Westworld Hinted That Game of Thrones Is Another Delos Park
Game of Thrones fans who tuned into Westworld last night were treated to a pretty huge crossover Easter Egg. When Bernard heads back to Delos’s labs to hunt for Maeve, Stubbs guides him through a repairs shop for a park we’ve never seen before. And in it, two technicians are working on a familiar, scaly face: that of Drogon, Daenerys’ dragon from Game of Thrones. And the employees hard at work on the fire-breathing lizard were none other than David Benioff and Dan Weiss, Thrones’ showrunners.
The Hollywood Reporter talked to Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan about how the scene came about, and it turns out that Nolan and co-creator Lisa Joy are friends with their Thrones counterparts. “They have been incredibly supportive and friendly with us as we were getting our show up and running,” said Nolan, “George R.R. Martin as well. George has frequently pitched a crossover episode. When the time came for Luke and Jeffrey's characters to be wandering around in the bowels of the Mesa, we could not resist.”
As for Drogon, “He ate a couple of PAs,” Nolan joked, “but that's it.”
But the sequence didn’t only reference Game of Thrones. In Michael Chrichton’s original 1973 Westworld film, Delos’ three parks are Western World, Roman World, and Medieval World, so the glimpse we saw of Park Four also nods to the show’s source material. The dialogue given to Benioff and Weiss also tips its hat to Westworld’s original creator, as the two technicians discuss selling the dragon to a “startup in Costa Rica.” Isla Nublar, the fictional setting for the Jurassic Park movies, also created by Michael Chrichton, is off the coast of Costa Rica. And Jurassic Park would definitely be in the market for a giant reptile.
The Game of Thrones reference opens the door to an exciting possibility. What if that entire show took place in a Delos park? Some Thrones characters definitely seemed like they could be hosts stuck in a loop. There’s Jon Snow, who brooded for five-episode stretches before engaging in pointless acts of self-sacrifice over and over again for eight whole seasons. And Tyrion, who was hired as hand to a monarch every time he turned around, despite being demonstrably terrible at the job. The show taking place in Park Four would also explain why Season Eight was such a mess. Head of Narrative Lee Sizemore was pretty busy helping Maeve find her daughter and dying heroically—he probably didn’t have a lot of time to invest in the storylines over in Park Four.
At the very least, you can appreciate the meta-joke of Benioff and Weiss literally dismembering our beloved Thrones characters with a hacksaw.
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