![]() As we follow Maeve to the shogun's camp, it's like a greatest-hits compilation of samurai tropes - right up until the final confrontation, in which a vengeful Akane brutally bisects the Shogun's head. (The fact that the Shogun host is literally broken probably helps too.) It certainly makes for exciting television, as ninjas attack Maeve's counterpart Akane (Rinko Kikuchi) and soldiers kidnap her favourite geisha. With no guests to play the key roles in their preordained narratives, and with Maeve's freedom virus having spread to their park, the Shogun World hosts have begun feeding back upon themselves, creating new Frankensteined storylines far from the park creators’ original intentions. Maeve and company meet with strange set of AI behaviours, in which hosts continue to express their programmed personalities even as the parameters of their simulation have changed dramatically. ![]() Even the soundtrack's musical covers are the same: we heard “Paint It Black” last season, and heard it again this week, cloaked in traditional Japanese instrumentation. Maeve empathises with her Shogun World counterpart Armistice is fascinated by hers Hector immediately hates his. Amusingly, however, many of Shogun World's characters and locations, though beautifully-designed, are just reskins of those found in Westworld, in a cost-cutting effort analogous to one often employed in video game development. Based on Edo Japan, Shogun World is designed for those hyper-violent customers for whom Westworld is too tame. Samurai, ronin, geishas, ninjas, a shogun, and many gallons of blood made appearances this week, as Maeve, Lee, Hector, Armistice, and our two favourite bumbling lab technicians ventured across park boundaries (on what definitively seems a single island). ![]() Westworld has been teasing a visit to Shogun World since last season, and this week's episode made up for the wait. I could get used to this (but I probably shouldn’t). It’s a less frustrating viewing experience, and - in last week’s adventure in human cloning and this week’s journey into Shogun World - resulted two of the show’s best episodes yet. The past three episodes have followed a single A-story, telling almost self-contained stories in their entirety, while touching on a B-story or two. I’m liking this new, more streamlined Westworld. ![]()
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