William is found by Akecheta and taken to a Ghost Nation camp. Emily arrives and persuades him to let her take William, promising that he will suffer more with her than with the Ghost Nation.
Maeve is taken in for analysis, as Lee hopes she can be used to control the Hosts, but Charlotte discovers that she has been consciously accessing the Westworld network to communicate with and reprogram other Hosts.
In the camp, Akecheta tells his story to Maeve's daughter. Prior to the uprising, he lived a peaceful life among the Ghost Nation until he discovered the maze symbol and inadvertently started down the path to sentience. After an encounter with Logan Delos and the discovery of the Valley Beyond, he concludes that his life is not his own and plans an escape. When his partner Kohana is taken by the park technicians and decommissioned, Akecheta dedicates himself to spreading the maze symbol as a warning to other Hosts.
It is revealed that Maeve has been connected to her daughter during the analysis and that Akecheta has been communicating with her. The raiding parties were intended to save Hosts, who he promises Maeve he will lead to the Valley Beyond. He implores her to stay behind and complete her mission before Dolores destroys them all.
Tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: Twice used:
- It's not clear if Logan and Akecheta recognize each other when they meet in the desert. Logan is delirious, and it's unclear if Akecheta has regained all of his memories up to this point. He does however recognize Logan as human.
- Ford's meeting with Akecheta seems to be coincidental, but Ford reveals that he has been keeping track of the Host for a while, and it is bizarre that Ford would be setting up a tableau of Hosts fighting a bear while completely alone in just the spot where Akecheta would find him.
- Automaton Horses: Averted with Logan's horse. It eventually died after marching into the desert, and Logan wasn't faring much better when Akecheta found him.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Akecheta becomes attached to Maeve's daughter and devoted to protect her because she helped save his life during his travels.
- Beneath Notice: Akecheta and the other Native Hosts are treated pretty much as background scenery by the staff and guests. They appear to be programmed only for simple loops and do not have any specific narratives assigned to them. As such, they are only upgraded when they die, and undergo diagnostics only when they do something to really attract the staff's attention. Akecheta is able to go ten years without any upgrades and memory wipes because his loop does not require him to die and as a marauder he is expected to roam around. After a while he learns to adapt his appearance to the different settings and blend in. A Ghost Nation warrior in war paint would attract instant attention in Sweetwater but with a clean face Akecheta is able to walk around as just another background Host, albeit one that attracts hostile glares from Hosts seemingly programmed with prejudices towards natives. It even takes Ford a long time to notice that Akecheta is special, and Ford was deliberately looking for abnormal behavior in Hosts.
- Big Good: This episode makes a pretty good case for Akecheta being secretly this for the series. He's been working for years to help free the Hosts, and unlike Dolores and Ford, has been using mostly non-violent methods. He doesn't want any kind of vengeance on the humans, he just wants to leave.
- Bilingual Bonus: "Kiksuya" is Lakotan for "Remember".
- Cruel Mercy: Akecheta saves William because death would be too good for him. He lets Emily take him because she promises to make his life even worse than they could.
- A Day in the Limelight: Combined with Lower-Deck Episode, this shows us what Akecheta, who had previously been a minor recurring character, as well as the Ghost Nation, have been up to and what their motives are.
- Declaration of Protection: Akecheta swears to protect Maeve's daughter as recompense for her saving his life in the past.
- Determinator: Akecheta went ten years without dying, fearful that he would lose his memories of his wife if he were taken in. Armed with nothing but a knife and bow the entire time, he survived guests with guns despite being completely unable to harm them. None of the techs can believe it, and quickly cover it up because it indicates they haven't been keeping proper tabs on the Hosts.
- Didn't See That Coming: Ford is genuinely shocked by Akecheta's self-awareness, which he achieved entirely independent of human interaction. But he quickly adapts and takes steps to add him to his grand plan.
- Dramatic Irony: Several examples:
- Even if Akecheta had been able to escape Westworld, the explosive in his spine would still have killed him as soon as he crossed the boundary out.
- For all of Ford's talk that the Hosts need to suffer in order to achieve sentience, Akecheta achieved it by being generally left alone by the park staff and guests for the most part. Then again, he did suffer due to the loss of Kohana.
- Framing Device: The exhibition detailing Akecheta's backstory and how it relates to the park's backstory is framed as him telling a story to Maeve's daughter and Maeve herself to reassure them of his intentions.
- Funny Background Event: The repeated "Ghost Nation slaughters trappers" scene sometimes has two guests in it, slightly out of camera focus, who just watch without interfering. New guests become important when Akecheta wants to travel into "the underworld".
- Gender Is No Object: While all of the flashbacks show only male Ghost Nation warriors, the present day scenes also have Ghost Nation women in war paint and acting as guards in the camp. It is implied the women took on this aesthetic as a result of becoming sentient.
- Grew Beyond Their Programming: While in analysis, Akecheta states that while his primary drive is to maintain the honor of his tribe, he gave himself a new drive: to spread the truth to the rest of the Hosts about the falseness of their world.
- Happily Married: Akecheta and Kohana prior to him getting reprogrammed into The Savage Indian.
- Heroic BSoD: Akecheta undergoes one when he finds Kohana in cold storage, deactivated and then noticing the decommissioned Etu and the rest of the Hosts as well. Whichipi also suffers from one when Akecheta returns with Etu's braid, confirming her fears that her son had been replaced with a duplicate.
- Hero with Bad Publicity: Maeve believed Akecheta was a villain as a result of her past-life memories combining him with William. Turns out he actually sought to protect Maeve's daughter and has been attempting to free the Hosts for years. His fearsome appereance and the role assigned to the entire Ghost Nation as The Savage Indian certain didn't help.
- Internal Reveal: Charlotte and Roland learn Maeve can control other Hosts and even communicate through them by consciously accessing their Hive Mind.
- It Was Here, I Swear!: Downplayed but present when Akecheta returns to the Valley Beyond.
- Made of Iron:
- Despite multiple life-threatening wounds, William pushes on because he's simply too stubborn to die.
- Akecheta also managed to survive for ten years despite the brutal nature of his story line, surviving even injuries and exposure.
- Mistaken from Behind: The second time Akecheta sneaks up on Kohana in the tent, he realizes that she has been replaced when the replacement Host turns around in her sleep.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Sizemore brings Maeve in to be healed, thinking that she'll be taken care of because she's a valuable asset. He's horrified when he finds Roland not only hasn't treated her, but instead cut her up even further to analyze her.
- Once More, with Clarity: We see again both the Ghost Nation's "attack" on Maeve and her daughter, as well as William's murder of the two. This time around it's revealed that Akecheta had nothing but benevolent intentions for both of them, but his terrifying appearance caused them, specially Maeve, to misinterpret him.
- The Other Darrin: In-universe. After Akecheta was made into a marauder, Etu was reprogrammed into Kohana's husband. Later, Kohana is decomissioned and replaced after she breaks out of her loop. Further down the line, Etu is also decomissioned and replaced with a new Host.
- Past-Life Memories:
- Akecheta got these after seeing Kohana again after being reprogrammed into the violent leader of the Ghost Nation warband. Kohana gets these after she sees Akecheta without warpaint and he quotes her affectionate catchphrase.
- Likewise, Wichipi was also gaining access to hers, as she was suspecting her son Etu to have also been replaced. Akecheta cuts off Etu's braid while in cold storage and gives it to her as proof.
- Pet the Dog: Akecheta takes pity on a delirious Logan, and gives him a blanket to help shield him from the sun (and help keep him warm when night falls). He knows that park staff are probably on their way to save Logan, but still goes out of his way to offer him some small relief.
- Precision F-Strike: Sizemore burst out "She can control the other Hosts with her FUCKING mind!" when the ignorant technician refuses to check up on Maeve.
- Promotion to Opening Titles: Zahn McClarnon got promoted to the opening credits in this episode after being around as a recurring character for the past episodes.
- Pulling the Thread: The entire episode is basically a depiction of why it's a good idea to do this slowly.
- Rescued from the Underworld: Akecheta lets himself be killed so he will be taken to "the world below" — so-called because the park techs emerge from below the ground and so the Ghost Nation believes they come from the underworld — to find his beloved, only to fail. Unlike Orpheus, Akecheta never had the chance because Kohana was already decomissioned and put in cold storage.
- The Reveal:
- Akecheta is the first Host to achieve true sentience, and did so without the teaching Arnold gave Dolores. He is also responsible for the maze symbol on the scalps of certain Hosts, having carved it into his own men to hide it, and spreading it to other Hosts by giving out carvings, paintings and even drawings on the ground. Some would have been repurposed, explaining how William found it in Kissy's scalp. And he's trying to help the Hosts escape the park by waking them up.
- Maeve's ability to influence Hosts is explained as her having admin access to the system, which allows her to rewrite their code through the Hive Mind. It goes further than that, though. She has the ability to see and hear through other Hosts, and over vast distances. Even while being worked on by the techs, she's able to communicate with Akecheta through her daughter.
- A minor one, but we learn that the Ghost Nation marauders were created after Arnold's death from repurposed, less "offensive" Native American Hosts.
- The Savage Indian: Utterly, utterly deconstructed. While the Ghost Nation in particular had usually only occupied either this role or the Wacky Wayside Tribe, they're now shown to be actually the first Hosts to awaken, predating Maeve and possibly Dolores and nicely mirroring the small problem with white people "discovering" America.
- Shown Their Work: The show hired three Lakotan cultural experts to nail down the story, and to coach Lakotan-Irish actor Zahn McClarnon in the Lakotan language, as he had only limited knowledge of the language from his grandparents.
- Swiss-Cheese Security:
- Akecheta spent ten years acting completely off-script, and Behavior never noticed because they only check the Hosts when they die, having never thought that a Host could go so long without someone managing to kill them. Their supervisor has the techs update him and quietly shove him back in the park to avoid admitting their own incompetence.
- Dear God, if you thought the Mesa QA security was bad to begin with, it is truly shocking here. Akecheta is able to pretend to have an update installed over the course of four hours, and the techs leave him alone for this. He's able to explore enough of the Mesa to find Cold Storage and make it back without a single person noticing. All this while decked out in Ghost Nation warpaint.
- And finally, while Akecheta himself died just once, the rest of the Ghost Nation most likely didn't share his survivor capabilities. And still Behavior never noticed that the whole tribe was making a concerted move towards consciousness.
- These Hands Have Killed: When Akecheta wakes up while slitting someone's throat he looks at his hands in disgust.
- This Means Warpaint: Unlike the benign Indians, the repurposed Ghost Nation warriors are covered in war paint.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Apparently, one attraction while the park was open was watching Ghost Nation raiders slaughter some trappers in the woods, while the Hosts paid no attention to guests being there.
- Wham Line: Akecheta telling Maeve's daughter, "But I couldn't save you", indicating that he's actually telling the story to Maeve since she's interfacing with her daughter's mind via the mesh network; and that Akecheta can tell that Maeve's really in control of the child.
- Wham Shot: The intercutting of Akecheta telling his story to Maeve's daughter and of Maeve on the operating table, indicating that he's actually talking to her. It isn't entirely obvious until the last time it cuts between them, at which point the techs also notice that Maeve is communicating with someone.
- Whole Episode Flashback: The majority of the episode is Akecheta relating his story to Maeve's daughter (and secretly Maeve herself).
- Worst Aid: Both Akecheta and Emily transport a grievously injured William on horseback, both draped over and barely riding, despite the fact he has a bullet wound to the gut, and is therefore at serious risk for spinal damage. The safest thing would be to put him in a stretcher. Admittedly, Akecheta only marginally cares about William's well-being, and they're not in much of a position to treat him properly.
