We’re hours away from the 90 minute finale to HBO’s Westworld. Let’s talk Maeve. Putting aside the nearly inexplicable, unbelievably stupid actions of the techs that boosted Maeve’s intelligence, this has been one of the most engaging exciting stories of the season. Maeve is now fully self-aware and supercharged with a deep desire to emancipate herself and her fellow hosts from captivity.
Her realizations and awareness of the torture she has endured through countless lives has made her one of the only characters I deeply emotionally care about. She also acts as a foil to Ford – they both have the power to vocally command the hosts, Ford uses this power freely, where Maeve wants to convince people to join her of their own free will.
We can expect this story line to reach a conclusion tonight. Either Maeve will escape - or she will be trapped again and see her power slip away. Evidence suggests that the latter is in store for her. First of all, we know that Ford has a backdoor to all the hosts’ programming. Worst comes to worst, he can command them all to stop. Until they are free of this or we see a host overpower their own code, he will have the power to stop any rebellion at any point. Though seeing this backdoor used in nearly the same way as it was against Bernard is too obviously bad plotting for a show of this stature.
Beyond that, I think there is strong evidence that Ford is either aware of or orchestrating the entire escape. We know there are cameras everywhere yet no one has seemed to flag Maeve’s unscheduled chats with the tweedledums. We saw Bernard erasing camera evidence for his forced transgressions, but nothing for Maeve’s. Hard to imagine that Ford does not know this is going on.
With that in mind, he could either be ignoring it since he knows his backdoor can shut it down at any moment. Or maybe, he wants the added chaos of it to obfuscate his grand plan. That all seems too coincidental for Westworld’s style though. I think it’s more likely that Ford is orchestrating the rebellion. Not hard to imagine that the two techs are hosts, programmed to aid Maeve on her road to self-discovery. This would mean that Ford’s grand storyline extends far beyond Teddy/Wyatt and the park itself.
Ford’s obsession with Arnold goes far beyond excavating the town where he died. Is it too far to imagine that Maeve’s rebellion is deliberately designed to echo Dolores’ from thirty years ago? We know that she ended up wiped and trapped yet again, but will this be Maeve’s fate as well?
There’s also the longshot theory that Ford wants Maeve to escape. This seems to go against his entire character and desires so they’d have to try pretty hard to make it work. I guess I just want to imagine some world where Maeve can beat the slavemasters.
More likely we’ll see her rebels get a few kills, cause some chaos before we learn it was all part of Ford’s plan. I’ll be rooting for her anyway. Tune in tonight to see how wrong I got it.
