westworld
HBO
HBO

'Westworld' Just Snuck in a Cheeky 'Game of Thrones' Easter Egg

This article contains spoilers for Westworld Season 3 Episode 2. To read other Westworld coverage of the show, head to Westworld World, our hub for recaps, interviews, theories, explainers, and more.

After a long hour of set-up in the season premiere, Westworld's second episode of Season 3 finally gets the ball rolling as Maeve figures out that her brain is trapped in a simulation by someone trying to get information about the Hub out of her, and Bernard teams up with security guard Ashley Stubbs, who turns out to have been a host the whole time (what!!!) who was programmed to protect the hosts in the park. That's a lot to deal with already, but Westworld isn't afraid of having some fun with things from time to time. While watching this episode, fans of HBO's biggest series ever may have spotted a very familiar character hanging out in one sequence.

The short scene happens when Bernard and Stubbs are walking through Westworld's mesa facility, where all the techs are, as Stubbs puts it, waiting to see if they get laid off after the closure of the park. We then cut to two of these techs, played by none other than Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, sitting in a testing room and discussing where their robot is going to end up. Weiss mentions "a buyer in Costa Rica" and, when Benioff asks how they're going to get their creation all the way over there, Weiss suggests they do it "in pieces." The robot, which turns out to be a scale model of Daenerys Targaryen's black and red dragon Drogon from Game of Thrones, growls as Weiss approaches it with a buzzsaw.

westworld drogon
Look who it is! | HBO

First, is the "buyer in Costa Rica" a clever reference to Jurassic Park? That's likely, given that Michael Crichton wrote and directed the Westworld movie as well as wrote the Jurassic Park novel and co-wrote the screenplay for the adaptation. But the more galaxy-brained among us will be more interested in using this opportunity to start madly theorizing about whether there's an HBO cinematic universe.

Do the characters of Westworld know about Game of Thrones? Does the entirety of Game of Thrones take place inside the park? Will we see characters or creatures from other HBO shows as Westworld goes on? Next season, will we get Wire World, complete with cameos by Bunk, Omar, and Stringer Bell? Of course, Drogon's appearance is probably nothing more than a cheeky little Easter egg to tip a hat to the fans that made HBO one of the last great cable channels -- and one of the first essential streaming services other than Netflix. Besides, that VFX company spent way too much money on Dany's dragon to let it just fly off to Valyria and disappear into the mist forever.

It could be, in HBO's utopian vision for its own company, that, in the future Westworld promises (this season is set in 2058), enough nostalgia remains for that one TV show with all the knights and dragons that Delos can make it into a profitable theme park. Will there still be die-hard A Song of Ice and Fire fans in the future? Will people still be naming their children Arya and Nymeria and Sansa? If we could get Shogunworld in Season 2, I see no reason why the show can't send a couple characters on a side-quest to Knightworld. Might be a tad more fun to visit than the Nazis in Warworld.

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Emma Stefansky is a staff entertainment writer at Thrillist. Follow her on Twitter @stefabsky.