Female Characters Take Control in Westworld Season 2

WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for HBO's Westworld.

When it comes to Westworld’s second season, all bets and safety functions are off. We were prepped for this, as much as we could be, with the marketing for Westworld Season 2 featuring the tagline, “Chaos takes control.”

The last we left Dolores and Maeve, one had just shot Robert Ford, while the other chose not to take the train to leave Westworld. In the season 2 premiere, titled “Journey Into Night,” the female characters finally took control following the chaos of Season 1's violent and bloody finale.

Dolores Takes the Reins

Dolores’ role in the park is simply “the rancher’s daughter,” and she has always been defined by her relationship to a man. At the end of Season 1, Dolores’ consciousness has fully developed, and she remembers everything that has happened to her. With the power of memories at her command, she seizes control of her narrative and does what she desires. In the season 2 premiere, we finally see her take the reins, literally and figuratively.

Dolores rides a horse with both hands clutching a rifle and gunning down guests. It’s an image that, cinematically, is usually given to a male character. She makes it clear to everyone around her that she is calling the shots. Before she leaves three guests to be hanged, she lectures them, “Do you know where you are? You’re in a dream. You’re in my dream.” For so long, Dolores could not figure out the how to get to the next level of consciousness and would always feel like she’s dreaming. Now, it will be difficult for any Delos employee or human to regain control over her.

Though Dolores holds the power in every scene she’s in, we can’t forget about her sidekick Teddy, her constant cowboy companion who now serves the traditionally female character role of doing whatever the main character asks. Their relationship has become a reversal in stereotypical gender roles as Dolores really starts to lean into her Wyatt side. The Wyatt narrative, as you may recall, is what made her and Teddy go on a murderous rampage under Arnold’s control before the park opened. But, Dolores’ identity, once defined by her relationship to a man, will likely be more complicated. In her words, she has “one last role to play. Myself.”

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Maeve Chooses Motherhood

Maeve is another female character who desires to be in control of her own story. The host uprising and her escape plans coincided nicely, and she admits that this wasn’t all her doing. However, she does assert dominance over the situation using her smarts and a firearm. When we think of a character taking control of a building using a machine gun, we think of male-led action films (like Die Hard. Best Christmas movie of all time). Maeve subverts our expectations of this trope. Like Dolores, she also gets a sidekick – two, in fact.

Hector Escaton, Westworld’s resident bandit with a penchant for safes, fulfills a Teddy kind of role for Maeve. He’s there to do what Maeve tells him to do, and he looks pretty doing it. He tells her, after passionate kissing, “Where you go, I follow.” Typically, it’s the female character that follows a man around in a story because it’s the male who has agency. Maeve is now one of the most powerful hosts in the park. And with her power, she aims to find her daughter.

To do this, Maeve also decides to keep Lee Sizemore around. As Lee enters Westworld’s control room, he is stunned that no one is in control. However, in the shot, Maeve is standing next to, yet slightly behind, him with her machine gun. He is hers to control. With his knowledge of the park and narratives, Lee provides a utilitarian purpose for Maeve. This purpose is sealed when she makes him take off all of his clothes in front of her. Last season, we saw hosts, especially Maeve, naked all the time. Now Maeve shows her total control over Lee by doing to him what was done to her probably hundreds of times.

When Maeve tells Lee that she wants to find her daughter, he scoffs at her and says that she’s not real. Maeve argues, with a well-phrased threat that involves decorating the walls with Lee’s “outsized personality,” that if she’s real then her daughter must be. Maeve understands the concept that her daughter was a story – she said so herself last season – yet she chooses to define herself as a mother.

New Images in the Westworld Credits

In the new credits sequence, we see the indisputably feminine image of a woman holding a baby. There are many possible reasons for this image, as well as the final image of a female host accompanying the show’s logo. If one of the focuses this season is empowering the female characters (we haven’t even touched on the Man in Black and Bernard), it makes sense that feminine imagery would be present in the credits.

These images in the credits could be alluding to the power of women in general, Maeve’s storyline to find her daughter, or even the possibility that hosts might actually be able to create life. After all, while we don't have confirmation if hosts can procreate on their own, we also don't have information declaring the opposite. If Dolores has her way, and the host uprising spreads to the outside world, the hosts will have to figure out how to fix themselves and create new life. Dolores and Maeve have bucked gender expectations and assumed control of their stories and Westworld; now it's time for this power to spread to the world at large as well.

Westworld airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on HBO.