Let’s dive deep into last night’s Westworld-Game of Thrones crossover

The second episode of Westworld‘s third season, “The Winter Line,” aired last night, and it featured a couple of faces that should be familiar to any Game of Thrones fan. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss popped up in our favorite sci-fi show as two Delos lab techs, both of them working behind the scenes of a medieval-themed world. Imagine that.

We’ve known for a while now that Benioff and Weiss were going to be appearing in Westworld this season…but the biggest surprise was that they weren’t the only ones from Game of Thrones to show up. Check out the scene below.

Yup, that’s Drogon. Just nobody tell Dany that her favorite dragon is a host — I don’t think she could handle it…

“Very kindly, we were working with their vendor, Pixamundo, who built the dragons for them. So it’s the real dragon,” showrunner Christopher Nolan told Variety. “There was some back and forth about whether Season 4 or Season 5 Drogon, and some debate about how big the room was and what position the dragon could be in. But yeah, it’s just irresistible.”

Of course, seeing as how this is Westworld, the show couldn’t just give us a cameo. It had to give us a cameo within a cameo…within a cameo? Okay, so there aren’t that many layers, but this thing had some serious references. Let’s break it down.

Apparently, this cameo came about because Westworld showrunners Johnathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are both “fans of and friends with Dan and David,” as Nolan told The Wrap.

"We’ve said many times before that the only reason we are able to make ‘Westworld’ the way we do is because [Weiss and Benioff] invented this version of the genre. They invented the gigantic, on-location, sweepingly ambitious, dark, deranged, delirious, but beautiful version of television that allowed us to attempt to walk in their footsteps. So we love those guys and we love their show."

In fact, the whole medieval-themed park is an intentional nod to Game of Thrones. According to Nolan, George R.R. Martin — with whom the pair are also friendly — has been suggesting “a Westerosworld tie-in so often that we felt like with Jeffrey and Luke stumbling around in the Mesa, we could not resist the opportunity to tease everyone a little bit with that park. But we will not name the park! It’s Park 4.”

“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,” Nolan told Variety, filling in some details. “So George had always been pitching the crossover show.”

So while it’s not quite confirmed that patrons of Delos Destinations could go hang out in Winterfell or King’s Landing, it’s still fun to imagine.

But the tastiest part of this cameo comes from the dialogue Weiss and Benioff share during their time on screen

"Weiss: “I found a buyer. Some start-up in Costa Rica.”Benioff: “How the f$#! are you gonna get that to Costa Rica?”Weiss: “In pieces, man.”"

That start-up Weiss mentions? I’d be willing to bet its name is The Ingen Corporation. The original 1973 Westworld film was written and directed by author Michael Crichton, whose most famous work is Jurassic Park. In Jurassic Park, Ingen CEO John Hammond is building the titular park on an island off the coast of Costa Rica.

Nolan confirmed that this was indeed a Jurassic Park nod while talking to Insider. “I was of the theory that the lovely people at NBC Universal probably had a lawyer sitting and watching every episode, waiting for the dinosaur, so they could make a friendly phone call to tell us to cease and desist,” he said. “So we found a way to blend those two pitches into one ridiculous moment in our series.”

Including a nod to Jurassic Park makes my fanboy heart pretty happy. In a lot of ways, Westworld and Jurassic Park are spiritual siblings. They’re both about exotic sci-fi tourism parks that go off the rails, resulting in the attractions trying to kill the guests. Both handle heady themes about whether humanity can control the things it creates.

You know what doesn’t make my fanboy heart happy though? The fact that Weiss is chopping Drogon up into bits as the scene fades.

Talk about killing your darlings.

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