#I AS RELIVED HECTOR DIDN'T GET SHOT

[cagedchoices]

I was planning on putting this in my big relationship meta series later on but I don't wanna wait however long it's gonna take me to get back to that so I'm just gonna talk a little about 4.04 - Generation Loss on its own because in a lot of ways I think it was THE Episode of Season 4.

In trying to escape from the park, Caleb tries to fight off Hale's mind control after being commanded to kill Maeve, but he gets stabbed by another infected guest before he can commit to any course of action. Maeve hurries to get him to safety afterwards, and as she watches him she remembers back to their mission 7 years earlier where he got shot and nearly died.

CALEB: You gonna disappear on me this time too? MAEVE: Typical. Using the gravity of this situation to dredge up the past. CALEB: Seriously, Maeve. MAEVE: I didn't. I sat at your bedside for weeks, fearing the worst. I confronted something I had never confronted before; Mortality. The finality of death in your kind.

The first thing Maeve does is try to skirt around Caleb's question in a way that's kind of like "you're sitting over there bleeding out right now and you're STILL asking about what happened 7 years ago?" but when that doesn't work and Caleb gently insists his point, she finally gives in and offers him the truth. No hiding, no deflection, no distraction. It's all she can do to give him some small peace of mind. He's dying, after all, and seeing how he barely survived the first time she saw it, his chances this time don't look great either. She lets him know that it wasn't his fault she left, she chose to leave because she thought she was giving him a chance, as she later tells Frankie.

What Caleb thinks before this is that Maeve must've left not long after they got him to the hospital, and he's never had a reason to assume anything else. He had no idea that in reality, Maeve stayed by his side for weeks while he was unconscious in the hopes that he would pull through.

The way it's presented, it seems like Maeve had every intention of going in to see Caleb when he finally woke up, but she changed her mind when she saw how he was with Uwade.

MAEVE: You asked me once what a regular life would look like for you. I saw a vision of how it could be for you to be free. It was... extraordinary... Our kinds are locked in a perpetual struggle. I wanted you to do more than just fight to survive. I wanted you to have something to fight for.

She sees a glimmer of something Caleb could have that he's never had before. He and Uwade could fall in love, maybe get married, have a baby, grow old together. He could experience the joy of being a father and a husband and living a normal, fulfilling, happy life. Something Maeve can't give him/thinks she can't give him, although I would argue that it was Maeve's memory of her loop as a homesteader living with her daughter that she shared with him through his limbic implant that motivated Caleb to want to build a life for himself that resembled this in the first place. So in a way, she kind of did.

You can read the disappointment in both of their expressions. This isn't how either of them wanted things to end, but it is necessary and deep down they both know it. Life goes on.

MAEVE: I had already known the love of a daughter. And I planned on spending eternity holding it dear. CALEB: You've been alone...for all these years... MAEVE: I knew that if I stayed put, no harm would come to you. You deserve to have something real to hold onto. That's why I left. And It would've been fine, except one day, I got curious. So I reached out through the grid to find you, and...

Maeve spent 7 years living alone and reliving her memories on a loop. Of the people she remembers most fondly, her daughter is alive and safe in the Sublime, but she is far beyond Maeve's reach. Hector is dead-dead. She has no idea what became of Clementine. Caleb seems to be the only person she would have any reason to check on and that's why she does, not knowing that Hale was out there waiting for something like that to happen.