"Westworld" Season 2's latest installment, titled: "Akane no Mai" (which translates to "Akane's dance," an obvious reference to that scene at the end), finally introduced the long-awaited Shogun World. And boy, the episode did not disappoint. The action-packed sequences were there, and so were the character-defining moments. All in all, the episode did a pretty good job fleshing out the characters even more while at the same time adding new plot points that will greatly affect the story moving forward.
But just like in any other "Westworld" episode, "Akane no Mai" featured quite a few easily overlooked details.
So in this article, I am going to break them down. Needless to say, spoilers for "Westworld" Season 2 Episode 5 will follow. With that said, let's get started.
A clue about what might be happening in the future time frame
The episode opens up with a quick glimpse at the future timeframe, two weeks after Ford's (Anthony Hopkins) retirement party massacre. This is where we see Strand (Gustaf Skarsgard), a leader of Delos extraction team, assessing the situation, with the rest of his team is at the Mesa Hub. But it's his cryptic conversation with Costa (Fares Fares), Delos' tech expert, that points to something incredibly significant.
"That's quite a story you gave them. And one hell of an ending," Strand said to Costa cryptically.
"How did all these disparate threads come together to create this nightmare?" he wonders while looking at Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and the pile of hosts, "If we figure that out, we'll know how the story turns."
According to Insider, this line most likely means that not only do the Delos team know Bernard is a host, but they also gave him a coded story, meaning that Bernard waking up on the beach two weeks after the massacre was a setup.
This further implies that they are using him to find out what happened in the park before they arrived.
Clues about hosts
Reddit user nos4atugoddess noticed a few other details as well. For example, Dolores' (Evan Rachel Wood) healed shoulder that implies that the technician who is traveling with them can also repair hosts, not just reprogram them.
Last but not least, when Lee Seizmore (Simon Quarterman) tells Maeve (Thandie Newton) that the hosts in Shogun should have read him as human and should have spoken English. This, according to the Redditor, confirms that, like the bullets, the hosts are reading humans as other hosts, no different from themselves.
