Although it’s canonically possible for Jurassic World: Dominion to bring back Jurassic Park’s Dennis Nedry, this doesn’t mean that the decision would be a good choice for the blockbuster franchise. By all accounts, the creators of Jurassic World: Dominion want to end the Jurassic World trilogy right. After 2015’s Jurassic World received a mixed-to-positive welcome, its 2018 sequel was a misfire that many critics and fans alike found far-fetched and too overlong to be fun.
However, Jurassic World: Dominion looks set to sort out this issue on two fronts. For one thing, bringing back Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow means the movie should be able to recapture the tone that made the 2015 hit a bigger success with critics than its sequel. Additionally, bringing back the original Jurassic Park’s Ellie Sattler, Alan Grant, and Ian Malcolm gives Jurassic World: Dominion an even closer canon connection to the original Jurassic Park trilogy than 2015’s Jurassic World boasted.
The news that Jurassic Park’s Dodgson will return in Jurassic World: Dominion could be met with reasonable suspicion by franchise fans. The final Jurassic World movie doesn’t need to bring back every nostalgic supporting star from the original 1993 blockbuster, and doing so could lean too heavily into the wrong kind of fan service. For example, fan-favorite Dennis Nedry (played by the irreplaceable Wayne Knight) never dies on-screen and, canonically, his remains aren’t encountered by anyone. This means that Jurassic World: Dominion could reveal that Nedry somehow survived on the island and has been engineering the events of the Jurassic World series from behind the scenes. However, it almost goes without saying that Jurassic World: Dominion shouldn’t take this route, even if it’s not canonically impossible.
For one thing, revealing that Nedry had the strength to fight off a Dilophosaurus—without his glasses, while trapped inside a confined space, no less—would be a bizarre revelation. Furthermore, while bringing back Alan Grant means Jurassic World: Dominion can finally fix his arc, bringing back Nedry wouldn’t come with many opportunities for character development. The shifty supporting star was a pretty one-dimensional villain in the original Jurassic Park and didn’t have much to do beyond facilitating the plot so, while the news that Knight’s character was able to survive in the inhospitable environs of Isla Nublar would be fascinating, it would also be an absurdly goofy decision with no real motivation behind it.
It is also worth noting that in the canon of 2011's Jurassic Park: The Game, Nedry’s corpse is encountered by the professional smuggler Nima Cruz. As such, the character is definitively dead in at least one of the Jurassic World franchise’s incarnations, although there is no reason to assume that the movies share the same version of Jurassic Park canon as Jurassic Park: The Game. As a result of this, Knight’s character could technically appear and heroically redeem his Jurassic Park self by saving the heroes of Jurassic World: Dominion, having started this entire mess so many decades earlier—this is simply not a twist that many fans of the franchise are likely to be happy with.
