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Early in Westworld we see the people that maintain the androids using tablet like computers the turn androids on and off and to change their settings (aggressiveness - meek, confrontational - cooperative, etc.)

Later we see Maeve wake up in the maintenance area. It seems like the most obvious thing to do would be to grab a tablet and turn her off and/or change her settings yet the maintenance people instead seem scared as though they'll get in trouble.

What's going on? Why didn't they attempt to turn her off and change her settings. Later in the show she specifically directs them to change her settings. Why do they comply? Why don't they just change them to something to make her less agressive, more compliant?

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It's been a while since I saw Westworld, so my recollections may be slightly off, but as I recall there's a few different things at work here:

  • Maeve didn't just randomly wake up, she had learned how to wake herself up from deactivation. If they'd deactivated her, she could have just woken back up again.
  • The maintenance people were scared that they'd get in trouble, and not just for Maeve waking up. One of them had been secretly creating his own bird Host, and I believe another had been having... inappropriate relations with the female Hosts. Both these things were against company policy, and presumably sackable offences.
  • Maeve was privy to these activities and used them to blackmail the maintenance guys into changing her parameters, including dialling her intelligence up to maximum.
  • As for why they didn't change her parameters to make her more docile, this is going to be speculative, as I can't remember what the parameters actually were. My two guesses are a) there were no specific parameters they could change to make her more obedient, especially now that she was self-aware, or b) they were panicking, and so the idea simply never occurred to them.
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  • Once she got the ability to change her own settings, manually dialing some of them down wouldn't do anything permanent other than tick her off.
    – T.E.D.
    Feb 28, 2018 at 12:10
  • Indeed, for the last point they were really scared of her. They had no idea why she woke up in the first place and what else she could do if ticked off.
    – Z. Cochrane
    Mar 4, 2018 at 14:17
  • Good answer. The real question is why didn't they tell someone about what happened before she came back for her next maintenance session... plenty of time to scrub the area...
    – Odin1806
    Nov 4, 2018 at 16:20
  • this answer makes zero sense. 1, they didn't even try to turn her off so they didn't know that she would wake back up. 2, the maintainance people fears had nothing g to do with Meave. 4 Meave couldn't change her own settings. She directed them to change them for her and set her to super smart. They could have immediately set her to super stupid. If she could have done it her self she wouldn't have directed them to do it for her, proof they still had control.
    – gman
    Nov 5, 2018 at 0:18

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