This series is absolutely a continuation of everything you didn’t realize you wanted from a Jurassic Park /World franchise television serial. And with Season Two of the Netflix exclusive, there are even more obvious nods to the larger franchise, while maintaining a uniqueness that sets it apart from the films.
I wrote about Season One, where I gushed about Camp Cretaceous’s place in the canon, but with the kids alone on the island with the fences down, the dinosaur discoveries are bountiful.
For example, Darius, the dino expert, gets to live out Dr. Grant’s fantasies, or perhaps maybe it would be more Dr. Sarah Harding’s dream, who you may remember from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, played by Julianne Moore, who was a behavioral paleontologist.
Darius gets to discover that the T-Rex is nesting, and there is a neutral watering hole. Plus other small observations the Drs. Grant and Harding would absolutely love to know about, Dr. Grant from the safety of Darius’s notebook and Harding who would want to see it for herself.
The writing on this show is great. Not just because the science of the dinosaur behavior fits in with the existing canon, but because the group dynamic and the stories are able to breathe without getting old. Season Two, just like Season One, is eight episodes.
Season One was the fall of Jurassic World and the kids were left on the island. Season Two is about survival. But the characters grow within themselves and within the group dynamic, like most cartoons from the ‘80s, but it happens over 8 episodes instead of 22, which makes it more obvious, as the episodes roll on.
The kids are also faced with trials that no one else in the franchise has been faced with. Being left behind on the island, in the wake of a recent park failure, is different from what Eric experiences in Jurassic Park III, because this failure is fresh.
The kids find plenty of things that are literally left as they were, in the midst of a park failure where the protocol is “run” just like we all remember Dr. Sattler telling us.
While the show is updated to the Jurassic World era, as opposed to the Jurassic Park era, and the technology has followed suit, I can’t quite put my finger on why this show is still better than I’ve described.
Perhaps it’s personal, as Jurassic Park and the series as a whole is one of my personal favorites, but perhaps it’s because it is great writing paired with wonderful storytelling, and that it happens in the canon of the Jurassic series, well, that is perhaps the icing on this wonderful dinosaur cake.
All I know is that Season One was a great introduction and Season Two is a wonderful continuation. Season Two was announced shortly after the release of Season One and I look forward to the announcement of Season Three should it happen, as the season doesn’t wrap up the series, and I would be fine if “slight spoilers” the kids are stuck on the island for a while.
To reiterate, it is absolutely everything you could want from a serialized Jurassic Park or Jurassic World show. And that’s what it is. There’s not enough space in a short review to mention all of the callbacks, but know that the nods to the larger Jurassic cannon are both obvious and subtle and they happen all the time, sometimes obvious in the foreground, sometimes in the background, and other times, it’s shot framing. This is television, based on a movie franchise done well, very well… Spared no expense even! So, get watching!