Warning: SPOILERS for Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Season 2 are in play. If you haven’t watched the latest adventures of the Nublar Five, you’ve been warned.
When you throw out a character name like “The Broker,” any series that’s part of the 2024 TV schedule, or any run of shows for that matter, is going to perk up some ears. But when you use that name to invoke a mystery in something like Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, it becomes an opportunity in the mind of a fan. With such a rich lineup of antagonists in the Jurassic Park Universe, that imposing name could have belonged to anyone.
Sure enough, this season made my jaw drop when revealing who this mysterious figure of power happened to be. Which meant that when I sat down with Chaos Theory’s EP Scott Kreamer, it was time to ask him to walk me through how Jurassic World Dominion inspired this particular choice. And yes, the person we’re about to discuss is from that very movie, which only makes this season’s cliffhanger all the more exciting.
Early Jurassic World Dominion Screenings Factored Into Jurassic World: Chaos Theory’s Big Reveal
While discussing Jurassic World: Chaos Theory’s Season 2 story development, I took some of the time allotted to speak with Kreamer during the press day to talk about how the overarching story for the first two seasons came to be. Dropping only months apart, these 20 episodes of Chaos Theory are pretty tightly woven together into the fabric of the Jurassic saga.
As it turns out, the genesis of some of Chaos Theory’s more exciting Season 2 plot points came from one of the perks of working on a Jurassic World project. With that in mind, here’s what Scott Kreamer told CinemaBlend his early Jurassic World Dominion screening experience, and how it helped:
When we were breaking Season One, we were definitely looking ahead … [it’s] when we got to see a couple early screenings of [Jurassic World] Dominion before it was released. And that's when we seized upon the events, and some of the characters from that. We were definitely keeping it all in mind. They weren't written as one piece, but obviously we knew where we were ending Season One, and it was fun to keep the train going into Season Two.
Scott Kreamer, CinemaBlend, 2024
Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Season 1's ending saw Brooklynn (Kiersten Kelly) being revealed as alive and still fighting the good fight for dinosaur liberation. That quest took her to some very interesting places in Season 2, especially when she ends up tracking down “The Broker” in Dubai. Revealing to the world that this shadowy figure was actually Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman) from Jurassic World Dominion, the threads between this DreamWorks Animation midquel and the 2022 trilogy capper started to tie together even tighter.
That much was present in my conversation with Scott Kreamer, as his mention of director Colin Trevorrow’s big send off allowed me to ask what inspired him to bring Soyona into the Chaos Theory mix. Seizing on that story as he had previously alluded, Kreamer continued to describe Dominion’s influence as follows:
I was halfway to answering the question when I realized we were in the non-spoilery part. So yeah, it was COVID times, we were in our masks, and we're in a screening room over at Universal. And Bethany Armstrong Johnson, our head writer, and I just sort of came together after the screening, and it was just like, ‘We gotta get that character into the show.’ It was such an intriguing character, such a great performance. And so luckily we had Colin’s Blessing, and then when they reached out and Dichen agreed to do the Voice. She's such a wonderful actress, and a better person than she is an actress. It's really exciting, and I think it elevates the whole thing.
Scott Kreamer, CinemaBlend, 2024
Having spoken with Dichen Lachman in the past, I can definitely tell you she’s a fan of the Jurassic Park Universe. So hearing Scott Kreamer call her a better person than a villainous actor further reinforced the experience I’d personally had speaking with the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes actor. With that on the table, we were able to dig more into how Soyona Santos was expanded from her Jurassic World Dominion appearance into the current big bad of Chaos Theory.
How Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Expanded Dichen Lachman’s Sonoya Santos
For everyone who saw Jurassic World Dominion, the character of Sonoya Santos may have come off as a mere smuggler who can always deliver for a price. But there’s a lot to the character that hasn’t been seen on screen just yet. Thanks to my conversation with Scott Kreamer, it reminded me of the time I learned those facts for myself.
Speaking with Dichen Lachman back in 2022 on behalf of Jurassic World Dominion’s home entertainment release, I learned just how much of Soyona Santos that the Altered Carbon vet came up with in her own process. Here’s part of Sonoya’s backstory, as told to CinemaBlend in 2022:
I hadn’t had a chance to read the script at that point, but I started thinking about how can I really ground this character? So I wrote this elaborate backstory about how she grew up in Siberia … and her mother ended up smuggling dinosaur bones, which is actually, like, a thing. … She was extremely wealthy, boarding school educated, but she came from this interesting place. … What I wrote, you could make a movie by itself.
Dichen Lachman, CinemaBlend, 2022
Reading that back also makes Soyona’s introduction in Season 2, Episode 5 - “Troubled Waters” all the more exciting, as she references a dig that her mother was on in her travels! Seeing Dichen Lachman’s morally gray character revealed as “The Broker” made the fan in me smile, especially with such a juicy callback to deep lore. That sort of decision showed an impressive degree of tying this animated saga into the live-action adventures, without making too much of a deal about it.
That’s as good a time as any to flip back to my time with Scott Kreamer, as I was curious if his early access to the big Jurassic World trilogy finale would have given him a chance to help tweak Soyona’s cinematic presence. Since the specific Chaos Theory Season 1 notes that Colin Trevorrow shared about the Nublar Six’s path to growing up proved that degree of trust between series EPs, there could have been room for some changes here and there.
But as you’ll read from Scott Kreamer’s continued remarks, that wasn’t a concern at all. Citing Jurassic World Dominion’s own development process, Scott Kreamer did highlight the following specifics when it came to expanding Soyona Santos for Chaos Theory Season 2:
Oh gosh, no. They were in post-production by the time we got involved. But, you know, what was great is this is the character that Colin originated, [that] he and Dichen created, with his writing and her performance. So we felt very secure we knew we had a handle on the character. And even some of our backstory that got into the show was based on meetings that the two of them had had together when discussing a backstory. So that was cool. But when we wanted to expand it, whether it's her being a painter, or anything else that we expanded from the original, Colin and Dichen, and everyone else got right on board … it flowed very easily.
Scott Kreamer, CinemaBlend, 2024
While there’s still no word about whether or not Jurassic World: Chaos Theory will be renewed for Season 3, reintroducing Soyona Santos is a good step to take for the future of this series. As the plot is meant to show events set months before Jurassic World Dominion kicks off, whatever twists and turns happen next could lean heavily on what’s been said, but not shown. That’s especially true for Dichen Lachman’s character, as there’s an entire event mentioned in the 2022 film that we still haven’t seen come to life.
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see if the dino-fueled mayhem returns to push the story along. If you haven’t watched either season of Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, or want to go back and see what you may have missed the first time, it’s quite simple. All you have to do is use your Netflix subscription to stream these current chapters, in the hopes that we’ll see more heading our way sooner rather than later.
