Storytelling — Just Add Dinosaurs

Stories with dinosaurs are about the dinosaurs, not the character changes that Matthew Dicks treats as the essence of a story. Dicks reads Jurassic Park as the story of Alan Grant shifting from disliking children to liking them, with the dinosaurs as "just stakes." The same pattern holds in Doctor Who, where companions repeatedly choose cosmic adventure over human-scale love, and their human partners and families mostly serve as punchlines. Character arcs are structural scaffolding, and the cosmic stakes give them their intensity.