(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Sunday’s episode of “Westworld.”)
By the end of “Westworld” Season 3’s second episode, Maeve (Thandie Newton) has not only figured out that she was trapped inside a simulation of Delos Destinations and its Warworld park, but busted her way out of said simulation into the real world with the help of the digital version of her for-sure-dead-in-real-life friend Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman).
Unfortunately, Maeve’s efforts to escape her artificial cage are proven pointless when she wakes up inside a newly made version of her old Host body inside the home of an unnamed villainous character played by Vincent Cassel. He’s new to the series this year, but based on the fact he’s already ordered Maeve to kill Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and frozen her when she tried to fight him, we’ve already got a pretty good idea of how he’s going to try to use Maeve over the rest of Season 3.
And to tease that plotline for TheWrap further was Newton herself, who broke down how Maeve quickly realized she was trapped in a simulation crafted by Cassel’s character and revealed that the Host will be turned into a weapon somehow.
“I think with every update to her intelligence, it increases her intelligence. So it means she’s quicker, as computers are, she’s quicker to update in the future” Newton said. “It’s like she’s honing her skills with every new piece of information that she manages to figure out. And there’s no limit to her programming. It’s both a blessing and a curse, I suppose, because then she finds herself as a weapon, eventually. She can be used for good or bad. And that is a constant question in this season, is what is the nature of good and what is the nature of evil and everything in between? And what’s worth fighting for and how high are the for beings that want to survive and, of course, want to have free will, which is a whole other layer to this thing?”
“These are gripping storylines that are being woven together for this season, partly because these are things that we all think about, these are things that we all crave and fight for: freedom, free will, agency, the truth,” she added. “We find ourselves in a system where we can be lied to, where transparency is not a given. And these are all things that currently, with technology, we’re getting closer and closer to discovering truths which send us all into a tailspin. Who do you trust? And how information is being used to exploit people who are ignorant to the fact they are being used, that they are being exploited.”
Newton described Maeve as “an escape artist” who ultimately “wants peace” and “deals with the fact of the betrayal that she’s actually not a human with an acceptance and then retires.”
“Really, for me, at the end of Season 2, lying there on a heap, discarded, with a hole in her head where her pearl was — that’s fine for her,” the “Westworld” star said, making a call back to how Maeve was dead by the end of the show’s second season — however, we didn’t find out that pearl bit until this episode. “She didn’t want anything to do with life as she now knows it because the life she has will then betray her.”
We’ll have to wait to see how exactly that all plays out — and if/how we’ll be seeing more of Lee and Maeve’s beloved Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) this season, who only existed inside Maeve’s simulation but are both listed as series regulars for Season 3.
“I love that you’re curious about it and your curiosity will be rewarded, but it’s delicious to wait,” Newton said.
“Westworld” airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.