Hector Escaton: I don't believe we've ever met.
The Man in Black: No, we haven't. You know, you always seemed like a a market-tested kind of thing. Big gun, tasteful scar. Locked in your little cycle like a prized poodle after its own tail.
Hector Escaton: You sound like a man who's grown tired of wearing his guts on the inside.
The Man in Black: There's no need to get testy. I'm just curious about your worldview. Some kind of half-native mumbo jumbo?
Hector Escaton: It's simple. I believe that only the truly brave can look at the world and understand that all of it gods, men, everything else will end badly. No one will be saved.
The Man in Black: Maybe we've got more in common than I thought.
The above excerpt was taken from a Westworld quote page and I’m going to make a post about it because I didn’t notice this before and now I feel so bad about it lol.
In the episode “Virtù e Fortuna”, Hector, Maeve and Lee meet Wanahton and the Ghost Nation. In that scene, Hector doesn’t have any problem talking with the natives in their language, and no one is surprised. Not only that, even when Hector tells Maeve to go and shoots, he isn’t aiming at the natives: he shoots towards the ground, in what seems like an attempt to scare them off without hurting anyone. In fact, from the beginning of their conversation, Hector says they just want to pass, not hurt anyone.
At the time, this left me wondering why Hector could speak with them, and what was the connection, specially once Lee brings up his backstory. When looking for quotes, though, I found the dialogue above, and this particular line is interesting:
There's no need to get testy. I'm just curious about your worldview. Some kind of half-native mumbo jumbo?
So I went back to that episode and now I feel bad because I completely missed something so important about him. Later in this same episode, Clementine and Maeve are at the Mariposa and Maeve notices one of their customers is one of Hector’s man, to which Clementine replies “Is that the one they say lives out with the savages?” and Maeve confirms it. It is what leads her to ask him about the figures she’s seen in her dreams recurrently.
He does have her answer, and tells her that is a “shade” and that a shade is sacred native lore. He proceeds to tell her that they are “men sent from Hell to oversee our world”, and that “the dreamwalkers consider it a blessing from the gods to see the masters that pull our strings”. And this itself is an insight on what we see from Akecheta’s point of view in “Kiksuya”, but my point here is to talk about Hector.
I completely forgot about all of this, but now it makes perfect sense he was able to speak with the natives in season 2, and why Maeve wasn’t surprised either. Hector’s connection to the natives is that he is half-native himself, and I wrote all of this to announce this will soon be in his bio because it is important and something I had previously overlooked.
