Reconciliation

A Jurassic Park/World oneshot

By

EvilFuzzy9

Rating: T

Genre: Friendship/Humor

Characters/Pairings: Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm; [N/A]

Summary: (or, "Grumpy Old Men, But With Dinosaurs... Kinda") Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm visit Jurassic World to learn about a new attraction. They do not get along.

"Oh, Christ. Not you."

Alan Grant groaned irritably when he saw the person seated next to him in the helicopter. He adjusted his hat and sighed.

This was going to be a long flight.

With a face deeply lined by the passage of years, a thick beard, and a thinning shock of snowy white hair, the elderly paleontologist looked every bit the venerable yet down-to-earth dinosaur expert he was purported to be. He had an approachable air about him, with a casual demeanor and manner of dress. He was also fit for his age and well-tanned, continuing to do regular field work even into his seventies.

In contrast to stout, burly, physical Grant in his khaki and flannel, the man beside him was dressed all in black, lanky and thin with a grim, clean-shaven face locked into a most severe expression. A cane was laid across his knees, and a pale complexion left the veins in tensed hands quite visible. He looked like he would have rather been anywhere but here.

Ian Malcolm assessed Grant unamusedly.

"I could say the same thing," the mathematician drawled. Age had not robbed him of his dry wit or iconoclastic tendencies, but as a man in his early sixties Professor Malcolm carried himself with a certain cold austerity borne of an unflinchingly fatalistic, even pessimistic view of society and modern science.

He was rather dour these days, even moreso than he used to be.

And Malcolm was no happier to be seated next to Grant than Grant was to be seated next to him. Despite a common experience with Isla Nublar, and the concerns they had shared over the safety of Jurassic Park, these two scholars were not friends. There was no love lost between them, and no lingering sense of camaraderie.

In part, it was a matter of personal philosophy. Grant was an outdoorsman, an explorer. He thrived in the field, the harsh wilderness. He disliked computers and milquetoast intellectuals; an old fashioned man's man. Malcolm, on the other hand was a pure theorist, tech-savvy and STRONGLY opinionated. He thrived in universities, lecture halls, rarely leaving what Grant called his "ivory tower".

Despite both being scientists, they were as different as night and day.

But another, bitterer aspect of their mutual enmity, this shared distaste they held for one another, might have emerged from the stances they had taken on Jurassic World as former consultants for Jurassic Park. Over fifteen years ago, they and the other consultants and survivors of the InGen Incident had been approached by representatives from Masrani Global about the possibility of reviving the failed project.

Malcolm had been adamantly pessimistic, insisting stubbornly and repeatedly that any attempt to bring the island back under control would fail. He maintained that Complexity Theory had no room for the possibility of successful capture and containment of all the surviving dinosaurs on Isla Nublar – a daunting and costly endeavor by itself – while also getting workmen onto the island to reclaim, repair, and rebuild.

He reasoned they would need to transport most, if not ALL of the animals to a secure facility (probably off-island) just so they could safely build, or else hire a small army to maintain a constant secure perimeter – and it would be exorbitantly expensive, either way, with very high risks involved. Not to mention the hundreds if not thousands of ways in which all of this could go horribly, horribly wrong.

Naturally, he'd laughed the speculators all the way off campus.

Like Malcolm, Grant had also had numerous reservations about the project... at least, initially. But then he'd taken a closer look at the plans.

Perhaps it was the love of dinosaurs he'd acquired as a young child, seeing those enormous skeletons towering over him and the other museum goers, a pure and fervent awe which had ultimately led him into the field of paleontogy as a grown man, that changed his mind. Even getting on into his seventies, now, some of that innocent and childlike fascination with these these grand and ancient beasts still remained. He loved dinosaurs; he always had, and at this point in his life it seemed safe to say that he always would.

The InGen Incident had been a tragedy, a senseless disaster that could have been averted at so many different points, or mitigated in any number of ways. Bad choices were made from the upper management level all the way down: rushing the project, not taking the time to properly study the animals they'd created, failing to make certain that they knew how to care for and contain the dinosaurs.

The electrical fences had been too weak to properly condition the animals, not a powerful enough negative stimulus to train the bigger or meaner ones. Insufficient staff in the park proper meant no one saw the signs that should have been obvious from the beginning, the animal droppings in the maintenance tunnels and the eggshells out in the open where no bird on the island would nest.

They had boasted of thorough security measures, yet the system had been flawed at a conceptual level, ill-equipped to adapt to an entire clade of creatures with which mankind had never before had living contact. Human error was often cited as a failing in such systems, but having actual human personnel regularly out in the park could have nipped so many of those problems in the bud.

To this day, Grant still had no damn idea how the wild, breeding raptors had gotten out of containment in the first place. They never found out, with all of the other things that went wrong. There was never a chance to investigate it. Hammond had been too stubborn by half to accept that he might have made mistakes, that there might have been any need to step back and reassess his methods. Not until it was too late. Not until things had gotten too far out of his control.

Mind you, whatever Malcolm might have to say on the matter, Grant honestly believed that with a fair bit of elbow grease and considerably more research the InGen Incident could have been prevented. At the very least, kept down to a manageable scale. But dinosaurs had been getting off the island for months even before the catastrophe. It took the Costa Rican government ages of aggressive hunting to cull the invasive predators, and they continued to destroy the corpses of "aberrant forms" that persisted in showing up for several years afterward.

Jurassic Park had been a disaster. There was no two ways about it. The events on Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna had left their scars on everyone. Tim and Alexis sold their late grandfather's private island to Simon Masrani, but said in no uncertain terms that they would have nothing to do with Jurassic World; they'd been in college at the time. Ellen – Dr. Sattler-Reitman – stonewalled Masrani and Wu, flatly refusing to have anything to do with the project. Richard Levine, a noted specialist and millionaire, threatened to take the InGen representatives to court over emotional distress if they tried to contact him.

Grant himself still had vivid nightmares about the incident. He remembered the smell of death, the sickly sweet putrescence of those ancient predators: Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor. Accurate to the fossil record or not, they had been deadly, terrifying, and all too real. He would never forget that day of dread, of fear...

...of wonder.

Yes.

Even now, after all was said and done, Alan Grant still loved dinosaurs. If anything, these past incidents had only deepened his awe of them, his reverence.

So, deep down, when he first looked at Masrani's plans for InGen, he found himself daring to hope.

Daring to dream.

After three days of perusing every line and passage of the proposals, the security measures, and the blueprints... at the end of that period, his skepticism had almost completely vanished. He found himself nearly convinced of the feasibility of it all.

With only one caveat.

Recalling the words of late game warden Robert Muldoon, he'd urged that the raptors not be brought back. That those animals were too dangerous to be kept in a park setting.

This was the sole point of contention in his initial consultancy.

But the park had been open for years, now, hadn't it? InGen's raptors survived in captivity, though kept far away from guests. They were not tame, no never tame... but kept in check by trainers mad or skilled enough to curb their most dangerous impulses, contained against all odds... and vigilantly monitored by game wardens and security forces armed like a first world military, equipped with the kind of hardware Muldoon had demanded, but never received, back in the days of Jurassic Park.

Hell, in many ways, this modern tech far surpassed his original specifications.

In 1989, Jurassic Park had been wildly ambitious, an unprecedented undertaking, and many mistakes were made with the animals, the systems, the safeguards. With Jurassic World, InGen and Masrani had seemingly learned from those mistakes. They adjusted for unexpected variables, anticipated them, employing a more adaptable, more human system.

Malcolm still maintained, to this day, that it was all a pipe dream and doomed to fail. But Grant took heart in these successes, a tentative, cautious optimism slowly convincing him that it really could be done. So, in spite of the common misgivings they had shared about InGen's original project (doubts which had proven most well-founded) Ian and Alan now stood on very opposite sides of the fence regarding Jurassic World.

So Grant was unpleasantly surprised, to say the least, when he saw the self-proclaimed chaotician on this Masrani helicopter. Blue sea fell away beneath the window as the small aircraft took off.

"Have they already booked you for another lecture?" Malcolm drawled, several minutes of tense silence into the trip. "Well, I suppose it must be a fun intellectual exercise thinking up ways to excuse those theme park monsters they call dinosaurs."

Grant harrumphed.

"They keep the educational materials up to date with current research," he said gruffly. "It's not like they're going out and saying that the animals in their park are what real dinosaurs actually looked like. They aren't lying to anyone."

"Are saying you actually trust the general public to do their research?" Malcolm said. "Spare me, Dr. Grant! Don't insult my intelligence. We both know that the public just accepts what they see at face value. Providing pamphlets and documentaries on actual dinosaurs doesn't excuse the so-called animals they have in the park. It's intellectually dishonest. You can't really be okay with it, as a scientist."

"Every generation has grown up with inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs in some way or other," Grant stubbornly replied. "Popular culture rarely reflects the latest scientific advances. From picture books to television—"

"Don't try to equate Jurassic World with popular culture," Malcolm said. "Please. This isn't a matter of a cartoon mispronouncing the name of a species, or a movie making things up for dramatic effect. These are living, breathing creatures that people can look at and touch. Only an idiot would take something they see on The Flintstones as fact, but if an animal is standing right in front of someone, then of course they're going to assume that it's real, and take for granted that it's accurate to the fossil record."

"But the people who actually care to do their research know otherwise. I've always made it clear in my lectures that the dinosaurs in Jurassic World, like the skeletons you see in most museums, are merely guesswork recreations, the product of fragmented DNA filled in with roughly comparable genetic sequences from modern species. And unlike a plaster skeleton, you can't just replace or reconfigure these dinosaurs whenever new research comes out. Animal rights groups would have a field day."

"How many people do care to do their research, though?" Malcolm asked rhetorically. "Not very many, from what I've seen. You should know this. The public is ninety percent morons, and most of the rest are lazy and willing to just accept whatever they're told, anyways."

"I can't force people to learn," Grant stubbornly retorted. "Believe me, I've tried. But if they refuse to accept what you're telling them, then there's only so much you can do."

"Most of the dinosaurs should have feathers, though, shouldn't they?" Malcolm said a touch insistently. "Like the pteranodons, or the gallimimuses. Or the T-rex."

Grant crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Malcolm.

"An animal the size of Tyrannosaurus rex, in an environment like North America during the Late Cretaceous? Please. A warm-blooded creature with that much body mass wouldn't have any more need for a full body covering than a modern day elephant or rhinoceros."

Malcolm smirked the tiniest bit. "And what about the others?"

Grant was silent for a lengthy few seconds. He scowled.

"Pteranodon and gallimimus are descended from the original InGen stock, before feathered dinosaurs were definitively known to have existed," he finally said, after taking a moment to collect his thoughts. "Aside from the raptors and the new attractions, they've made very few changes to the dinosaurs since Jurassic Park."

Malcolm smirked. "Funny you should mention the raptors, actually. I've done a fair deal of research on Velociraptor mongoliensis since those days..."

Grant swore.

"Fine. I'll give you that one," he muttered. "But most of the recent stock are much more accurate to the fossil record. Their mosasaur, for instance... aside from the back ridge, it's almost exactly how paleontologists would expect it to look."

There was a moment of silence in the helicopter.

"Just be glad Levine's not on this flight," Malcolm said dryly, noting Grant's annoyed expression. "You know how vocal he is about that kind of thing."

"Christ," Grant moaned. "Don't remind me. I hate that bastard."

Malcolm smirked.

"So do most people who have to spend an extended length of time in his presence."

Just then, the pilot spoke up to inform them that they would soon be landing.

It was every bit as harrowing a landing as the last time Malcolm had come to this island. The swirling air currents, nigh constant fog, treacherous peaks and sheer cliffs of Isla Nublar made landing a helicopter anywhere on the island's interior a risky affair at the best of times, and there was an especially bad northerly coming in today.

The pilot was cool as a cucumber, though, as he maneuvered them in to land. He set them down on a helipad outside the research facility without once showing a sign of distress.

Malcolm breathed a nearly inaudible sigh of relief when the helicopter finally touched down. His knuckles had been white, gripping the cane on his lap.

Grant caught this, and smirked.

As the deafening roar of the rotors began to slow, and fade, the paleontologist unbuckled his seatbelt. Grant stood up with little difficulty, once the pilot told them it was safe to disembark, and he stepped out of the helicopter.

Malcolm got up much less easily, and his cane clicked on the helicopter's floor. He gripped the rail with a shaky hand, and gingerly disembarked.

"I'm getting too old for this..." he muttered.

"You're still younger than I am," Grant quipped.

Malcolm hissed and leaned on his cane. Slowly, he took a few steps away from the helicopter.

"Just know," he muttered, "that if raptors break out and eat us, I blame you."

"Duly noted," Grant said. "Why did you come here, anyway? I thought you didn't want anything to do with Jurassic World or InGen."

"That's funny," Malcolm retorted. "Didn't you once say that there was no force on heaven or earth that could get you back on this island?"

Grant coughed.

"That was years ago," he said evasively.

"It was only a little while before InGen and Masrani reps first approached me, as I recall. Barely a year after Y2K."

"Things happened," Grant replied. "I changed my mind."

"You know, it's funny," Malcolm continued. "I believe you first started consulting with them shortly after that news report about US marines making landfall on a private Costa Rican nature preserve... old Site-B on Isla Sorna, wasn't it? Quite the affair. Pteranodons were shot down over Canada, as I recall..."

Alan colored. The two of them walked down from the helipad, where the Jurassic World park operations manager was waiting with a familiar face beside her.

"What about you?" Grant muttered. "I doubt this is a social call to catch up on old times with Big Rex."

Malcolm shrugged. "They contacted me, said they had something they wanted me to see. Frankly, it sounded rather like the person on the other end of the phone was of the opinion that whatever they have here will be enough to reverse the position I have held for the last fifteen years. Or nearly the last thirty, if you count my original consultation with Jurassic Park."

"And you accepted because...?"

"I felt like proving them wrong."

Grant rolled his eyes.

"Well, I can't claim to know much more about it than you do," he said, snorting. "Aside from the fact that InGen and Masrani have been wanting a big, new attraction to draw the crowds back in."

"Big, new attraction?" Malcolm deadpanned. "What, like a Spinosaurus?"

Grant choked, just for a moment.

"I hope not," he grumbled.

Malcolm quirked an eyebrow at this, but said nothing.

A redheaded woman in white stepped forward to greet them with a nod and firm handshakes, then, smiling more professionally than warmly. Henry Wu stood a short distance behind her, looking a bit younger than the almost-sixty he actually was.

"Hello, Alan. Professor Malcolm. We spoke on the phone."

"Hello, Claire. Fine weather for flying, today, isn't it?" said Grant wryly, holding his felt hat down on his head to keep it from whipping away in the wind.

"Ms. Dearing, was it?" said Malcolm, assessing the young woman with a critical eye. "Yes, I recognize your voice. Hopefully you didn't have me flown all the way down here just to exchange pleasantries."

Claire nodded smartly and turned, gesturing for the two to follow her.

"It's about our newest attraction," she said. "We've put a lot of work into it, and I think you two more than anyone else will be able to appreciate just what a leap it represents. It's actually built off of the same basic techniques Wu and his scientists were using back in '89, although much more refined."

Grant followed with a sure gait, while Malcolm hobbled along on his cane. Both men greeted Wu (Grant with a nod, Malcolm with a snort), who turned to walk alongside Claire.

"That's a strange way to phrase it," Grant mused. "From the talk I've heard, I'd assumed you were just introducing a new dinosaur to the park."

Malcolm scoffed. "Just introducing a new dinosaur? God, listen to yourself. What has become of the world, when we can act so blasé about cloning animals that have been dead a thousand times longer than modern man has existed?" He shook his head.

"Once," Wu interjected, "people might have said the same about flight, radio, or any number of other technologies. Invariably, there would have been a time in human history when even something as fundamental as the creation of fire would have been treated as strange and marvelous. This is no different."

"You say this like it isn't something incredible," Malcolm quipped. "How many other creatures on this planet can make fire? That level of tool use is virtually unprecedented in natural history, yet modern man takes it completely for granted. It changed the history of our species, but we treat it as a given. We've deluded ourselves into thinking we can control it."

A beat.

"You know what?" he added. "You're right. The genetic technology you employ here is the same. It represents a fundamental paradigm shift, a massive change in what mankind considers possible, yet you're still using this awesome power every bit as irresponsibly as you were twenty-five years ago. Like a child who's just found his father's gun."

Claire looked over her shoulder at Malcolm, and she frowned. Wu gave her an exasperated look.

I warned you, the geneticist mouthed.

Claire rolled her eyes.

"I'm well aware of your... opinions, Professor Malcolm," she said. "But trust me, we've accounted for all reasonable variables in this park. We aren't making the same mistakes twice."

"No, you aren't," Malcolm agreed. "You're making all new ones."

Grant shook his head and sighed. "Don't mind him," he advised. "If you get started on this now, we'll be here all day."

Malcolm snorted.

Wu nodded ruefully, remembering all too well what Ian Malcolm could be like. They entered the Hammond Creation Lab – the real lab, and not a stage show put on for the tourists. Trefoil biohazard symbols and harshly colored warnings written in several languages were plastered over stainless steel walls, along with reminders of basic hygiene and security protocol for all employees, from lowly custodians to the head scientists.

"Well, as you might have drawn from Ms. Dearing's comments..." Wu said after a few moments of silence, as they progressed deeper into the lab. "The work we've been doing here these past few months has broken a lot of new ground, although the foundations of it lie in the same basic techniques we were using in Jurassic Park twenty-five to thirty years ago."

"Could you be more specific...?"

"The protocols for repairing damaged gene sequences," Wu said, smiling cheerfully. "You're actually the one who convinced me it might be possible, Dr. Grant. Does rana ring a bell?"

Grant gave Wu an odd look. "Frogs?" He furrowed his brow for a moment. "You mean the breeding dinosaurs, don't you? The ones that were able to change genders because you'd introduced amphibian DNA into their genetic codes."

"Precisely!" Wu said, nodding. "At the time, I'd not put much thought into what kinds of DNA I used with what dinosaurs, since very little of the genome actually differs from species to species. Even between men and bacteria, there's barely more than a ten percent difference.

"But realizing that the inclusion of amphibian DNA enabled animals like the compys and raptors and maiasaurs to change from female to male in a single sex environment made me realize something... I suppose I'd always known that we couldn't truly call them real dinosaurs, but..."

"They were all new animals, in a way," Claire said, smiling enigmatically. "Genetic hybrids."

Wu nodded. Grant frowned, mildly perturbed.

Malcolm looked outright aghast.

"You, er, aren't suggesting what I think you're suggesting," he said weakly, seeming even paler in the buzzing lights. "Are you?"

"That we've made a hybrid dinosaur?" Wu replied. "We certainly are. Actually, I've been considered the possibilities of that for a while – since before Masrani bought out InGen, even."

"Jesus," Malcolm wheezed. His grip on the cane's handle looked tremulous, uneasy. "Jesus Christ. You crazy sons of bitches. You fucking insane bastards." He pointed a thin, bony finger accusingly at Wu and Claire, his face ashen and tightly drawn.

Grant couldn't blame Malcolm for this outburst. Hearing the confirmation left him dizzy, aghast, and he had to lean against the wall as he caught his breath. He felt a twinge in his chest, and he fancied for a moment that it would surely be some sort of twisted irony for him to die of a heart attack here and now, out of all the times, ways, and places that he could possibly go.

God damn.

He'd thought InGen had learned from their mistakes. He'd thought Masrani might be able to do what Hammond couldn't. And in a way, they did, he had. But now, now this...

Good Lord. Malcolm may have been full of hot air, but it seemed he might have been right about at least one thing. Science could show people how to do something, but it couldn't tell them NOT to do it.

He felt sick.

"A hybrid," he gasped, breathing in with shuddering gasps. "You... made..." He shook his head. "What, what on earth is it? What kind of dinosaur, what the hell kind of hybrid have you...?"

Claire frowned, her expression souring. Wu seemed highly perturbed by these reactions.

"Theropods," Wu said. "Two of them. Mostly, their genetic material comes from Majungasaurus, Giganotosaurus, Rugops, and Carnotaurus. Corporate wanted to create a new mascot for the park. Something bigger than the T-rex. Literally and figuratively."

"Jesus," Grant swore, feeling faint. "Giganotosaurus? Majungasaurus? Even that alone would be just... Jesus."

"Carnotaurus..." Malcolm muttered. "I think I ran into those on Site-B. They could camouflage themselves."

Grant looked at him. "Camouflage?"

"Change colors. Like chameleons, except much faster. Actually more like cephalopods in the extent of their capabilities."

Grant paled. He wheeled around, turning on Claire and Wu.

"What the hell kind of monsters are you bastards engineering?" he gaped. "And why?!"

Claire sniffed. "Indominus rex," she said. "That's the name we decided to go with."

"Indominus..." Malcolm muttered. "Tell me, what does that mean, exactly? I was never that good with Latin, but it sounds an awful lot like indomitable. You know, as in something that cannot be subdued or overcome. Untameable. Unconquerable."

"That is the general idea, yes," said Wu.

Grant and Malcolm shared a look.

"Still think this park will work?" said the latter flatly.

"Depends," said the former. "On how big these I-rexes have gotten, and how smart they've made the damn things. If it's just DNA from ordinary large theropods, then maybe all they'll have to do is scale their containment protocols up for a couple of animals larger and meaner than Big Rex. But if they've included anything from dromaeosauridae, or the like, then our only recourse will be to hope they're still small and relatively defenseless. But T-rex is manageable, and she's one of the meanest and smartest predators from the Mesozoic. Excluding the raptors, of course. As long as they didn't include anything that would make these I-rexes particularly intelligent..."

Wu cleared his throat nervously, and he refused to look either Ian or Alan in the eye.

"Oh, God, you didn't."

"Er, they haven't actually hatched yet..." Claire said. "So we have no way to gauge their intelligence, but..."

"I may have included simian DNA," Wu sheepishly confessed. "Er, not to say that I did, because I would have been breaking a number of laws if I actually used human genetic material in a cloned animal, eheh... but it's always a faint possibility."

Grant and Malcolm shared a look.

"Remind me, does Costa Rica have a standing military? Can they bomb this place into oblivion?"

"They don't. We'll probably need the USA, or else a South American country that does have a proper air force."

"Do you think we could get them to give this place the Hiroshima Special?"

"It would be violating a million different treaties, but we can certainly try."

"Alright, let's get the hell out of here. If we hurry, we might be able to stop them before anything goes wrong."

"Agreed."

With that, two bitterly antagonistic old men once more found themselves standing on common ground as some of the only sane bastards on an island full of dinosaurs. Arm in arm, they walked back to the helipad, headed for civilization and the nearest military powerhouse.

Claire and Wu could only stare dumbly at their retreating backs.

"Why does everyone act that way when we tell them about I-rex?"

"I haven't the foggiest."

A/N: Wow, this started out fairly serious, then ended on a silly punch line. How about that.

Also.

I love Jurassic Park. The movie, the books, all of it. I was one and a half, about, when the first film came out. I grew up in a world post-JP, attending elementary school around the time that Lost World and eventually JP III were still fresh in the cultural consciousness. I remember a big paper mache triceratops in the old Churchill library, the big dino-themed festivals(?) we did - with songs and plays, props of all sorts.

I can still remember "Deinonychus... dun, dun... with its terrible claw... deinonychus... dun, dun... with its powerful jaws..." from one of the many public domain song filks (like one set to the William Tell Overture, about a race between various dinos, I think?) that we did as part of those annual(?) productions. The memories are dim and faded in the details, but the nostalgia is strong. For a million different reasons, I think I probably grew up during a real rennaissance for dino-lovers. It was EVERYWHERE during my most formative years, which is probably why Jurassic Park in specific, and dinosaurs in general, are such a big thing to me.

That shit was practically my childhood.

Hell, I remember a conversation with one of my childhood friends in elementary school that was literally just him describing the scene in the second movie where Eddie Carr gets ripped in half by the two tyrannosaurs, long before I ever actually saw Lost World.

...Yes. The thing is, I actually read the Jurassic Park novel LONG before ever seeing the movie. (Though I didn't get a hold of Lost World until middle school, I think, yet that still means I probably read it before seeing the corresponding movie.) I was something of a bookworm, you see, and also more squeamish about blood on screen than some of my peers (I still am, to an extent). JP was a fucking scary movie to me, as a child – I didn't see it in its entirety, I imagine, until I was somewhere in my teens. In contrast, I know that I read the book back when I was still in elementary school.

(And that also gave me some nightmares, but what can you do)

So, when I think of Jurassic Park, I think almost more of the novels than I do the movies. I love the books, even if Malcolm is a pretentious asshole in them. I love the movies too (although the second one, in hindsight, is just a goddamn mess), but when it comes to what I have internalized as canon I tend to lean mostly towards the novels.

Which, I find, seems to actually be the opposite of most people. And I think that's sad, in a way, because if it weren't for the books the movies wouldn't exist at all – and who knows how many of the people working in paleontology, genetics, and all those related areas these days were originally inspired by the movies?

And with the news of Jurassic World coming out, I find myself getting drawn once more into that world, reawakening my love of dinosaurs. It's not the first resurgence of my passion for that stuff, and my love of the Jurassic Park series, but it might be the most relevant. And while my inner cynic anticipates disappointment, my inner child hopes for a return to form, to capture if only briefly the magic of the Summer of '93, when audiences the world over found themselves transported to a world where they glimpsed titans a hundred million years year old.

So I guess you could consider this one shot a go at reconciling the wildly divergent canons of movies and Crichton's original novels. Except not really, once it got past the first part.

But fuck the second movie. What it did to Sarah Harding. What it did to Sarah Harding.

Pro-tip: if you want to have an antiseptic presence? DON'T TOUCH THE DAMN ANIMALS. THAT IS BASIC BLOODY PROTOCOL. I AM NOT EVEN A FIELD BIOLOGIST AND THIS IS AS OBVIOUS TO ME AS THE SKY BEING A MISERABLE, DREARY GRAY.

IN THE BOOK SARAH IS ACTUALLY A GOOD SCIENTIST. AND A MORE LIKABLE KIND OF FEMINIST, TOO, IN HOW SHE IS GENUINELY SMART AND BADASS AND GETS ACTUAL SHIT DONE WHILE MALCOLM IS INFIRM AND DRUGGED UP ON PAINKILLERS, LIKE FUCKING ALWAYS, INSTEAD OF JUST GOING "ooh, you are so unreliable Ian. Imma run off to an island filled with dinosaurs and act like a complete dumbass and get myself killed (along with Nick OH IF ONLY) without telling you."

I really wouldn't mind the environmentalism angle of that movie if it hadn't been shoved down everyone's throats in the clumsiest, most awkward, most ham-handed way possible by characters who were more unlikable caricatures than actual relatable people. But Nick is the worst.

Fuck that asshole.

Also, the movie did not include Richard Levine, which disappointed me because he made such a good foil to Malcolm. I dunno, I just really like him. (Doc Thorne, too.)

I WAS RIGHT AND YOU WERE WRONG, anyone? :P

Updated: 5-27-15

TTFN and R&R!

– — ❤