WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the first season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, now streaming on Netflix.
When the body count starts piling in Netflix's Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, it only seems fitting given the franchise it belongs to. So, when a couple of camp rangers get chowed down by the dinosaurs or the pterosaurs bringing the rescue helicopter crashing to the ground, it really comes as no surprise. However, the real shocker arrives when the show appears to take the Jurrasic World MO a little too seriously, making sweet, shy Ben Pincus fall to his doom.
Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous follows a group of six teenagers-- Ben, Darius, Brooklyn, Yasmina, Kenji and Sammy -- who have been chosen to experience the wonder of living dinosaurs in a new adventure camp. Midway through the series, though, chaos rip threw the camp as the dinosaurs are on the loose, and because everyone already left, the kids have to evade a Carnotaurus and the deadly Indominus rex all on their own.
Every adult they manage to find on camp is either killed or eaten by the dinos, but the teen campers keep moving forward, desperate to reach the South docks and board the evacuation boats. They manage to hop on a monorail that is heading for their destination, but just when they think that the worst is over, they are attacked by a fleet of pteranodons who are intent on pushing the speeding train over the edge. To make matters even worse, there is a stopped train car that is lying right in their path.
At that moment, Ben crawls along the top of the speeding monorail, drops into the engineer’s car, re-routes the train away from the stopped car and saves the day. But the moment of triumph is shortlived as a pteranodon shatters the glass of the train car and knocks Ben out the window. Darius manages to catch his hand, and just when it feels like that he would lose his grip, he manages to grab Ben’s wrist with both hands. Then, out of nowhere, a pteranodon knocks right into Ben, causing the young boy to plummet from the tracks and into the darkness below as everyone else looks on in horror.
In the ongoing chaos, they also lose track of Bumpy, Ben’s ankylosaurus. While they want nothing more than to go back and look for both Ben and Bumpy, they are also afraid that it may end up being a futile journey if their friend died in the fall. Worse yet, it may cost everyone else their lives as well. So, with a heavy heart, they decide to keep moving forward to the South docks.
Even though many adults die in the series, Camp Cretaceous sticks to the fact that it’s a kid’s show, having all the killing take place offscreen. In Ben's scenario, however, for the story to just go ahead and bump off a kid seems unlikely. Though the series has been following the theme of Jurrasic World films, it didn’t go around killing the side lead characters like the obnoxious Kenji or the social media crazy Brooklyn who would have been the kind of character who dies first in the movies.
Fortunately, for those who were worried about Ben's fate, there was a big sigh of relief in the last few seconds of the episode after the screen goes dark. In the tease for Season 2, Bumpy appears, first sniffing the ground before hurrying to a still body that turns out to be Ben. And, just as viewers start to fear the worst, his fingers twitch and the credits start rolling.
When Ben wakes up, the likely conclusion he will reach is that the people he considered friends left him to die and even abandoned Bumpy in his absence. As the remaining campers are still in Jurassic World, after failing to catch the last ferry, it's obvious that there is going to be a reunion with Ben, but it won't necessarily be a happy one.
Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, Colin Trevorrow, Scott Kreamer and Lane Lueras, with Zack Stentz serving as a consulting producer. The series is streaming now on Netflix.