Light spoilers ahead for Westworld season 3, episode 2: “The Winter Line”.
Episode 2 of Westworld‘s third season, which aired on March 22, featured a couple of fun cameos: Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, as well as a robotic version of Daenerys Targaryen’s Drogon, a fixture of Delos’ Medieval World park.
It’s a neat nod to HBO’s other big genre series, and in an interview with Variety, Westworld showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan explained that we might have seen more: George R.R. Martin had at one point pitched an extensive crossover episode!
This latest episode featured Medieval World, a nod in and of itself to one of the worlds in the original movie and its sequel, Futureworld.
In the behind-the-scenes video for last night’s episode, Joy and Nolan acknowledged the easter egg, noting that Benioff and Weiss lent them the dragon. Moreover, we could have seen more of Westeros, as Martin had pitched some sort of crossover to them.
Buy the Book
The Memory of Souls
Nolan: We’re also friendly with George R.R. Martin, and George had consistently since the first season said, “We’ve got to do a tie-in with ‘Game of Thrones.’” People forget that George was originally a TV writer and he came up in the TV world in which you’d occasionally have these crossover shows, which the fans would f—ing freak out over. So George had always been pitching the crossover show.
Wait, George had pitched the idea of a “Game of Thrones”-“Westworld” crossover?
Nolan: Oh yeah!
Joy: But like a full situation. “Game of Thrones” world, or something!
That’s obviously a little vague, but when Westworld first debuted on HBO, I remember joking (and saw others do so as well) that Westeros was really one of the parks, like Westworld, and that it was just a super-immersive experience for guests. A direct crossover would have meant one of two things: Either Westeros was actually a simulated world, or that the people at Delos were such big fans of the show, that they decided to license it from Martin’s literary estate in the future. Either way, it’s a fictional world that I’m sure would fit nicely with the immersive worlds that Delos was putting together.