What to Watch Verdict
Season 2 gives us a look at the dinosaurs in ways that would make Alan Grant jealous.
Pros
- +
🦕Bumpy? Bumpy.
- +
🦕All in on the season making humans the villains.
- +
🦕Yes to the girl squad that has formed between Yaz, Sammy and Brooke.
- +
🦕The dinosaurs are the real stars this season.
Cons
- -
🦕Where in the world are Dave and Roxie? Some serious time has passed on the island and no one's come back for these kids?
Check out our Camp Cretaceous Season 1 review here.
What's up, Camp Fam? Season 2 is finally here and the stakes are somehow higher than they've ever been. As a quick recap: the kids are still stuck on Isla Nublar, it's still filled with dinosaurs, and they all still just want to find a way home. The Indominous Rex is very dead (after finding herself monched by the mosasaurus), and Rexy's finding herself more and more antsy. Who can blame her? There are a lot of interlopers still chilling out on her island.
As it stands, the human count remains: Darius (Paul-Mikél Williams), Yasmina (Kausar Mohammed), Brooklynn (Jenna Ortega), Kenji (Ryan Potter), and Sammy (Raini Rodriguez). We watched Ben (Sean Giambrone) fall from the monorail at the end of last season, but know that he was alive as of the final credits of that chapter. But can he really survive an entire island full of creatures that can kill him in countless ways? After all, Bumpy's just a baby, and Ben's lost his hand sanitizer!
With Camp Cretaceous in shambles after the Indominous attack, the kids must do their best to find shelter in their inhospitable surroundings. Main Street's a no-go with Paddock 9 sitting with its doors wide open (which genius thought to put the T-Rex right next to the place on the island with the most foot traffic?), the labs are emptied, and many doors remain locked. So, the kids simply build their own.
Luckily for their little camp gang, Brooklynn has had to build shelter before for one of her videos. Whatever she had to build must have been darn impressive, given the new base of operations they manage to create for themselves in a tree. These kids needed to catch some kind of break, so I'm willing to suspend some disbelief on their carpentry skills.
But I would like to sincerely ask where in the world are Roxie (Jameela Jamil) and Dave (Glen Powell)? Given the home their able to build and some other key indicators outlining the passage of time, these kids have been on this island by themselves for a hot second. Roxie and Dave have had more than enough time to make it back to the main land and make approximately eighty phone calls about there being a group of small children trapped on an island that's run by a bunch of prehistoric behemoths. Their lack of involvement makes it apparent that there's simply no one coming for these kids. The children do manage to get a beacon out, but it's not answered in the way that they expect.
The real star of this season are the dinosaurs. That might seem like a silly statement, given the franchise it's adapted from, but Camp Cretaceous Season 2 seems to revere these creatures in a way no other entry into the Jurassic Park franchise has. Rexy and the raptors aren't the sole antagonists anymore. We see plenty of dinosaurs ruin the kids' days in their own right! Meanwhile, carnivores and omnivores are both treated with a complicated balance of love, fear, and respect. There's a watering hole sequence that may or may not have made me tear all the way up. We don't know.
"Critically," I'd probably call Season 1 the stronger chapter in the saga, but I don't say that in a way that's meant to imply the series falls into the trap of the Season 2 Slump. There's still plenty of mystique to this year's offering to the story, and you'll see some of these creature in ways we never have before. There's a little bit less of the shock and awe of Season 1 here, but most folks will have a fun time on the ride.
Season 2 of Camp Cretaceous will hit Neflix January 22nd, 2021.
