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Jun 12, 2018 · Westworld Season 2 Episode 8 Review: Kiksuya. Westworld takes a moment to celebrate, and deconstruct, Western tradition in one of the season's finest hours. By David Crow | June 12,...
Jun 12, 2018 · Jun 12, 2018 4:47 AM. In Westworld episode 8, the show finally finds its heart. In episode nine of Westworld season two, we discover some of the park's most vicious residents are also...
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By Laura Prudom
Updated: Jun 11, 2018 1:53 pm
Posted: Jun 11, 2018 2:30 am
This review contains spoilers for Westworld Season 2, episode 8, titled "Kiksuya." To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out last week's review of episode 7.
After the explosive events of episode 7, "Kiksuya" is a more measured hour - one that surprisingly allows us to see the park from the perspective of Ghost Nation leader Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) after two seasons of treating the Ghost Nation hosts as stereotypical antagonists. The episode title translates to "remember" in the Siouan language of Lakota, which is fitting, since the episode offers us a useful reminder of how deceptive our memories can be.
While episode 7 dealt with Bernard's unreliable recollections, episode 8 challenges us - as so many of the best Westworld episodes do - to reexamine our own perceptions, just as Maeve is forced to do when it becomes clear that the Ghost Nation tribe is trying to protect her daughter, not harm her - and has apparently been attempting to do so for years.
And, much like Maeve, Ake's journey has been driven by love - after waking up his wife and planning to escape the park with her, she was taken from him and decommissioned, driving him towards a new purpose: to wake up the other hosts, drawing the symbol of the maze throughout the park - something that inadvertently attracted the attention of the Man in Black, who didn't realize that the maze wasn't meant for him, and spent far too much time cutting a bloody swath through the Ghost Nation hosts as a result. "In this world, it's easy to misunderstand intentions," after all.
We also discover that Ake encountered Robert Ford before he died, hinting that Ford had been planning his Dolores-assisted suicide for some time. "When the Deathbringer returns for me, you will know to gather your people and lead them into a new world," he assures Ake in one of the season's most unsettling scenes, implying that the Ghost Nation leader probably won't be thrilled that, at some point before the final showdown, Dolores took it upon herself to kill his men, as we saw in the season premiere when Strand and Costa cracked open a Ghost Nation host and discovered that Dolores had decided "not all of us deserve to make it to the Valley Beyond."
Where does this all leave us? Not far from where we started, which is an issue that's plagued most of Westworld Season 2. Two of the three timelines came together last week, which thankfully provided us with some answers, but with Ford basically possessing Bernard, and Dolores now in control of "the key" that will no doubt unlock "the door" and allow her to access all the human minds that Delos has been copying over the years, it's debatable that we needed a whole episode devoted to proving that the Ghost Nation tribe are actually the good guys, when that probably could've been explained in a couple of scenes (less artfully, sure, but still).
This episode also reassures us that Lee Sizemore has a heart of gold under all that bluster (but he really needs to put his money where his mouth is), and that Maeve is now able to communicate with and reprogram hosts via the mesh network, but it still all feels vaguely like filler, even if it's filler that's beautifully acted and packs an emotional punch. Oh, and of course the Man in Black is still alive and now back in the hands of his daughter, despite being riddled with bullets, because over the course of playing this game he's apparently racked up infinite lives.
Where "Kiksuya" really succeeds (and deviates from Westworld's formula in an effective way) is in telling a story driven by character rather than plot - anchored by McClarnon's expressive and nuanced performance. It's just a shame that the episode comes so late in the season, right when the narrative is finally starting to kick in, which makes the episode feel far more frustrating than it deserves to, considering the weighty themes it's examining. While the series as a whole is focused on the importance of free will and the cost of freedom, it rarely works so well - or feels so poetic - as it does here. And although the series usually prefers bombast, blood, and body parts when it's trying to make a point, the horror of the hosts' existence is rendered far more effectively with a lighter touch this week; the anguished cries of a mother who realizes her lost son is beyond her reach forever, or the helplessness in Ake's eyes when he discovers that he's not truly free of his creator's control, are much more unsettling than yet another scene of female host being assaulted or entrails spilling into the dirt.
"Kiksuya" is also refreshing for giving us an episode where almost the entirety of the dialogue is spoken in Lakota - something that's almost unheard of in a mainstream series. And while the show never overtly tackles the parallels between the Ghost Nation and the indigenous peoples who've been oppressed by western colonialism for centuries (although writers Carly Wray & Dan Dietz do gesture towards it when the techs reprogram Akecheta to be more "brutal" and "dehumanized" so he's "easier" for the guests to kill), it is indicative of Delos' hubris that the Ghost Nation hosts are clearly an afterthought, since Ake managed to go unnoticed in the park for almost a decade after breaking from his loop. Here's hoping we get to see even more of Ake in the final two episodes, since McClarnon's nuanced performance is a standout of the season, even if it would've been nice if we'd gotten his backstory a little earlier.
While it's somewhat frustrating to get an episode that's 90 percent backstory after the action of episode 7, "Kiksuya" succeeds on the strength of Zahn McClarnon's powerful performance. It'll be interesting to go back and rewatch the previous Ghost Nation scenes with this new context, but it can't help but feel a little like the episode is treading...
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