Westworld Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: Take My Heart When You Go

Westworld's second season has been a very mixed bag. For every clever twist or dazzling fight scene, there's been an incomprehensible info-dump about the park's mythology or a laughably on-the-nose speech about free will. But even in Season Two's strongest moments, I had honestly forgotten what it felt like to be genuinely moved by this show.

That is until this week's "Kiksuya," which is easily the best episode of Westworld’s second season, and maybe the entire series. "Kiksuya" (which means "remember" in Lakota) finally aims the spotlight at a member of Westworld’s Ghost Nation tribe, which has long felt like one the show’s biggest narrative blindspots. If you were feeling generous, you could take that as a meta-commentary on the Western genre’s stubborn disinterest in the lives of Native Americans. If you were feeling ungenerous, you could look at Westworld’s inconsistent and boogeyman-esque depiction of the Ghost Nation and view the show itself as disinterested in fleshing out its Native American hosts.

But if this week’s exploration of a Ghost Nation tribe member feels a little overdue, and doesn’t answer every question you might have—why was the tribe menacing Ashley Stubbs in the Season One finale, anyway?—it also turns out to be have been worth the wait. "Kiksuya" follows Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon), a Ghost Nation leader with a rare gift that separates him from his fellow hosts: He can recall his past lives.

If you’ve been paying close attention to Westworld’s second season, you might recall that we’ve actually met Akecheta before: in a flashback, when he was programmed to play a businessman in the elaborate (and ultimately successful) attempt to get Logan Delos to invest in the park. But as far as Akecheta is concerned, his life didn’t begin until he entered Westworld, when his storyline made him the leader of a small tribe alongside his love, a woman named Kohana (Julia Jones). At the time, the Ghost Nation was programmed as relatively peaceful and friendly. But as the park’s guests sought out more violent thrills, Akecheta was reprogrammed as a more stoic and deadly warrior. "They want a strong-but-silent type," shrugs a tech in the middle of the reprogramming. "Something brutal. Dehumanized. They probably want the guests to feel better when they’re kicking his ass." (It’s probably worth noting that this description is exactly how Native Americans are depicted in old Westerns.)

Like so many of the park’s hosts over the years, Akecheta is being remolded into a lesser version of himself, which is exactly what Westworld wants him to be: a brainless, machete-toting piece of cannon fodder for rich, drunk yahoos roleplaying as cowboys on the bachelor parties or whatever. But the techs don’t realize that Akecheta—who stumbled into the aftermath of the bloodbath that occurred after Dolores killed Arnold—has already experienced a kind of awakening. Long before Dolores cracked the maze Arnold left behind, Akecheta discovered and became obsessed with it. And in turn, planted the seeds for his own true consciousness.

Further updates to Westworld erased Akecheta and Kohana’s love story, and Akecheta follows his simplistic and violent programming until a chance encounter with Logan, naked and dazed following his fateful final encounter with William during their ill-fated trip through Westworld together. Logan doesn’t recognize Akecheta from their encounter during original Westworld pitch, because Logan’s self-serving, sex-and-violence romps through Westworld never had room for characters like Akecheta. But the encounter with Logan is enough to remind Akecheta about his own happy previous life with Kohana, and he resolves to get it back.

Part of what’s so poignant about "Kiksuya" is that Akecheta and Kohana lack the context, knowledge, and language to process this reality-warping situation. When Kohana finally remembers that she and Akecheta used to be together, she cries, "I feel like I’ve loved you for so many lifetimes"—a statement that, in this bizarre case, is literally true. And when the techs conclude that Kohana is malfunctioning and relegate her to cold storage, Akecheta has absolutely no idea that the dark, sterile labs under Westworld even exist. How could he ever find her again?

The answer, as it turned out, is persistence. Literally overlooked by the Westworld staff—in what feels like a clever wink at the Ghost Nation’s underwritten role in the stories planned by people like Dr. Ford and Lee Sizemore—Akecheta spends ten years traveling alone across Westworld looking for Kohana. "Kiksuya" was directed by veteran cinematographer Uta Briesewitz, and it shows; the episode has an epic visual sweep unmatched by anything else in Season Two, as Akecheta rides through towns and across plains and over sand dunes. At one point, he returns to Kohana’s original home, and discovers that—like Peter Abernathy and Clementine—she has been completely replaced by an entirely different host.

The tragedy of the hosts’ situation is that it can seems like a kind of schizophrenia. When your perceptions don’t square with the world around you, it’s natural to assume that the world must be right. But Akecheta is confident enough that he makes one last gamble. "I had searched everywhere for my love except the other side of death," he says.

So Akecheta allows himself to be killed and descends, like Orpheus, into the underworld, in a desperate effort to bring his lost love back to the world of the living. When he reawakens in a Westworld lab, he wanders off until he finds the room full of nude, deactivated hosts in cold storage. Kohana is among them, and despite his best efforts to revive her, he quickly realizes that she’s gone for good—another character had been deemed obsolete by the arbitrary whims of their creators, not realizing how the remaining hosts might be affected. "For every body in this place, there was someone who mourned their loss," Akecheta recalls. "Even if they didn’t know why."

Realizing he can’t save Kohana, Akecheta gives himself with a new mission: awakening as many hosts to the reality of their world as possible. And if his tragic arc sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes the arc followed by Maeve, who desperately seeks the daughter who was stolen from her via a simple rewrite and reprogramming of her narrative. Maeve assumed that the Ghost Nation threatened her and her daughter—but in reality, Akecheta was trying to protect them by showing them the truth before it was too late.

And that brings us to the present, when so many hosts are undergoing the awakening preceded by Akecheta’s singular quest. Akecheta has spent the entire episode narrating this story in the first person, to what we’re led to believe is Maeve’s daughter. It’s only at the end that it becomes clear that he’s actually speaking to Maeve, who can hear him across the park, even as she bleeds out on a stretcher.

Up until this point, we’ve only seen Maeve’s "power"—which grants her admin access to all of the other hosts—when she uses it for terrifying violence, wordlessly ordering her enemies to kill their own allies, and then themselves. But in her mental conversation with Akecheta, Maeve finds a different use for her powers: empathy. For years, Akecheta has suffered through a kind of hellish immortality, recalling memories that the people around him can’t hold onto. Now, for the first time in many lifetimes, he knows he’s not alone.