The Nublar Five get help, and hindrance, from a fellow Jurassic World veteran. Brooklynn sinks deeper into the dark side and Ben’s girlfriend (and her nonna) save the day!

The show smashes up to, and into Dominion and we get the biggest crossovers to date this season. Aside from Dichen Lachman’s still excellent Santos, we also get the animated debut of  Barry Sembène, played on live action by Omar Sy and here by Evan Michael Lee. He’s a fun character, and very much in the same vein as Santos. Both weren’t given much to do in the movies but get a surprising amount of screen time here. Barry doesn’t have as much agency as Santos, but he’s part of the show’s bridge across to Dominion’s Malta sequence and he gets some fun action beats.

The cast is also expanded this season with Beatrice Grannò as Ben’s girlfriend Gia and Isabella Rossellini (!!!) as her grandma. They’re introduced so fast they’re not actually introduced, we just open an episode at their house, but they do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting this season. Mich like the excellent Anaiya Asmougha and Cherise Boothe as Zayna and Aminata last season, they function as a lens to view the fanged singularity of dinosaur life through. Granno’s Gia is great, hyper competent and the exact sort of glorious nerd as her boyfriend. Rossellini is typically superb as Nonna, and carries the majority of the show’s arc, bonding with Smoothie, Bumpy’s baby, as a means of dealing with the massive changes her world is undergoing. It’s kind and grounded, humane in a way that the second movie trilogy almost never managed.

The show’s new found connectivity to the movies pays into this, as we realise that the area of Italy they live in is close to Biosyn Valley, and Biosyn have definitely skimped on security. That leads to a great pyroraptor versus snowmobiles sequence for Kenji and Sammy and in the biggest crossover to date, the others being on site at the Maltese dinosaur black market at the same time as Owen and Claire. That sequence is especially great, as the Nublar survivors work with Davi (Marwan Salama) an undercover journalist to save lives.

The one weak spot here is the Brooklynn plot, and I suspect that’s the point. This season, Sammy finally says the quiet part loud and asks why they’re helping a friend who is constantly working to push them away. That leads to the show’s first breakup, between her and Yaz, which is handled with welcome emotional maturity. Raini Rodriguez and Kausar Mohammed have been the powerhouses of a strong cast for a while now and the subtlety they bring to this plot is exactly what’s needed.

Kiersten Kelly impresses too as Brooklynn, as does Dichen Lachmann as Santos. However, for the first time in seasons the show feels a little like it’s running in place for a few episodes here as it carefully lines the three groups of characters up with Dominion. Sammy’s frustration is very welcome but it’s also left necessarily unresolved as the season ends with Brooklynn reunited with some of her friends and all of them unknowingly heading to the same place. Her actions are all understandable, but you can’t shake the sense things have taken longer than they should have done, and been more dangerous than they needed to be, because of how her actions are used to tie into the movie. That full reunion next season is going to be very interesting. I just can’t help but wish we got it here.

Verdict: This is still an enormously fun season, and the dinosaur action has never been better handled. But having finally caught up to the movies and reunited, my hope is the Biosyn Valley season coming in November is going to be the Nublar Six, and the show, back on top form. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart