WestWorld, S02E05- Akane no Mai

Please check out our sponsor for this episode, Day 11 Podcast! You can find them at www.day11podcast.com or on whatever podcatcher you use. They're going to be starting coverage of 13 Reasons Why soon, as well as House Of Card in honor of election season! Before everyone starts emailing me with explanations, I did look up the meaning of this title once it was time to edit the episode. Akane is the madame's name, but also mean "red", and no Mai is "of dance", so it essentially means "Red Dance Of Akane" which seems quite appropriate. I've also seen some translations of it that include a meaning about a lost child, but those seem to be American translations that have been debunked by native Japanese speakers, so I'm going to ignore those. This episode was a lot of fun and very strange and surreal at times. I'm really hoping that they manage to come up with a convincing explanation of Maeve's sudden newfound abilities, because that was the main thing I took issue with. I'm also a little confused about the nature of the glitches that interfere with language, and I'm hoping we find out why things are going so differently with non-English-speaking hosts. But overall I enjoyed getting to see Shogun World and the parallels to storylines and characters in WestWorld. Then there's the whole thing with Dolores and Teddy, which I think most of us probably saw coming. I wish I cared about Teddy more, but the fact is that I only really care about him in relation to other characters, and not as much for his own sake. I'm very curious what Dolores is going to do to him, and I am not looking forward to seeing him start to break. Thanks so much for listening, everyone, and we will see you soon with a new episode!