At the end of the story Grant rides in the helicopter with the children asleep on his shoulders. This is a far cry from the Grant at the beginning who essentially attacked a child with a raptor claw to prove a point. Early on Grant seems somewhat self conscious about his theory about dinosaurs evolving into birds, but at the end he watches the bird flying alongside them with a sense of contentment.
The information he’s gathered on the island supports his claims, and he won’t have to fight so hard to convince his doubting peers. His treatment of the child and his defensiveness about his theories are both behaviors he needs to stop. These actions also show how Grant is Do-er. He’s neither content to let the child or the others at his dig believe what they want, nor willing to adjust his own beliefs. He feels the need to bring them around to his point of view. Later, when he wants to see the science facilities up close, he pushes the safety rail back on the ride (albeit with some help). He calls out to the brachiosaur to bring it closer so he can feed it and to help convince Lex that not all the dinosaurs are scary.
We see Grant using a step-by-step, logical style to solve his problems. Tim’s stuck up a tree? Climb the tree and get him down. When he and the kids are blocked by the perimeter fence, Grant first checks to see if they can squeeze through the web, and when that doesn’t work, he climbs the fence.
Throughout the story Actions drive Decisions. In the opening scene, a worker is killed by a raptor, which leads to the investors deciding to pull their funding unless Hammond can get some outside experts to endorse the park. At the major turning point in the middle of the story, the T-Rex escapes. And in the final plot point, the survivors escape the island.
The park has implemented several ways to control the dinosaurs, and each way is shown to fail. The fences and the security get turned off, the dinosaurs can actually breed, etc. As the characters attempt to regain control of the park, their options narrow. They go from rebooting the control room, to flipping a breaker, to needing to get a single door locked, losing ground to the dinosaurs at each step until the only option is escape.
The story ends in Success because all the principle characters survive, and the dinosaurs are left in peace. The problem throughout the story is that the dinosaurs just want to “do what they do,” to quote Grant, and the people running the park have made them into a theme park attraction. The moment the T-Rex accidentally saves Grant, Ellie, and the kids is presented as a heroic moment. The main theme swells. I think this is the outcome we’re supposed to want. Dinosaurs are too awesome to be in cages; the park should have failed, and I think part of Grant watching that flying bird, a symbol of freedom, is him agreeing.
Despite all that’s happened, Grant seems content at the end. The children sleep peacefully on his shoulders, and Ellie is smiling at them.
Most of the discussion in this thread has centered around the topic of which domain the OS Throughline belongs in. I started in Situation, then changed my mind to Activity. Now, I’ve changed it back.
Like Jhull said, dinosaurs in modern times is the source of inequity. At least it’s something close to that. I think if the dinosaurs simply exist on the island and aren’t coming into contact with people and the modern world, there isn’t a problem (barring an ethical one, but that’s a different story). The story can end in Success because humans and dinosaurs are separated at the end.
The Situation is that dinosaurs have been brought back from extinction and put in an amusement park. This has implications for the Present. Yesterday, the world was as it has always been. Today, we’re sharing it with dinosaurs. Under Present we see issues of Work/ Attempt and Attract/ Repel. We see strong examples of these thematic issues throughout the story. The mere idea of seeing living breathing dinosaurs is extremely attractive, but Malcolm is repulsed by the hubris required to bring them back. But the central issue in the plot is the question of whether those running the park can actually do the work or attempted something beyond their skills. Has their reach exceeded their grasp? In the story we’re shown that while the scientists were able to create the dinosaurs, their ability to control them is merely a failed Attempt.
Characters constantly Attempt to do things they’re ill suited for, which causes further problems. Nedry attempts to steal the embryos and not only wrecks the park in the process, but fails anyway and gets himself killed. Ellie’s attempts to figure out why the Tricerotops is sick delays the tour and leads to the trucks stalling in front of the T-Rex paddock instead of closer to the Visitor’s Center. Malcolm nearly gets himself killed (and does poor Gennaro) when he attempts to help Grant distract the T-Rex. Tim attempts to climb the fence but gets electrocuted because he’s not fast enough. They reboot the control room in an attempt to bring the park back online, but this shuts down the fences around the raptors and allows them to escape.
Problems in the OS are caused by Protection. Ellie says it herself: “These are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they’re in, and they’ll defend themselves–violently, if necessary.” The dinosaurs aren’t malevolent; they’re just animals. “They do what they do.” They’ve been thrust into an unfamiliar environment, poked, prodded, shocked, and gawked at. Dogs chase cars because they see them as a threat to their territory, and it turns out, so do T-Rex’s. From the other side, all the security and fences and safeguards is to protect people from dinosaurs, and the park’s inability to get that stuff right causes problems. After the park goes offline, their attempts to protect their interests only cause more problems. Rebooting the control room trips the breaker and releases the raptors. Reactivating the perimeter fence nearly gets Grant and the kids killed.
They’d have been better off doing nothing, Inaction. Sometimes the best solution is to just back away. After the T-Rex attack, Grant and the kids should have just waited in that tree to be found by Ellie. Instead of trying to get the park back online, the characters should have simply hunkered down and waited it out, since it’s implied the dinosaurs will die if not fed special food. In the end the characters run out of ways to protect themselves and have no option but to do nothing as the raptors attack, and hey, it all somehow works out. Finally, once the people leave the island and the dinosaurs and humans are no longer trying to protect themselves from each other, there is no longer an inequity.
You can see how Grant’s problem is Protection as well. In Grant’s first scene, he’s troubled by how technology will interfere with paleontology. When his bird theory is challenged, he protects it. When the child doubts the raptor’s viciousness, Grant ruthlessly comes to it’s defense and probably traumatizes the kid. There are several instances where it’s brought up how living dinosaurs will effect his profession. Grant is motivated to protect Lex and Tim even though he doesn’t like kids.
