'Westworld' should really just be the Maeve show

Westworld Season 1 was a phenomenon that thrived on a method of storytelling best described as burlesque: show ‘em a little bit, but always keep ‘em wanting more.

It took the entire season’s run to reveal important information that deeply impacted the way the characters had been interacting all along — Bernard is a host! William grows up to become the man in black! Delos is smuggling data out of the park! But when the shock of those reveals wore off, there was the promise of another season that would hopefully answer more of the audience’s burning questions.

Smash cut to Westworld Season 2, which after five aired episodes seems to be content giving the audience more questions that will likely not be answered until the sure-to-be-riveting finale. Sure, they revealed why James and Logan Delos invested in the park and the general location of Westworld on the planet Earth, but each episode piles more mystery meat on the plates of watchers who haven’t had a chance to finish their first helping.

William, Bernard, and Dolores each have plots that contribute to this overstuffing of questions — where is the valley beyond? What is William looking for? What time is it right now for poor Bernard? It’s frankly exhausting, and while it’s likely that all of these questions will be answered soon, it’s feeling less and less worth it to tune in each week for some regularly scheduled confusion that won’t be alleviated until mid-summer.

However, there is one exception to the riddle-y mess that Westworld’s plots are becoming, and that is Maeve’s relatively straightforward plot to find her daughter somewhere in the park.

Sunday’s “Akane No Mai” episode put Maeve and her motley crew of humans and hosts in a brand new environment — Delos’s gorgeous Shogun World — and used the narrative of a ninja attack to show Maeve’s increasingly powerful and nonverbal psychic abilities (come on, that is the coolest sentence ever). Thandie Newton’s performance as an increasingly empathetic and vengeful Maeve is the best part of the show, and while Shogun World raises its own set of questions, they’re not the kind that will drive the internet crazy with fan theories that won’t be validated until the third episode of Westworld season 5.

Contrasted to Maeve’s plot in “Akane No Mai” was Dolores’s frustratingly cryptic conversations with Teddy, whose palpable confusion with Dolores’s transformation mirrors that of the audience in this episode. Teddy just wants to hang out with his girlfriend and get a house somewhere, but Dolores has a... plan to... do something bad... soonish. And she has to reprogram Teddy to do it. Wouldn’t it be more fun if watchers had even the slightest idea of what Dolores was planning so Teddy’s tablet transformation made sense now instead of next week, or the next week, or the next week?

Half the fun of Westworld Season 1 was guessing the motivations of various characters, but halfway through a second season of the same it’s starting to seem like plots like Maeve’s should become the show’s main focus. I’d watch the shit out of Maeve World. She’s the only one making any sense in or out of the park these days.