‘Westworld’ Recap, Season 2 Episode 8: The Great Ghost Nation Mystery

Life on the outskirts has its advantages: A close-knit sense of community, sweeping natural vistas, and a much smaller risk of getting murdered by random visitors. For almost a decade, Akecheta managed to avoid getting killed. Because he and many of the other Native American hosts could stay alive longer, their memories piled up. Whenever one of their people got replaced with a different host, they could discuss the oddness of having some new guy impersonating one of their old pals.

It’s a departure from what Westworld has implied before about the emergence of sentience. In Season 1, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve began to achieve consciousness after Delos technicians introduced reveries—snippets of memories that were supposed to make the hosts more spontaneous. Akecheta’s awakening shows that they didn’t need a covert software update to gain self-awareness; all they needed was time. The diabolical truth about Delos is that every time its technicians erase a host’s memories, they are killing off the first shoots of sentience.

In this episode, Akecheta and Maeve’s daughter are inside a Ghost Nation encampment when he tells her, in Lakota, the story of his awakening. He’s not a bad guy, he assures the girl, just a nice fellow with a juggalo’s taste for face paint and a broken heart. His journey began when he happened upon a carving of the maze right after Dolores killed Arnold in Sweetwater. He became obsessed with it, drawing the pattern everywhere like a school kid doodling the “Cool S” all over his notebooks. It became his first clue that there was something more to life than what he knew.

A second hint came when he stumbled across Logan Delos (Ben Barnes), sun-scorched and delirious after his cousin William (Jimmi Simpson) dispatched him into the desert naked and tied to his horse. Logan kept repeating in a feverish haze that he was in the wrong world. “His words cracked something open for me,” Akecheta tells the young girl. He started searching for clues to other worlds, and eventually found what appears to be the Valley Beyond while it was still under construction. He becomes convinced that it contains a door to the outside world. (Finding “The Door,” of course, has also been the Man in Black’s quest this season.)

Then one day, Akecheta caught a glimpse of a beautiful woman from another Native American tribe, and he recognized her as his partner from a former existence. He kidnapped her and managed to jog her memory of their shared past, and they searched for an exit together until Delos lab techs brought her in. Much like Maeve’s quest to find her daughter, Akecheta hunted for her reincarnation in every corner of Westworld, eventually resorting to killing himself to see if he could find her in death.

Down in the Mesa Hub labs, the technicians examining Akecheta were astounded to discover he hadn’t died in almost a decade. In one hard-to-believe scene, he wakes up mid-software-update and calmly rides an escalator down to Cold Storage, where he finds his decommissioned wife. He weeps at the realization that he cannot get her back, but also realizes he has a larger mission: He must help the other hosts recapture their memories of the people they’ve lost. Then he saunters back to his lab chair without encountering a single Delos staffer, and gets shipped back out to Westworld.

He begins slowly awakening his own people to their memories, using the symbol of the maze. Tattooing the maze on the underside of their scalps becomes a Ghost Nation meme. How this never raised concern among Delos staff seems puzzling—surely the lab techs who stitch their heads back together would at some point notice and get spooked by the warriors’ macabre artwork.