Review: ‘Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous’ Season 2

*WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!*
We will do our best to avoid direct plot spoilers for Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, but there is a lot of ground to cover and some things simply can’t be avoided. Proceed with caution!

Imagine a world where dinosaurs are not only alive again, but you can actually go visit an entire island theme park full of them. Now imagine you’re spending your entire summer at a super exclusive camp on the island where you get to experience these animals in a way few people ever have. Now imagine everything goes absolutely wrong. The dinosaurs are loose. The island is evacuating. Now imagine you have been left behind, and no one else is coming back to the island for the foreseeable future. Welcome to Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Season 2.

The all-new second season of the animated Jurassic World spinoff series, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, just dropped on Netflix and it is an absolutely wonderful time for fans of the Jurassic franchise! Season 2 of the series picks up immediately after the events of Season 1, with our heroes left behind in the abandoned island theme park full of loose dinosaurs.

With no one really knowing for sure that they are even alive, let alone coming to save them, our group of campers set out to find what they are going to need in order to make it through this ordeal. They’re trapped and alone on a deserted island with certain death looming around almost every corner. They quickly realize that if they are going to survive, they need to find food and shelter as soon as possible while also trying to figure out how to contact the mainland.

Our group is comprised of Darius (the dinosaur obsessed one who won a contest to be here, voiced by Paul Mikél Williams), Brooklyn (the social media star, voiced by Jenna Ortega), Kenji (the ‘too cool’ rich kid, voiced by Ryan Potter), Yaz (the sporty athletic one, voiced by Kausar Mohammed), and Sammy (the farm girl who revealed last season that she was a spy sent there to retrieve inside info on the park, voiced by Raini Rodriguez). They’re a mismatched group for sure, but they’ve been through a lot together already after having suffered the loss of one of their own.

Back in Season 1, Ben (the nerdy one that we would definitely refer to as an “indoor kid”, voiced by Sean Giambrone) was among the group’s number, but he was lost during a Pteranodon attack that saw him thrown from a speeding train. The other teens believed him to be dead, and they couldn’t go looking for him or they would have definitely missed the last boat off the island. It was a tough decision to be made at the time, but the group made it together in order to survive. Each of the teens spends some time grieving in their own way, but they have plenty of other things to worry about right now.

As soon as they find themselves back in the main park, they immediately realize they’re still in plenty of trouble. Food is scarce, the shelter immediately available is unsafe, and personalities are clashing across the board. If the kids can’t rally together to get through this, there’s a good chance they’ll end up taking each other out before the dinosaurs even get a chance to!

Early season plot points involve finding and activating a distress beacon hidden somewhere in the Main Street area of the park, finding a new potentially long term shelter, and making the decision to free more trapped dinosaurs that were left behind; with the latter issue becoming a real moral dilemma among the teens. While it’s an easy decision to release the trapped herbivores they find still caged up without food or water, what about the carnivores? Do they not deserve the same chance to survive on the loose that the other dinosaurs are getting just because they’re meat eaters? Does the cost of additional danger with them running free outweigh the cost of their lives if left locked up with no chance at surviving? It’s a question that weighs much deeper than most audience members would think we would see in a show that is generally geared towards children. It adds some reality to the outlandish nature of the series that makes it feel even more in line with the movies they’re tied-in to.

Although the teens are hoping that rescue will be coming along sometime in the near future, there is plenty to keep them busy while they wait. Time flies when you’re trapped on a deserted island theme park, and in Season 2 we see that the kids have been stranded on the island for a number of weeks before they see their first hint that they are not quite as alone on the island as they thought. Could it be a search party looking for them? Masrani Corp or Ingen sending people back to the island to assess the damage? Other Jurassic World theme park survivors? The mysterious Mantah Corp (the company that sent Sammy to spy) looking to steal Jurassic World‘s secrets?

The answer was none of the above, as the kids are introduced to Mitch (Bradley Whitford) and Tiff (Stephanie Beatriz), a pair of eco-tourists that are traveling the world to take photos of rare animals, and their survival guide Hap (Angus Sampson). This new group had heard what happened on the island and rushed to get there and see the dinosaurs in the wild while they still could. While the teens are excited to have found more people, Brooklyn catches on quickly that everything may not be as it seems, and that these people may not be quite who they say they are.

Audiences will be relieved to find out that (shockingly) the writers did not, in fact, kill off one of our series protagonists in the last season! We soon find that Ben is actually alive! Once the timid quiet one who was glued to his fanny-pack and couldn’t get enough hand sanitizer, after several weeks alone on Isla Nublar with no one but his faithful infant Ankylosaurus Bumpy, Ben is now a survival badass. While it hadn’t been an easy couple of weeks for the teen, he managed to survive all on his own in the wilderness and even fend off quite a few of the island’s nastier denizens while he was at it.

Bumpy, the adorable baby Ankylosaurus from Season 1 that doubled as the Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous series mascot, has had a growth spurt. In a move that we don’t think anyone in marketing saw coming, Bumpy is now a full-grown Ankylosaurus and pretty much a living, breathing, loveable tank. It’s weird that they would throw away the adorable small version of Bumpy that has shockingly not become a plush toy yet, but they also make excellent use of her throughout this second season of the show. They took a character that was useless outside of being adorable and made it into one of the kids’ greatest advantages.

In Season 1 of Camp Cretaceous, the “big bad” was a particularly headstrong Carnotaurus that the kids nicknamed Toro. The creature has an appearance in Season 2, but it was minor, to say the least. The real stars of the season are a trio of Baryonyx that spend most of the season terrorizing just about anything they can find. They are treated almost like larger velociraptors here; smart, agile, and especially vicious. This season features less human death than the previous season, and we never see any of it happen on screen (it is a kids show after all), but violent deaths are certainly heard and alluded to off screen.

The dinosaurs this season are pretty well varied, but only a few of them receive any specific focus. In the first season, the kids are rushing from one side of the park to the other, while here they are largely staying put and trying to survive. While we obviously get time with Ankylosaurus and Baryonyx as previously mentioned, we also get a solid amount of time spent with Rexy, everyone’s favorite Tyrannosaurus Rex from the original Jurassic Park.

We get a healthy amount of Compstegnathus throughout the season as well, but they’re essentially viewed as the rats of the dinosaur world so they’re just kind of all over the place. Blue the Velociraptor makes an appearance or two, but they are by and large just cameos. The Mosasaurus is name dropped a half-dozen times but is sadly never actually on-screen in Season 2.

Here’s the list of Dinosaurs we spotted on-screen in Season 2 of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous:

One thing we absolutely love about the show is that it does not seem to be in a big rush to answer all of your questions. By the end of Season 1, we had plenty of hanging threads to look forward to answers on, and while Season 2 definitely addressed some of these, there are still a lot of questions fans will look forward to seeing answered in future seasons of the show. Isla Nublar and the abandoned Jurassic World theme park have plenty of mysteries yet to be explored, and Camp Cretaceous looks to be taking them all in stride and getting to them at its own pace.

Looking at the show objectively, a few questions came to mind right out the gate. Even if the power is off on the island, why do the kids try to survive in the jungle instead of trying to hide out inside some of the Park building structures? Even beyond the obvious places like the Hammond Discovery Center on Main Street, the island has got to have at least one Hotel, probably two or three based on the number of people normally in attendance. While Main Street itself is unsafe because of Rexy living nearby, surely the kids would have been safer hanging out inside some of the buildings than in the jungle? It also would have made it much easier for any potential rescuers to find them if they stuck close to the main park areas.

It also seems odd that the park would be so completely and utterly abandoned so quickly. While it makes sense that Masrani and Ingen would want to get guests off the island as fast as possible, you would think that they would have sent some people back in to assess the damages and see what might be salvageable; especially with the knowledge that the creature that caused most of the damage, the Indominus Rex, was no longer in play. It just seems odd that after weeks and weeks, the kids are still largely alone on the island with no one from the company that owns Jurassic World showing up.

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous continues to be a fun and exciting romp that the entire family can enjoy. It definitely has a few darker moments, but nothing that wouldn’t be considered inappropriate for children (unless implied death is a no-no for you). The show has a rollercoaster ride that never really lets up too much to give you a chance to lose interest. Something is always happening, and Season 2 feels considerably more grounded than Season 1. This sophomore season of the series also laid the groundwork for what looks to be something big happening in the not-yet-announced-but-probably-coming Season 3 of the show!

If you’ve got time to kill (and who doesn’t? Global Pandemic and all), definitely take some time to sink your teeth into Dreamworks Animation’s Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Season 2. The show is smart, fun, and exciting, but most importantly it’s something that the entire family can watch together and everyone will actually enjoy it!

Camp Cretaceous Season 2 gives us everything that made Season 1 great with some fantastic new twists that make the show truly stand on its own rather than just being a generic tie-in series. As a series now set during the four-year gap between films, in a time in the Jurassic World universe that has yet to be touched on in any form of media, Camp Cretaceous can tell whatever story it wants to. It’s an adventure-filled dinosaur-centric romp that feels closer in tone to the original Jurassic Park film than it does to any of the sequels.

All eight episodes of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Season 2 are available for streaming now exclusively on Netflix. We definitely recommend checking it out!