The Nublar Five make their way to Senegal to investigate who has been stealing dinosaurs from the DPW. Meanwhile, Brooklynn, very much alive, goes deep undercover with that exact same person…

The most ambitious season of the show to date splits its narrative into two parallel paths. Both explore the massive changes that dinosaurs have brought to the world. It does its best work showing how variable that impact has been. New characters Aminata and Zayna, along with their adorable dinosaur Geba, show how adaptable both species are. Zayna is a great character, a girl growing up in a very different world to her mother and completely at home there.

This plot also allows the show to explore some dark territory. Kenji, a young man who’s lost his father, his girlfriend and any sense of certainty in his life becomes a thrill-seeking adrenalin junkie who knows he’s acting out but can’t bring himself to stop until it’s almost too late. Ben discovers early on that Brooklynn is alive but can’t bring himself to tell his friends. All of them are pushed to the edge both by the investigation and the stresses it puts them under. That comes to a head in the season finale, as the two plots intersect.

We’ll get there, but first there’s a pair of flashbacks here which show how Brooklynn survived and how she ended up on the other side of the ethical fence. Kiersten Kelly takes over for Jenna Ortega and brings Brooklynn a fragility and edge that carries the emotional heart of the entire season. She spends most of the season sharing the screen with Dichen Lachman as the Broker. The Broker is a character we’ve met before, in Jurassic World Dominion, but here she gets much more screen time and the context that was sorely lacking in her live action incarnation. She’s a dinosaur smuggler, a tangible threat and a woman burning with the need to prove herself. She’s calm, focused, intensely dangerous and her elder sibling relationship with Brooklynn is vital to the show and to successfully communicating what a new world this is.

That relationship is at the core of the season, and possibly the show’s best episodes as we see events from Brooklynn’s point of view. ‘C13v3rGr186’ tells us what happened to her and how she survived. It’s dark territory, and it manages the difficult balancing act of showing how Brooklynn’s thinking is off, but entirely understandable. The season highlight though is ‘Lab Partners’ and ‘Reunion’, a three-part finale that shows us the same events from two different perspectives and finishes with the Nublar Six finally reunited, only for Brooklynn to seemingly make her choice. Along the way we get a couple of wonderful new dinosaurs, and an impossibly creepy moment of raptor problem solving that may be my favourite moment in the show so far.

Verdict: It’s an incredibly ambitious season and the closer relationship with the movies works very well. There’s maybe a case for saying the entire season is a set up for the final scene, but even then there’s a lot to enjoy here and a killer set up for the third season. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

Highlights: ‘C13v3rGr186’, ‘Lab Partners’ parts 1 and 2, the incredibly creepy leucistic Baryonyx