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![]() Maeve, Akane and Sizemore then had to disguise themselves as Chinese diplomats to get closer to the bloodthirsty shogun (whom it’s revealed is malfunctioning), after Sakura is kidnapped. Ultimately, Maeve’s posse become participants in the village’s narrative, after Akane murders an emissary of a local shogun (Masaru Shinozuka) and this triggers a ninja attack. Although Akane’s daughter, Sakura (Kiki Sukezane), isn’t missing like Maeve’s. This twist gave the episode some emotional heft by the end, as Maeve forged a close bond with geisha Akane (Rinko Kikuchi), recognising they’re essentially the same person. It was also used for last season’s Mariposa sequence. Also, I loved the cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black”, which continued this season’s tendency for composer Ramin Djawadi to give pop classics a thematic twist. And they’re even following recycled narratives, as an action sequence echoing the choreography of Hector’s Mariposa heist demonstrated. Sizemore’s laziness resulted in him taking shortcuts in his work, so many of Shogun World’s characters are just variations on Westworld personas transposed onto Japan’s Edo period. Maeve, Hector (Rodrigo Santoro), and Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) were captured by a ronin named Misashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his men, then escorted to a village to meet other people they soon realise are their “duplicates”. The majority of “Akane no Mai” (Japanese for “Akane’s dance”) was dedicated to Maeve’s (Thandie Newton) storyline a character who’s been somewhat overshadowed this season. Next week’s episode should be interesting if sweet Teddy’s suddenly going to behaving like a ‘black hat’, and knowing he ends up drowned in the reservoir suggests his new personality could be a hindrance to his survival… ![]() And so, against his will, Teddy has his personality changed to better suit what Dolores needs in a lieutenant. After recounting a story about how her father dealt with the outbreak of an infection in their herd (he burned the weakest animals to spare the rest), it became clear that Dolores thinks Teddy lacks the balls to do bad for the greater good. ![]() The fact Teddy spared Craddock’s life a few episodes ago is also returned to, as Dolores decides his sense of decency is a liability. Then Dolores ordered the town’s broken locomotive be repaired, as it’s the best way for them to travel directly to the park’s control centre. In flashback to before the reservoir massacre, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Teddy (James Marsden) returned to their hometown of Sweetwater… only to find a scene of mass slaughter themselves. How could those hosts function without any coding? Were they being controlled by a more powerful entity elsewhere, essentially under a kind of remote control? It’s the aftermath of a terrible massacre Bernard feels uncomfortable being around (as we know he blames himself for whatever happened), but the puzzle piece of most interest was Strand being informed that a third of the hosts pulled out of the water didn’t have any programming. The present day only featured in the opening with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) inside the Delos control centre, watching Karl Strand’s (Gustaf Skarsgård) security team retrieve drowned host bodies from the flooded reservoir they’re draining. ![]() The flashbacks haven’t always been easy to follow this year, but there was less flitting around in the timeline during this hour. A different location and fresh faces gave this episode a renewed sense of discovery, although I couldn’t shake a concern Westworld has opened up a new frontier when it should be focusing on the one we’ve invested the most time in. Having been teased during season 1’s finale, in “Akane no Mai” we finally enter Shogun World, with far greater emphasis on story and characterisation than usual.
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