WARNING: Spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has the franchise’s biggest twist - Maisie Lockwood is a clone - and it’s setup with some very carefully placed clues.
When it comes to genetic meddling, the main reveal of the sequel is a second hybrid dinosaur, the Indoraptor. An advancement on the Indominous Rex from Jurassic World, the Indoraptor is a sleek, refined, killing machine, and a combination of various dinosaur genetics. Since Jurassic Park in 1993, we’ve seen the InGen technology advance at an extraordinary rate; cloning dinosaurs and recreating an extinct species was one thing, but to produce a hybrid dinosaur as deadly and powerful as the Indoraptor is quite another. However, that isn’t InGen’s most remarkable achievement.
That is Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). A small, pleasant girl of around 10, Maisie is the granddaughter of Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), former partner of Dr. John Hammond. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the biggest twist is the revelation that Maisie is not actually his granddaughter at all, but a clone of his dead daughter. But while the news might come as a shock, the whole movie is actually littered with clues that you may have missed.
- This Page: Jurassic World 2’s Human-Clone Twist Explains Page 2: All The Maisie Clues Hidden In The Movie
The Horrifying Twist Explained: Maisie is a Clone
Let’s start by looking at how Maisie came to be. Lockwood’s daughter died in a car accident decades prior, so presumably, he and his team extracted her DNA at some point. Maisie is about 10, and as a fully functioning human being with no complications, it’s likely she wasn’t the first attempt. Lockwood mentions that he and John Hammond parted ways over this debate, showing how long Maisie has been worked on and raising the question of how the process links to the dinosaurs: which came first?
What’s so curious, there, is why Maisie was created. It seems (for now) as though she is a one-off; recreated to make an old man happy in the latter stages of his life. It’s strange, though, that if InGen had the technology capable of cloning a human, they didn’t use it on a wider basis. Unlike giant prehistoric creatures, this could have a major impact it upon science, medicine, and the world at large.
All that begs the question of what’s next? Will the technology be used to clone more dinosaurs now that a lot have died out on Isla Nublar? That seems unlikely, unless Jurassic World is going to be rebuilt elsewhere, and all the dinosaurs now roaming the world are recaptured. Surely, even Dr. Henry Wu isn’t stupid enough to think that cloning dinosaurs when America is about to be overrun with them is a good idea.
Maisie herself is bound to have questions, and in Jurassic World 3, it’s likely we’ll see some more parallels being drawn between her existence and the dinosaurs. The biggest question for poor Maisie in Fallen Kingdom was a moral one; if the dinosaurs don’t deserve to be saved because humans made them, then does she herself deserve a place on earth? What makes her life any different to theirs? It’s likely that’s a dilemma to be explored further in Jurassic World 3.
Page 2 of 2: All The Maisie Clues Hidden In The Movie
All The Maisie Twist Clues Hidden In Jurassic World 2
Clues to Maisie’s origin are littered throughout Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, starting with Dr. Ian Malcolm’s (Jeff Goldblum) words of warning during the Congressional hearing. When stating that he thinks the dinosaurs should be allowed to go extinct again, Malcolm says that in dabbling with cloning and bringing creatures to life, humans have tried to overpower death. While they might not have conquered it fully yet, Maisie’s existence is proof that death is no longer an obstacle; especially to the beholder. Humans now have control over the creation of life, therefore death actually means very little.
Maisie herself has no clue that she is a clone; all those around her have been in on the secret, it seems, and happy to go along with the lie. Her nanny, Iris, was nanny to Lockwood’s daughter as well, and both she and Lockwood are evasive when the naturally curious Maisie asks questions. We see a photograph of Lockwood’s daughter, looking identical to Maisie, which he keeps hidden in his notes; the extraordinary likeness between mother and daughter is yet another clue to Maisie’s true heritage. The discussion of the car crash that supposedly killed Lockwood’s daughter is also notable for its curious telling; Maisie doesn’t remember, dismissed as her being too young, but it’s actually because she wasn’t really there.
The shared origin of Maisie and the dinosaurs is teased out too. Watch the girl carefully during Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and you’ll realize how closely her mannerisms - particularly her head movements and inquisitive nature - seem to resemble Blue. Both are intelligent, both can empathize, and both very quickly form close bonds with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who trained Blue from birth and immediately takes Maisie under his wing. But there’s another creature determined to get to both Blue and Maisie, and that is the Indoraptor. The Indoraptor has been trained to kill anything that its master demands, yet it instinctively goes for Maisie; the creature is obsessed with her to the point that it stalks her and terrorizes her before going in for the kill.
The connection between Blue, Maisie and the Indoraptor is striking, and raises questions of a further twist. We know Dr. Wu wanted Blue’s DNA to make the next Indoraptor more obedient and empathetic, but could it be that all three clones are sharing some of the same strands of DNA? Is this what’s next: human cloning and dinosaur cloning combine? It’s a terrifying thought, but a possibility. We’ll have to watch Jurassic World 3 very closely for more clues.
