Jurassic Park

Harding, Sattler, and Gennaro get ready to head back to the lodges in the storm. Meanwhile, the power goes out briefly in the control room but turns back on moments later to Arnold’s relief. He begins to wonder where Nedry went off to and sends guards to check for him. Nedry is the only person who knows how to get the system up and running again, as he seems to have messed with the code in such a way that Arnold is unable to fix it. Muldoon comes back to the control room and tells Arnold that the Jeep is gone.

Nedry is speeding through the jungles of the park on his way to the dock. All of a sudden, he comes to a concrete wall. He spins frantically and manages to avoid hitting it, realizing he took a wrong turn and is lost. Nedry panics and gets out of the Jeep to see where he is. He hears a soft hooting sound in the forest which he at first thinks is an owl; soon, however, he realizes it is actually a dilophosaurus, the same type of dinosaur that the tour group saw earlier. With its v-crested head, it snaps its neck and spits on Nedry. Clueless to what is happening, Nedry is disgusted and even touches the venom. It happens again, this time hitting his neck, and Nedry’s hand and neck begin to “tingle and burn” (218). He runs for the Jeep but foolishly turns back to check if the dinosaur is behind him and gets sprayed in the eyes. Instantly blinded, Nedry begins stumbling around and is suddenly stabbed in the gut by the predator. He looks down to find himself “holding his own intestines in his hands” (219). Nedry prays for death as he is picked up by the head in the dinosaur’s jaw.

Hammond and Wu sit safely in Hammond’s bungalow enjoying a large meal. Wu ponders the nature of Hammond and whether it was Hammond’s faults that led to the current state of things. Wu sees Hammond as someone skilled in self-deception and in convincing others to believe his lies. Currently, Hammond seems unwilling to admit the fact that the park and the people in it are in serious danger.

Hammond begins preaching about his reasons for pursuing money instead of helping mankind with his technology. He insists that companies that seek to help others inevitably end up losing money, as governments and insurance companies force them to lower the prices of their products. Entertainment, on the other hand, knows no limits; as Hammond puts it, “If I charge five thousand dollars a day for my park, who is going to stop me?” (223). Hammond even plans to start building two more Jurassic Parks, in Japan and Europe, and reveals that his only concern at present is not living to “see the joy on [children’s] faces” (222) when the parks are finally functioning and open.

Meanwhile, the guard returns to the control room and tells Arnold and Muldoon that Nedry was seen going into the garage a few minutes prior, and Muldoon realizes that Nedry took the Jeep.

Down in the park, Harding, Ellie, and Gennaro encounter a herd of apatosauruses. Harding explains that they are a confident and rarely fearful dinosaur, and there is no concern that they will attack. Sure enough, they pass with no problems and the Jeep continues down the road. They do not get far before a herd of compys dashes across the road. Harding wonders where they could be going as they do not usually travel at night. He explains that they follow the smell of dying or dead prey, and Ellie suggests following them. Harding obliges.

Tim wakes up in the Land Cruiser with his head pounding. He is on his back against the passenger window of the flipped vehicle. As the car rocks back and forth, Tim slowly looks out the window to find himself stuck 20 feet high in a tree. Tim manages to crawl out the rear door, but the branch he steps on breaks, and he falls several feet, landing on his stomach on a large branch. He looks up to see the Land Cruiser swaying directly above him, and moments later it begins careening towards him at lightning speed. Tim lets go, hits the ground, and rolls out of the way of the car just in time, though he is badly hurt. He goes back to the main road to find the other vehicle upside down and everyone gone.Meanwhile, Wu goes to the fertilization room to check which dinosaurs species might have frog DNA and finds that only the species that are known to be breeding have it.

Tim finds Lex curled up inside a drainage pipe. She has her baseball glove in her mouth and is banging her head against the pipe, clearly in a state of shock and fear. She calls for Dr. Grant, who thankfully happens to be nearby.

Meanwhile, Ed Regis hides between a couple of boulders near the road. He thought about going back for the children, but convinced himself there was nothing he could do. To his horror, he discovers a leech is crawling into his cheek. He tears it away and finds himself covered in several more. He hears Lex calling for Dr. Grant and realizes some of them are still alive, so he begins walking towards them, but heads in the wrong direction.Lex is almost unharmed aside from a bruise, but Tim has a broken nose and several other wounds. Grant has a slash down his chest but seems to be otherwise alright. Unable to fully grasp the fact that he is still alive, Grant wonders why the Tyrannosaurus had not chosen to kill them all. He hears a cough and runs over with the children to find Regis standing against a tree in fear. Just then, an infant T-rex emerges from the trees, walking “with the clumsy gait of a young animal” (241). Regis freezes and remains silent, and the T-rex passes right by him. Grant and the children watch in silence from afar, and Regis moves too soon. The T-rex comes back and swings its head at Regis, knocking him to the ground. Regis begins yelling at it and pounding on its snout, but the T-rex just thinks it is a fun game of playing with its prey. It knocks Regis down several times and then pounces one final time and devours him as Grant and the children look on. The T-rex turns and spots them; Grant takes the children’s hands and they run.

Harding, Sattler, and Gennaro arrive at the lodge. Meanwhile, inside the control room, Hammond has learned that the children are stuck out in the park and is livid with Arnold. Arnold remains calm in the face of Hammond’s anger, believing him to be “like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen” (245). They tend not to understand the technical issues and just demand that things get done. He knows he needs to stay calm, because now that Nedry is gone, it will be Arnold’s job to sift through the code and find the error causing the power outage. Since the code contains “more than half a million lines of code, most of it undocumented, without explanation” (246) he has a daunting task ahead of him.

Muldoon takes the Jeep to go find the rest of the group, accompanied by Gennaro. As the two continue up the road, they spot one of the Land Cruisers on its side. They see the second one a distance away, underneath the tree. The two men hear wheezing coming from the trees and think it might be a dinosaur. Muldoon goes to investigate and finds Malcolm lying there. His ankle is twisted and bloody, and he has wrapped his belt around his leg as a tourniquet. Malcolm is close to death, and they decide to take him back to the lodge immediately and put off finding the children until afterward. Muldoon tells Gennaro that he is going to be the one to tell Hammond his grandchildren are missing.

Gennaro shares the news with Hammond, who reacts with his usual façade of calm confidence. He is certain the children will be found and brought back promptly. Hammond downplays the problems even when his grandchildren’s lives are in danger, showing the full extent of his delusion. In the control room, Arnold tries to dig into the code while Wu watches.

Meanwhile, Muldoon goes to Sattler’s room to ask for her help in treating Malcolm. He explains that Grant and the children are still in the park, and Sattler instantly feels concerned. She keeps her cool, though, remembering, “If Grant was out in the park, well… what better person to get them safely through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert?” (259)

Grant and the children are alive and walking through the Tyrannosaurus enclosure, hoping not to be spotted by the T-rex. Lex gets tired and asks Grant to carry her, to which he begrudgingly obliges. Tim starts telling Grant that his parents are getting divorced, his mother has a new boyfriend, and the future is full of uncertainty. He asks Grant about his family, to which Grant replies that his wife died a long time ago. Tim also wants to know if Grant is going to marry Sattler now, and Grant laughs, replying that she already has plans to marry someone else. Grant starts getting tired from carrying Lex and they decide they need to find a place to rest for a while. He climbs a tree to look around the area, and sees that they are actually quite close to the edge of the forest. He spots a small shelter on the other side of the fence and moat and takes the children there. Tim is afraid to climb the fence, but manages to conquer his fear and gets over, with help from Lex bullying him and calling him afraid. They hear the T-rex roar in the distance, and Grant fibs and tells Lex it is on the other side of the park. Finally reaching the shelter, all three of them pass out on a pile of hay almost instantly. Grant feels a sense of warmth and purpose for the children now, partially due to never having been able to have his own, and partially due to having gone through several traumatic experiences with them in a single night.

Arnold finally cracks the code and resets it, restoring power to the park. Meanwhile, Gennaro goes to see how Malcolm is doing, and Malcolm is high on morphine and telling jokes with Harding. His leg is infected, but he is in good spirits and happy to tell the story of being picked up, shaken, and thrown by the T-rex. He explains that he believes he only survived because “the big chap’s heart wasn’t in it” (271); the dinosaur had its mind on other prey. Gennaro asks Harding for help herding the animals, and Malcolm mentions something about making sure the “Malcolm Effect” (271) does not happen.. Ellie tells Gennaro to send for a helicopter to get Malcolm off the island.

Muldoon goes out into the park with a crew to repair a fence torn down by a fallen tree. One of the crew members sees what appears to be car lights unmoving in the distance, but Muldoon ignores him. A few minutes later, they see evidence that the T-rex is in the sauropod enclosure, and again Muldoon says they will deal with it later because they lack the proper weaponry. Back in the control room, Gennaro asks Arnold what Malcolm meant by the Malcolm Effect. Arnold draws on a metaphor: He compares Malcolm’s chaos models to a drop of water running down a finger. It may go along any part of the finger, but it will go down the finger—not up. Arnold notes that “Malcolm’s models tend to have a ledge, or a steep incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly” (274). This is what he calls the Malcolm Effect, and it implies inherent instability in the system. In this case, Jurassic Park is headed for a steep incline in which it falls into total chaos. Arnold arrogantly states that he and Hammond disregarded Malcolm’s predictions, feeling that computer models cannot predict nature: “Living systems are not like mechanical systems. Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable. But they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the verge of collapse” (276). Arnold insists that Malcolm does not understand this key difference between nature and computers; further, Arnold believes that nature is meant to have instabilities. As a result, he sees the instabilities in Jurassic Park as necessary and normal.

Grant wakes up, having slept through the night. He hears Lex giggling and finds her feeding a baby triceratops, which Lex names Ralph. They see hadrosaurs nesting and eating across a lush landscape, and “the scene [is] so peaceful Grant [finds] it hard to imagine any danger” (284). Grant begins waving in front of a sensor, but nothing happens, and he begins to worry that they still do not have power. They hear a large animal roar in the distance. Lex smells something like rotten garbage, believing it to be the stench of the carnivore, and suddenly the hadrosaurs begin running for the trees. The T-rex charges the hadrosaurs and duckbills, ignoring the humans, and Grant and the children make a run for it. Moments later, they begin stampeding towards Grant and the children. They become surrounded by chaos, a swirl of giant limbs and clouds of dust. They manage to reach a tree and climb it to safety.

In the control room, Arnold resets the system to get the phones back on. The entire room goes black. Thirty seconds later, the computer’s memory is clear, and Arnold turns the system back on. The computer screens indicate the stampede, and Arnold and Gennaro watch on in horror. When it finally ends, Arnold instructs Gennaro to go tell Muldoon to find out “how bad it is” (290).

Grant looks down to find a peaceful hadrosaur munching leaves in the tree just below his foot. It seems not to see Grant, and he wonders if, like the Tyrannosaurus the previous night, it can only see things in motion.

Grant and the children climb down the tree and reach a shelter. He finds plans for the park, which he studies. It indicates that there is a raft at the dock, which they plan to use to return to the lodge. They reach the dock and find a blow-up raft deflated, as well as the adult T-rex asleep beside a tree. After barely evading an attack from the T-rex, the current carries the raft towards the lodge, and Grant again passes out from exhaustion.