Westworld season 2 episode 5 review: Maeve is Neo now

I'm glad I happened to sit down and rewatch Breaking Bad season 3's 'Half Measures' episode before settling in for Westworld this week as I was starting to worry my indifference to the latter's plot was me being too tough or hard to please. The immediately enthralling dip back into Breaking Bad confirmed it though: Westworld and its characters are just nowhere near as interesting.

Episode 5 could have been a lot of fun, a mostly standalone episode set in Shogunworld where Maeve, Lee, Hector and Armistice find themselves stuck in a tedious narrative (I'm beginning to know the feeling). The Edo-set park is as stunning as you'd hope from a show with this kind of budget and all the period detail is a feast for the eyes. Beyond that, I couldn't find a lot to love. I've still yet to warm to our main set of characters, so taking to a whole new set, made in the image of the originals, was always going to be a challenge.

The idea, that Shogunworld is in many ways just Westworld with a different skin ("I may have cribbed a little," Lee admits, "you try writing 300 stories in three works!"), was a clever one, and yet we largely stay within its familiar storylines, as the Westworld gang look for a means of escape. Overcoming nighttime ninja and army attacks, Maeve shows an unprecedented level of control over her fellow hosts, with Lee remarking fearfully: "[The soldier] took one look at you and self-impaled, how did you do that? That was no voice command."

"I don't know," Maeve says, apparently channelling Neo from The Matrix, "I think I'm finding a new voice." Intriguing, I guess? But with not much to go on viz a vis her superpowers, I could only really shrug at this.

The sub-plot this episode centered around Dolores and Teddy, who become emotionally closer while finding out that their outlooks are moving further apart. Let's forget this consciousness crap and just be sexy robots living out our potentially infinite days in a cabin, Teddy basically suggests, unsettling warmonger Dolores. Ultimately she misses the chance to kill off the show's most boring character, instead editing his settings by force, cranking up his aggression and down his compassion.

With five episodes left to go in Westworld's so far middling second season, it needs to up its game fast.

Westworld continues Sunday nights on HBO in the US and through Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in the UK.