forward to “Dolores and Hector in season three, MIB and [Ghost Nation leader] Akecheta season four, etc.” Seeing as season four has yet to be greenlighted that’s probably a tease, but there we go.
Questions
Do you agree with my interpretation of Maeve’s powers? And what is going on in Dolores’s head? What would you rather have; nobbly death stick or a pistol? And, without getting too awful, how on earth does host sex work?
