Jurassic World Dominion Ending Explained

  Bryce Dallas Howard and Dilophosaurus in Jurassic World Dominion
Photo: Universal Pictures This article contains Jurassic World Dominion spoilers.Something has survived. That was the tagline for the first sequel to Jurassic Park, The Lost World, which was released 25 years ago. Yet it can also apply to the Jurassic franchise as a whole, as this series has survived—thrived, even—across three decades and multiple generations of casts.And with Jurassic World Dominion now in theaters, we’ve reached the apparent culmination of the dino-action. Two eras of heroes, including Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), raptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), corporate executive-turned-dinosaur-rights activist Claire Reading (Bryce Dallas Howard), and Owen and Claire’s adopted and genetically engineered clone-daughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), have all come together to save the world from the rampaging menace of prehistoric locusts. And what a sight it is seeing all six of them standing shoulder to shoulder as a fearsome gigantosaurus bears down on them!

The ins-and-outs of the plot are pretty straightforward—everyone survives except for the dastardly Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who goes the way of Dennis Nedry inside the belly of a dilophosaurus. But what exactly was Dodgson’s evil Bisosyn up to with those damned locusts, and how did the DNA of young Maisie Lockwood hold the key to saving the world? We’re here to unpack those questions and more… How Did the Locusts Get Out of Hand?While the Jurassic World Dominion screenplay seems intentionally fuzzy about what Bisoyn-engineered locusts are up to in the new movie, the basics can still be inferred. As relayed by Ellie when she first recruits Alan into her scheme to infiltrate Biosyn, the locusts are a hybrid of modern locusts spliced with the DNA of prehistoric versions (I missed whether she said they originate from either the Triassic or Jurassic period).

Presumably, Biosyn and its dastardly CEO Lewis Dodgson—who’s grown his hair back and changed his face since appearing briefly in the 1993 movie—required Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) to create these creatures as a way to destroy their competitors’ crops. If you buy Biosyn’s genetically engineered seed, the locusts were designed to pass your farms over, and if you didn’t it would ravage them. However, instead of dying off after one generation, the locusts bred at an accelerated rate. Life finds a way, right?As a result, they are now destroying crops across the entire American breadbasket in the midwest, and if they’re left unchecked, in several years they will plunge the entire world into famine and destabilization. Ellie and Alan are out to prove Biosyn is responsible by finding genetic evidence that Dodgson brought back the prehistoric creatures in his lab.
How Were the Locusts Defeated?In information that’s, again, conveyed in a highly vague manner, we learn that the man who designed the locusts, Dr. Henry Wu, is convinced the blood of young Maisie Lockwood holds the secret to destroying the creatures. Maisie is a genetic clone of her mother Charlotte Lockwood, who was a colleague of Henry’s.Because Maisie’s DNA does not have the same genetic defects of Charlotte’s blood (more on that below), Henry believes that by analyzing her genetic code he can discover a way to create a DNA strand that will cause the locusts to die out in one generation. That appears to be his sales pitch anyway when Henry, as the proverbial Dr. Frankenstein of the Jurassic World movies and the guy who straight up shrugged off making creatures that led to mass slaughter in the 2015 film, begs the heroes to take him with them out of the Biosyn nature preserve before his creatures will presumably eat him alive. And, strangely, Malcolm’s pretty cool with this. The Malcolm of The Lost World would’ve personally fed this guy to raptors.

But Wu gets off light for helping engineer a near apocalyptic famine and is seen later releasing a new genetically altered giant locust into a wheat field, presumably with Maisie’s DNA tinkering in its system. The creature will breed with other locusts and within a generation they’ll die off. Or something.