What happens to Maeve in Episode 6 is a variation of what happened in the previous episode to Dolores, who gunned down a pack of ex-Confederate outlaws and chose to pursue a destiny more assertive than her damsel-in-distress loop. And finally, she sees her life and memories edited into a slick advertisement for real people to “Live Without Limits.” For Maeve, it’s simultaneously a death and a reawakening, the end of her old life (or lives, given the sloppy accumulation of past constructs) and the beginning of a new one. She sees a designer literally sculpting facial details. She sees the programmed interaction, like lesbian playacting and a card-table dust-up. She sees buffalo and deer getting their movements calibrated in glass pens. She sees dead bodies getting hosed off before the techs throw them on the slab and reanimate them. The world as Maeve has understood it is gone - and, more painfully still, she learns that neither she nor it was ever authentic. The tour signals a tipping point for Maeve, the season and the series at large. How many of our own actions are scripted? How much can we really improvise? And what purpose did our own creator have in mind for us? If we were put through the full diagnostic test Maeve experiences here, perhaps the results would be equally unsettling. But Maeve’s peek behind the curtain hints at a more fundamental cause: As the engineers, coders and technicians dismantle and reconstruct the hosts, the show constantly forces us to reflect on how we humans are composed, too. The obvious reason the robots of “Westworld” draw more sympathy than the humans is their vulnerability, the fact that their daily lives require a passive acceptance of the abuse, terror, and tragedy that’s heaped upon them.
It’s the most haunting and affecting sequence the show has yet produced. Maeve witnesses the creation and processing of synthetic beings, having come to realize she is one of them the steady diet of “white lies,” as it were, is over. When “Motion Picture Soundtrack” plays, it again serves as a kind of coda, as a technician gives her a guided tour through the Westworld sausage factory. In this week’s episode, Maeve wakes up to an instrumental version “Fake Plastic Trees,” which continues as she walks to work, unfazed by the mundane spectacle of a bloody shootout on the streets behind her. Radiohead has provided the musical accompaniment for Maeve since the second episode, when “No Surprises” scrolled through the player piano as she unsuccessfully solicited a guest. “It’s not like the movies,” singer Thom Yorke laments. Perhaps the bleakest in a catalog loaded with bleak albums, Radiohead’s “Kid A” closes with “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a song that obliquely suggests the end of a relationship but is, more broadly, about disillusionment and death.
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