The Westworld Season 3 premiere was packed with intrigue, ingenuity, and and plenty of new characters. And while last week’s episode somewhat reset the table going forward for the complicated HBO sci-fi series, it lacked one significant piece of the puzzle: Maeve. Thandie Newton’s fan-favorite character has grown to become the heart of the series somewhat, and while the Season 3 premiere certainly had a lot on its plate with bringing Dolores to the real world and introducing Aaron Paul’s new human character, Maeve was missed.

Which is why the Westworld Season 3 Episode 2, titled “The Winter Line,” is a welcome change of pace as Maeve takes center stage and Dolores sits this week out. Directed by Richard J. Lewis and written by Matthew Pitts & Lisa Joy, this episode brings us up to speed on what Maeve has been up to since the Season 2 finale, and also advances Bernard’s story in a curious way. There’s a lot to dig into, so let’s get to it in this week’s Westworld recap.

Maeve

This Maeve-centric episode opens with a bang, as we see Thandie Newton’s character inhabiting a previously unseen corner of Delos’ theme parks: Warworld. Here, guests can presumably live out their fantasy of running around Nazi-occupied Europe (but why?). Maeve instantly remembers who she is—a host, not a real person—and is happy to see Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) show up. But as the two try to escape the city, she soon learns Hector doesn’t actually remember her. He thinks he’s actually living out a storyline, and Maeve is crushed. As they’re cornered on a runway trying to escape, Hector gets shot down and Maeve shoots herself in the head to trigger a reset.

Maeve awakens at the Mesa facilities with Felix tending to her wounds. She comes to while under surgery, as she did in Season 1, but Felix is acting weird. He flees. With nowhere to turn and guns pointed on her, Maeve—tired, frustrated, exasperated—grabs a tool and decides to “call the whole thing off” by drilling into her head. But Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman) shows up to save the day. He’s got a cane, but appears to have survived being shot down in the Season 2 finale, when he offered to give Maeve, Hector and the gang more time to reach the Valley Beyond by squaring off against Delos soldiers.

Lee explains that he put Maeve in Warworld because it’s near The Forge, “the place that opens the door to your daughter’s world.” Indeed, you may or may not recall that in the Season 2 finale, many of the hosts ventured to the “Valley Beyond,” which was actually a doorway through which they could upload their consciousnesses to a digital cloud. Dolores uploaded this encrypted data somewhere literally outside Earth, somewhere no human or host could reach, so the hosts could live out eternity in peace.

After another short detour in Warworld, Maeve heads to The Forge with Lee in tow, to presumably join her daughter. But things get weird fast. Lee is asking Maeve where she sent all the hosts, but she insists she had nothing to do with it. She’s never even been to The Forge before. Then Lee expresses his love for Maeve and gives her a passionate kiss which is… insanely weird. This is when Maeve puts together that Lee never actually survived the attack. He did sacrifice himself so the hosts could make it to the Valley Beyond, out of the goodness of his heart, not love for Maeve. The Lee in front of her isn’t real.

The big twist here, though, is not just that Lee isn’t real, it’s that nothing is real. Maeve realizes she’s not actually inside the park. She’s inside a simulation being run by someone who wants to know where the data was sent from The Forge. The moment Maeve realizes she’s inside a simulation, the aspect ratio of the show changes to widescreen—the aspect ratio it would switch to when we were watching Dolores and Bernard enter The Library inside The Forge in Season 2.

So now Maeve sets about trying to escape this simulation by overloading the system, which has been designed to simulate Westworld for Maeve’s benefit, but has not been designed to solve complex problems. Her plan? Fudge up the Warworld narrative by stuffing every single soldier and captive’s jacket with stolen papers. When Maeve wakes back up in her Warworld simulation, she sets off a chain reaction in the square that leads to everyone shooting everyone

The system can’t handle it and everything shuts down, allowing Maeve to see where she actually is—some kind of facility. She’s able to hack into their security cameras to see her surroundings, at which point she also hacks a maintenance drone to pull her CPU out of this mysterious system.

We learn that Maeve is nowhere near Westworld. It’s unclear exactly where she is, but the maintenance drone is shot down and Maeve then wakes up in a host body in this real world. A major clue arrives, though, as the room she’s in has a painting that looks very similar to the “divergence” maps that have been popping up throughout these past couple of episodes. Could she be in the home of the man who co-created the A.I. system Rehoboam?

That’s almost certainly the case, as we’re then introduced to a new character named Angharad Serac, played by Vincent Cassel, who wants Maeve to track down and kill Dolores. He explains that his business is the future and they’re in the middle of a war—a war that’s already been lost. He notes that “if things continue on this path there is no future. At least not for my kind.” At first he thought Maeve was the disturbance in this A.I. force, but has now learned it’s actually Dolores. He’s powerful, too. Maeve tries to stab him with a knife but he’s able to stop her with certain protocols he’s put into her system.

The episode ends with Serac stressing that next time he and Maeve talk, she’ll understand their interests are aligned. Ominous….

Bernard

The other POV in this episode is Bernard, who is back in Westworld because why not return to the scene of the crime of the century? As he re-enters, though, we do get a peek at what Delos’ park looks like from the outside. It is indeed in the South China Sea and there are massive markers telling folks to turn back.

Bernard makes his way to Ford’s secret house in the woods, the one where we learned the truth about Bernard back in Season 1. After rummaging around, he finds the room full of previous host-Bernard bodies, and in it sits Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth). Oh yes, one final twist in the Season 2 finale was the reveal that Stubbs, too, was a host. His core drive, as created by Ford, was to protect the hosts at all costs. The last job Ford gave Stubbs was to cover Bernard and Dolores’ tracks and give them a fighting chance to escape, by killing himself. But he failed. Bernard brings him back online and asks him to help him track down Maeve. Bernard explains that he needs someone smart enough and strong enough to stop Dolores, and who better than Maeve? Stubbs agrees to help, and the unlikely duo set out on a stealth mission throughout the Delos labs.

Bernard notices that QA is mostly absent, replaced by the Drone Hosts we were introduced to in Season 2. Stubbs explains that they lost a lot of men in the massacre, and they were replaced by Drone Hosts for the time being. They open cold storage, which is where all the hosts are being kept until corporate decides what to do with the parks. Indeed, the Bernard storyline plays out alongside the Maeve storyline, but we learn at the same time that Maeve isn’t actually in the parks—she’s in a simulation. So Bernard’s story is what’s actually going on in the parks right now, in the aftermath of the Season 2 bloodbath. Maeve’s body is in cold storage, but her central unit has been removed—that’s the central unit that’s plugged in elsewhere, inserting her into the simulation.

With the knowledge that Maeve is missing, Bernard and Stubbs go in search of a terminal connected to the mainframe so they can track down where Maeve is. But this is gonna prove tricky, as some techs are still present. The parks have been closed, but the techs are waiting around to see if they get laid off, so they continue doing whatever work they can.

It’s here that we get our big Game of Thrones cameo. Yes indeed, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have a cameo as a pair of Westworld techs discussing a startup in Costa Rica before Weiss takes a mechanical saw to… A DRAGON! Now is this confirmation that a fantasy, Game of Thrones-like world exists within Westworld? Almost certainly. But the design of the dragon is also identical to Daenerys’ dragons in Game of Thrones. So that’s what we call a double Easter Egg.

Back to Westworld, Bernard can’t find Maeve. The central computer is unable to locate her, which isn’t surprising given that she’s actually nowhere near Westworld. But Bernard then decides to take this opportunity to use a clean system to scan himself to search for code that Dolores may have hidden inside him. You’ll recall that in the season premiere, Bernard seemed pretty concerned that Dolores had put secret code inside him when she rebuilt him. So, did she? Bernard doesn’t say, but the look on his face once he completes the scan doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that he got the “all clear” he was looking for. For now, however, what he learned isn’t information he’s willing to share with Stubbs.

But Bernard did discover that when Dolores was in the library in the Season 2 finale, she focused on finding out everything she could about Luke Dempsey Jr. (John Gallagher Jr.), which gives Bernard a bit of direction in terms of where to go now. When Stubbs tries to say goodbye, however, Bernard changes his core directive to “protect Bernard Lowe at all costs.” And thus a Westworld buddy comedy was solidified, as it appears as though Bernard and Stubbs will be working as a team for the foreseeable future. Yes please.

Episode MVP: Thandie Newton all day, every day. Maeve arose pretty quickly as the most interesting character on all of Westworld, and Newton’s performance has been nothing short of brilliant. It’s a delight to see her back in the saddle here for Season 3, Newton did not disappoint.

Final Thoughts

This episode was kind of classic Westworld contained to one single episode. The dual timelines happening at the same time but not actually in the same place gag is something we’ve seen before, but previously the show played these as a long game arc. Here, we get closure and clarity within the span of a single episode, which is refreshing. And while it was fun to get a look at Warworld, I think this episode does kind of prove that the show has really moved beyond the parks, and the more interesting developments are happening in the real world.

This sets up not only a showdown between Dolores and Maeve, and a delightful buddy comedy with Bernard and Stubbs (Berstubbs? Stunard?), but also a heartbreaking season-long arc for Maeve. She’s been used and abused her whole life, and now we see that both Bernard and Sera want to use her to stop Dolores. But what does Maeve want? With Season 1 focused on her awakening and Season 2 focused on reuniting with her daughter, I’m incredibly curious to see what drives Maeve this season.

All in all this was a solid episode that also felt very much like it was setting the table for what’s to come. Until next time, folks.