Editor's note: The below article contains spoilers for Season 4 of Westworld.Maeve Millay (Thandiwe Newton) might be the best character in Westworld. Her battle for autonomy and freedom in the first seasons was incredibly engaging and her philosophical differences with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in their respective approaches led to some of the most thought-provoking parts of the show. Maeve is self-assured and with robot-hacking god powers to boot she’s a formidable force for anyone to deal with. When the story shifted to her, you could always expect something interesting to happen. The problem is, like most things in Westworld, Maeve got messed up by Season 3. Her powers became the central thing the story needed her for (unless it was to make a few trademarked quips when necessary) which led to her becoming more a plot device used to push the narrative or other characters to their desired destination rather than an agent of free will with her own agenda.
A big part of the issue surrounding Maeve feeling static comes from the fact that the show’s main cast has shifted severely in the last two seasons. Tons of staple characters were killed off or disappeared, especially ones close to Maeve. Hector (Rodrigo Santoro), the technicians: Felix (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum), Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), and many of her other connections have all been killed, and this meant all of Maeve’s connections were severed. Maeve was always a character who was motivated by not only her need to free herself but her ability to see the humanity in others. She allied with humans and Hosts alike from the beginning, yet self-preservation had become all she has left. Season 3 she spent most of her time alone hunting Dolores, and it made her feel much more like a robot than anything we’d ever seen her do in Seasons 1 and 2.
While Season 4 has been an improvement on Season 3 in countless ways, one thing that seems to have stayed the same is Maeve. Her powers make her a big threat to nearly any force against her, so the show has to keep coming up with ways to make her obsolete. This season she’s working to keep Caleb (Aaron Paul) safe and is set up to be the secret weapon that will take down Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson). It feels like the story happens to her rather than her being a part of the story now. She exists to preserve Caleb and to use her superpowers to be the trump card that’ll win the day. Maeve’s power itself isn’t the problem, it’s something she’s used incredibly well since the beginning. But now it seems like the story isn’t terribly interested in her outside of her powers. When she and Caleb travel to the new fake park, and they witness a recreation of the “Paint It Black” sequence, she has a few brief moments of recollection and a sad look in her eyes, but the story quickly moves on. It feels disingenuous to have Maeve return to a mocking recreation of her once-prison and puppeteered, re-textured versions of her old friends, only to have her barely affected by it.
Her powers will glitch and not work on Hale’s upgraded hosts, until she conveniently can break through. One would expect in the face of upgraded enemies, Maeve would do what she has in the past — link up to the system and download what she needs to gain the upper hand. Instead, she simply wills harder until her powers finally work precisely when the story allows her to. She spends too much of her time fighting silent computer screens. It feels like Maeve is operating with training wheels, limited not by her abilities but the story’s willingness to recognize them. It’s frustrating to see her levels of capability seemingly fluctuate based on what the narrative wants to happen, rather than what we know Maeve to be capable of.
There are glimpses of Maeve reverting to being a full character in her interactions with Caleb in Episodes 4 of Season 4. She reminisces to him about her past and expresses her desire to keep him safe, to allow him to be with his daughter like she couldn’t stay with hers, and we see how deeply she’s come to trust him as well as the lengths she’ll go to in order to keep him safe. This feels like Maeve getting back to basics, using her powers because she has something to protect and a goal she wants for her own reasons. Until she gets blown up. When she and William’s (Ed Harris) Host get buried, she’s rendered into a MacGuffin, a key object for the other characters to pull out to be used at an opportune moment. The people looking for her in the desert call her a weapon, and at this point that is essentially her function. She’s a powerful character to be used to help this ragtag group of rebels stop Charlotte Hale’s reign of terror, regardless of her own wellbeing or involvement. Knowing Maeve, she’ll probably want to help stop this world-ending business anyway, but her choice in the matter has been completely removed. Maeve has become a near-mythic power, and that means the plot can’t let her do anything too quickly, otherwise the story would simply end, so she’s busy being moved around like a chess piece and maneuvered to manipulate Caleb rather than having a plot of her own.
The basis for a return to form is there. Caleb could be the first connection that Maeve needs to make to start finding bonds again, to find something bigger to care about than survival or vengeance. But with the plot steamrolling on and her powers being constantly unreliable for story reasons, she feels like a plot device, only relevant when relevant to others. Maeve is a character who has always been strong, but it feels like Westworld has forgotten how multifaceted her strength is. It’s not just her extraordinary robot powers; it never was. Her wit, her empathy, and her ability to connect with others have always been her strengths as much as her ability to deactivate a host or wield a sword. Maeve Millay is a character who, at her best, is the most powerful person in any room she walks into and knows it. She just needs to have more skin in the game to make her feel like a part of the story again. Maeve is a fantastic character who doesn’t deserve to be squandered as an accessory to the story. Hopefully, Westworld will get her back on the right track and, rather than write around her, bring her to the forefront — not just as the secret weapon that will bring about victory, but also as the self-assured, driven character we know and love.