Everyone's raving about Westworld's 'Game of Thrones' Easter egg, but what about the 'Rick and Morty' one?
Spoilers for 'Westworld' Season 3 Episode 2 'The Winter Line'
The second episode of ‘Westworld’ season three has too many subtle and not-so-subtle Easter eggs about other shows and movies. The most obvious one, of course, was ‘Game of Thrones’.
When Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) and Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) sneak into Delos’ parks to investigate why Maeve (Thandie Newton) had gone missing, they discover a dragon. And not just any dragon, it was Drogon from ‘Game of Thrones’, part of Delos’ Medieval World park. The ‘Game of Thrones’ Easter egg did not end there. The fantasy show’s executive producers, David Benioff and DB Weiss make a brief appearance, working as technicians in the park.
A smaller, more subtle Easter egg, lay right there as Benioff and Weiss discussed how they could abscond with the dragon to sell to some startup in Costa Rica. It was a call to ‘Westworld’ author Michael Crichton’s other iconic work ‘Jurassic Park’, where a rich man created a theme park or rather a biological preserve with dinosaurs on Isla Nublar, a fictional island to the west of Costa Rica.
Another scene in the episode, though not necessarily an Easter egg, was visibly a homage to the Wachowskis’ seminal yet underrated work ‘Animatrix’. In the film’s segment called ‘The Second Renaissance’, directed by Mahiro Maeda, there are several instances of humans massacring robots. Armed personnel killing shooting androids, execution-style. In ‘Westworld’, the android drone reprogrammed by Maeve to steal her “pearl” meets a similar ending. It was a scene also emblematic of the trilogy and the series’ shared theme -- the war between man and machine.
However, the most infuriating Easter egg, which was really not an Easter egg but an entire huge chunk of the episode’s plot, seemed painfully similar to another series that blurs the line between science fiction and philosophy and human nature: Adult Swim’s animated comedy ‘Rick and Morty’.
Let’s head back to the plot of ‘Rick and Morty’ season one, episode four. Titled ‘M. Night Shaym-Aliens’, the episode dealt with an alien race called Zigerions, whose species-wide profession seemed to be scamming. Yes, it’s a not-at-all-subtle play on Nigerian scammers; ‘Rick and Morty’ is famous for many things, subtlety isn’t one of them.
Anyway, these Zigerions, in order to trick Rick Sanchez, created a simulation. Inside the simulation, only the titular duo was real. Everyone else was a low-effort digital impersonation. Rick and Morty break free from the simulation by giving the impersonators a set of complicated instructions. The result was the simulated world pausing, after which, Rick and Morty escape from it.
Back to ‘Westworld’, we see Maeve stuck in the loops of yet another Delos theme park called Warworld (a sort of a Third Reich experience). When Maeve dies in this world, he meets her former allies in the park’s tech labs, namely Felix (Leonardo Nam), Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum), and Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman).
While the former two don’t seem to recognize her at all, the latter, who it appeared had died in season two, tells Maeve how he had survived. He, limping with a cane (fans said this may have been a homage to Hugh Laurie’s iconic Dr. House, though that’s admittedly a stretch) takes Maeve to “The Forge” so that she could be reunited with her quote-unquote daughter. He also declares his love for Maeve.
Maeve, with her “bulk apperception” -- the ability to perceive her reality -- dialed up to the max, then realized this was not reality, rather it was a simulation. To prove to the simulated Lee that her suspicions were correct, he checks through the programming and realizes it was lazy. To glitch the system, she makes the lab techs figure out what was the square root of “negative one”. Inside Warworld, he plants enemy plans on every person, making all the hosts confused about who the traitor was, causing intense chaos. This led to the system glitch enough to completely stop.
This is not to claim that Jonathan Nolana and Lisa Joy ripped off ‘Rick and Morty’, but isn’t the similarity a little much? Both shows pulled this off with immense finesse, there is no doubt about that. But only one of these shows featured this idea way back in September of 2015.
The next episode of 'Westworld' airs on March 29 on HBO.