Colin Trevorrow said that the animation on this show is fantastic, and my immediate first response is, “Is it, though?” Because no matter how dreadful a show is, I forgive a certain amount if it’s at least well made on a technical level. And vice versa—badly made but with good ideas. But badly made with bad ideas and an obviously high budget? What even is the point of this? To be fair, I’ve been done with new Jurassic Park stuff for decades now, and I say this as a person who legitimately enjoyed The Lost World in the theatre. That my kids love this is not my ideal.

This is apparently happening at the same time as the assorted Jurassic World movies. Which I haven’t seen. At any rate, six kids are, for reasons, the first to attend Camp Cretaceous, a stay-away camp at Jurassic Park. However, because it’s Jurassic Park, this turns out immediately to be a terrible idea. They’re lucky to have Darius Bowman (Paul-Mikél Williams), who has won a competition to be there and is incredibly familiar with all sorts of dinosaur minutiae. The others also have reasons to be there.

I mean, I guess. Honestly, no plot in this franchise since the first one has really made sense, because after the first one, everyone should just be aware of how catastrophic the whole idea is. I don’t care how much my children loved dinosaurs; they would not go to that park. They just wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let them. Because I don’t want my children to die. And be eaten. Like, that’s what’s going to happen, and if Jurassic World is set in the same universe as Jurassic Park—and I’m pretty sure it is—we all know that’s what’s going to happen.

Would I like the show better if I didn’t respond to Darius getting excited about a compy with “But they ate Hammond”? Maybe a little? But I also don’t think I’d like it. Okay, the dinosaurs are better animated than the humans, and the backgrounds are pretty good, but this is just such an ugly show. And predictable. You know rich bro Kenji Kon (Ryan Potter) is going to improve. Scared Ben Pincus (Sean Giambrone) will develop bravery. None of the kids are actually going to get eaten because kids can’t get eaten.

And I never do understand what Ben is even doing there—apparently this is one of those dreadful “help someone overcome phobias by forcing them to face them” things, which is bad enough, but how did he get in? How was he chosen? I am bewildered. And I guess Sammy Gutierrez (Raini Rodriguez) is there because her parents are major suppliers, and Kenji’s father is somehow involved with the administration. Brooklynn (Jenna Ortega) is an influencer with . . . I have no idea who her guardians are, because I don’t think they come up. And Yasmina “Yaz” Fadoula (Kausar Mohammed) is an athlete, so she’s there because . . . .

The writing is clumsy. It’s one of those kids’ shows that doesn’t seem to understand how kids actually talk and act. Every kid has their main trait, and they don’t have much of anything other than that. Certainly they don’t, for the most part, have lives before that they’re actually talking about. Unless it’s directly plot-relevant. No mention of a best friend who’s probably worrying about them. Or missing something specific. I think the only one whose hobby we know is Darius . . . because his hobby is dinosaurs.

Okay, so I haven’t watched this series all the way through. It’s one of those ones that generally gets watched when I’m not there. There’s a lot I’ve missed. There are probably things that annoy me that wouldn’t quite as much if I watched more of it, but of course some of the things that annoy me would just be there more if I watched. I just feel like . . . it’s time to let the franchise go. We can’t have Abbott and Costello Get Eaten At Jurassic Park, so I guess one of the things we do instead is cartoons with kids.

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