Chaos Theory’ Finale and Ben’s Fate, Explained

[This story contains major spoilers from Jurassic World: Chaos Theory series finale.]

When Jurassic World: Chaos Theory executive producer and co-showrunner Scott Kreamer was first approached about doing a follow-up series to DreamWorks Animation Television’s successful Camp Cretaceous, his initial instinct was to pass. 

“I was pretty exhausted, and [executive producer] Aaron [Hammersley] and I both said, ‘That was a lot of fun, but let’s move on,’” Kreamer recalls of the show’s fourth and final season. “Our executive, Maria Crenna, has quoted me as saying, ‘Well, good luck with whatever schmuck you find to run that thing.’”

As Kreamer remembers it, there weren’t even dailies for Jurassic World Dominion to help paint a picture for Chaos Theory’s timeline, locations and events. Still, he agreed to hear Universal’s pitch, with two people from the studio over Zoom using photos and key art to set the stage for the then-upcoming installment. It would be enough to spark something for Kreamer. 

“They said the Department of Fish and Wildlife was in charge of rounding up the dinosaurs in America, and I just started thinking, as your mind wanders in one of those giant Zooms,” the showrunner recalls. “Maria, who was on the Zoom, texted me and said, ‘You have an idea. I can see it on your face.’”

That seed would birth Chaos Theory, initially a 16- to 20-episode pitch that became a 39-episode all-ages animated conspiracy thriller set five years after Camp Cretaceous. The show’s journey culminates with the final nine episodes streaming today on Netflix, and serves as a milestone virtually unheard of in modern TV. Across two series and upwards of 90 episodes, Kreamer and his team have been able to give the Nublar Six — a group of teens who survived Jurassic World’s 2015 Isla Nublar incident and the 2016 Mantah Corp incident — a sweeping coming-of-age arc. 

“That’s kind of unheard of now, and it’s been a dream,” says Kreamer, while crediting Colin Trevorrow, the animators, and writing team — including story editors Josie Campbell and Bethany Armstrong Johnson — on Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory. “You don’t normally get to tell these stories in kids’ animation. You don’t get to have characters like Kenji or Ben from day one on Camp Cretaceous, and see where they end up. You don’t get that kind of runway. And while shows like ours are out there, many more people get to see ours thanks to this giant franchise we’re wrapped up in.”

Below, Chaos Theory’s executive producer Kreamer and story editor Armstrong Johnson discuss landing the plane for the Nublar Six, weaving in Dominion’s events and characters, and what could lie ahead for Jurassic World’s animated future — if Kreamer has anything to say about it. 

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Landing the Plane on the Nublar Six

Johnson says she, Kreamer and Hammersley discussed Chaos Theory’s final season “paralleling the very first season of Camp Cretaceous” as a very condensed story that explores when the tension and stakes are highest and everything’s up against them; who these people are and how they’ve changed over nine seasons. It also let the team “make this the most Jurassic season that we possibly can,” the story editor adds. “Jurassic Park doesn’t take place over a long period of time. A lot of the movies have this condensed timeline, so it felt cool to be able to be like: This season is our movie.”

Characters like Kenji Kon (Darren Barnet) and Sammy Gutierrez (Raini Rodriguez) — goofy and fun in Camp Cretaceous — “cut to the core of who they are, being a little bit more vulnerable with each other” as they explore the ways they are not alone as someone related to Camp Creatious antagonist Daniel Kon and someone with her own very complicated family relationship. “Out of anybody in the group, the two of them have more of a challenge with: Are we destined to become like our parents, no matter how hard we try or are we able to break out of that?” says the story editor. “It’s being able to show that sometimes your parents are going to be great and sometimes life deals you a hand where your parents aren’t, but how can you navigate that? Can you take what is important to take from them, but also leave behind the other things, and find the people in your life who understand where you’re coming from and can support you in that? ”

For Yaz Fadoula (Kausar Mohammed) and Sammy, who split ahead of season four, they “were always endgame because they’re soulmates,” but they’re also “not defined by whatever relationship they have or whatever relationship people want them to have.” Johnson adds, “The trauma and difficulties they faced with Brooklynn were highlighting issues within their own relationship. You have pinnacle moments in your relationships or life, and how you react is going to be different than how somebody else reacts. Sometimes that’s going to break people apart. In this particular case, they needed their own time to figure out how they felt and whether they could navigate this. It was definitely about their relationship, but it was also about them as individuals — coming back together, being stronger, understanding their viewpoints and better ways to communicate.”

For Darius (Paul-Mikél Williams), there was no letting Brooklynn (Kiersten Kelly) get away with some of her behavior “because he deeply respects who she is as a person, and she respects him enough to take that criticism.” But for a duo who grappled with an unreciprocated confession of romantic love, “one of the things that was important was to sit in a bit of uncertainty and not necessarily know exactly what these feelings are or what they mean, or what they can look like in the future, because there’s so much more life to experience and more to discover about yourself.” Alongside wanting to represent Darius respecting Brooklynn’s boundaries, the team wanted to leave “a little bit open to interpretation and a little bit open to the future of what could become.”

A Second Fake-Out Death

“Whether there was a time jump or not, we always knew we wanted to see how this whole journey affected everybody,” explains Kreamer. “When Colin Trevorrow was in the writers room as we started breaking season four, we had many far-ranging ideas and as we started writing, we landed on Kenji almost becoming caretaker; seeing Darius doing what he’s always done in putting the dinosaurs first; having Brooklynn come back into the fold, though we definitely made her work for it.” Ben Pincus’ (Sean Giambrone) role then would be to, once again, test the team’s individual and collective growth after he experiences a life-threatening injury in the Biosyn Valley in the middle of a giant fire.  

“Ben almost didn’t make it. Bethany and I had many, many conversations about Ben’s arc. Because Ben did get the band, Smoothie and Bumpy, back together. If the show wasn’t ostensibly aimed at kids, as some of the people I answer to consider it, it probably would have ended differently,” he tells THR. “All of our scripts and outlines go up the chain of command, and then a strong concern started making its way back to me. Not that anyone said, ‘You can’t do this.’ If we pushed, maybe they would have. But at the end of the day, these kids deserved a happy ending, whether it’s Sammy and Yaz, or Brooklynn, while still leaving it open that they have their whole lives ahead of them.”

Ben’s last-minute save is revealed during the show’s final minutes as a near-death experience where his heart did at one point stop on the table, “so we, in our minds, could say, he did die,” explains Kreamer. It was also his second save, as the executive producer shares that he tried to kill Ben in the first season of Camp Cretaceous, but was, now gratefully, told no. “As we were recording those last episodes, Sean was the only one who knew he made it. We also didn’t want the actors to know that Brooklynn was alive. In season one, Sean was the only one who got a heads-up, and no one else did. In fact, we would do a kind of virtual writers’ room, and we started finding crew members all of a sudden sliding into the virtual writers’ room.

“So [for Chaos Theory], Bethany wrote a whole whiteboard that said Ben died. She had a whole document because our crew started peeking in on us,” Kreamer continues. “And boy, when that last script went out that she did such a beautiful job on — from the time that [Ben’s girlfriend] Gia gets out of the car and Ben comes out of the car, there’s like seven pages, and Bethany’s just writing, ‘But we don’t know…’ and ‘He was such a wonderful guy.’ She teased it out.”

Franchise Crossover Fates 

One of the exciting aspects of writing the animated Jurassic installment was how much it is interwoven with its live-action counterparts. “Having Colin in the writers room with us before every season kept the story surprises and re-plotting to a minimum, which is always a bonus,” Kreamer says. Trevorrow and Universal, also “pretty much had our backs the whole way through and when we did see things differently, they always heard us out and, in most cases, let us go in the direction that we wanted.”

That meant, with season four being intrinsically tied to Dominion, Chaos Theory’s final nine episodes were able to weave their plot and characters into the events of the movie. “Sometimes happenings in the show have a direct effect on the goings-on in the film, and vice versa. I was pretty stoked how we were able to expand on the influence that [Adam Harrington’s Lewis] Dodgson and Biosyn had on the Amber Clave Market in Malta, as well as the laser assassin training that the Atrociraptors went through at Biosyn that our characters head into the season intent on stopping,” he says. 

Within Chaos Theory’s larger arc, there were also appearances by characters like Dichen Lachman’s Soyona Santos, whom Kreamer knew he wanted to get into the show. “When that became a reality, it heavily influenced the entire trajectory of our story, as did Dichen’s amazing performance,” he says. “To be able to spend even more time with some of the super cool animals from the films, like the Pyroraptor, Therizinosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, was a real gift as well.”

But Dr. Wu’s (Greg Chun) reappearance in season four arguably speaks to just how much Chaos Theory earned its place alongside Trevorrow’s live-action installments. “When Scott and I saw an early cut of Dominion, it felt like Dr. Wu’s story was written for us,” Armstrong Johnson reflects. “He had had that difficult relationship with Brooklyn in Camp Cretaceous, and seeing where he went — realizing the consequences of his own actions at work on a global scale — he’s the perfect mirror for Brooklynn as a cautionary tale; for Brooklyn needing to see that sometimes what you do has these overarchingly massive consequences, but there’s also a chance for redemption.”

For the story editor, bringing back Wu presented a chance to not only see him recognize his shortcomings but also get a second chance alongside Brooklynn by having the Nublar Six bail him out of a situation. “I feel it’s where we are in the world a little bit, and it’s not fair that we’re putting all this pressure on the younger generations to fix all our problems that have come up. [Older people] need to recognize where we’ve messed up and be able to bring people into our fold and say let’s figure out the solution together,” she tells THR. “In his own mind, there are a lot of things that he was doing for the greater good, and things went in a different direction than he had wanted to. We’re seeing that in reality now, too. There are people who created AI and are asking, ‘What have I done?’ That’s a powerful narrative to see.” 

The Future of Jurassic World’s Animated Universe

While Chaos Theory has inherent connections to the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, Kreamer says fans shouldn’t expect the same for the latest installment, Rebirth.  

“When we started on this, I’m not sure I got to read the Rebirth script. I don’t think we even knew about Rebirth. That was months after we finished writing the show,” recalls Kreamer. “I always knew, after we got the lowdown on Dominion, that’s where I saw the series ending. To bookend it with two survival stories was always the idea.”

But after “a job of a lifetime,” bringing something to the screen as part of a universe he’s loved since its novelization, could there be more in the dinosaur franchise’s ongoing universe with or without the Nublar Six?  

“Given the time gap between Chaos Theory and Rebirth, there is plenty of runway to finish off a Nublar Six trilogy that leads into the most recent movie. That said, it would have to be a story worth telling, one that does justice to these characters as well as the franchise as a whole. You wouldn’t want to do it just to do it. But I’ve definitely got some ideas in that regard,” he tells THR. “And as far as a new set of characters in a new story set in this dino-world, I’ve got some ideas about that as well.”

Jurassic World: Chaos Theory season four is streaming now on Netflix.