Spoilers, my pals.
In “The Adversary,” the sixth episode of Westworld, several storylines did the work of setting us up for major reveals—Teddy Flood and the Man in Black did some real marauding together, with Teddy revealing he is capable of mass murder because someone looked at him kind of funny; Bernard learned that Robert Ford is keeping a secluded house in the woods full of dead people-turned-old model hosts, which is exactly the kind of nightmare I had to medicate myself to avoid; Elsie discovered that Teresa has been complicit in smuggling some kind of data from the park; Arnold is running around in some form doing something; we also suffered through the return of Lee Sizemore, the head of narrative whose dialogue consistently cheapens the show for me, and makes me remember that everyone on this show is an actor with a SAG card and an alcoholic agent. But with Sizemore came Tessa Thompson as Delos exec Charlotte Hale, and that is maybe enough to make me forgive his whole jilted-creative plot line.
But the most stirring parts of the episode were Maeve’s. Over the past episode or two, she’s realized that if she dies, she can return to the repair shop where she has the power to wake herself up and have conversations that she’ll retain with the overlooked repairman Felix. In “The Adversary,” Felix explains to her the entire system, the difference between hosts and humans, and how she is fundamentally not autonomous. He also gives her a tour of the upper floors—a sequence which was one of the most beautifully shot and scored of the season so far, and the reason (the host’s existential realization of their own non-humanities) I am so obsessed with this show to begin with.