Season 3, Episode 2: ‘The Winter Line’

One of the funniest running jokes in “Westworld” — check that, maybe the only running joke in “Westworld” — is that the hosts are virtually indistinguishable from the guests, and yet the scripted loops in the park are Z-grade genre television. The show hasn’t had the opportunity to return to that joke much recently, save for a version of the saloon heist that played out in Shogun World, but the opening of this week’s episode is clever opportunity to stick a fully woke host in a chintzy, down-the-dial World War II spy thriller.

The post-credits scene in last week’s episode teased Maeve’s return in Warworld, an environment that offers guests the apparent thrill of being stuck in a Nazi-occupied Italian village. If that sounds baffling, no one is more surprised than Maeve herself, who knows her surroundings are fake but has the programming to go through the motions. (Thandie Newton’s confused expression when she starts speaking Italian is nice touch.) Maeve’s instinct is to find a way out of the loop, but the show works some “Groundhog Day” variants into her team-up with a Hector clone (Rodrigo Santoro) and their daring escape from a villa with vital information. “If your plan calls for us to run all the way,” she says, “I’d have worn sensible shoes.”

The scribe responsible for this sparkling dialogue is Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), who has returned from the dead to help Maeve — or so she and the viewer believe. Lee tells her that he’s stuck her in Warworld because it’s the world closest to the Forge, and if they can find their way there, she can join her daughter in the Valley Beyond.

It takes multiple rounds between Warworld and the Mesa for Maeve to realize that she’s in a simulation within a simulation, a twist that is handled with elegant hint-dropping and stylistic touches on loan from “The Matrix.” There’s a reason Sylvester and Lutz genuinely don’t recognize her when she’s back at the Mesa, for example, and something conspicuously odd about Sizemore’s behavior, like the sketches of her that are piled on his desk. (He’s too self-obsessed, she correctly surmises.)