THE FIRST DINOSAUR THAT GETS SHOWN IN JURASSIC PARK is a raptor. And the first thing we see her do is kill a man in front of his coworkers. It happens, quite literally, in the opening scene of the movie.

The situation: A group of handlers on a small island near Costa Rica are transporting a raptor from a temporary cage into a more permanent paddock. They slide the cage up against the edge of the paddock¹ and a guy climbs on top of the cage and raises up the door.² The hope, of course, is that the raptor will run out of the cage and into the paddock, same as a monkey would exit a smaller cage to enter a larger sanctuary. The raptor is more violent than they’re anticipating, though.³ She thrashes around, knocking the guy off the top of the cage and also knocking the cage backward, creating a small open space between the cage and the paddock.⁴ She grabs ahold of the guy by his legs, drags him into her cage with her, and it’s a wrap for him after that. He gets mauled to death (and possibly eaten). And so the point is established quickly: The raptors are the enemy.⁵

The movie continues forward in the same way, reiterating how dangerous and vicious raptors are whenever it can. There’s a scene, for example, just a handful of minutes later where Dr. Alan Grant explains to a child at a dinosaur excavation site that raptors don’t kill you before they eat you, they maim you so you can’t run away and then they eat you while you’re still alive. And there’s a scene after that where Dr. Grant and several others are on a behind-the-scenes tour at the park. He’s given a newborn dinosaur to hold. And he’s very sweet and tender with it. Then he finds out it’s a raptor, and he reacts like he’s been told he’s holding a stick of plutonium.

The first time we hear from the grizzled and gnarly game warden at the park, he says of the raptors, “They should all be destroyed.” (He walks up on the group as they watch a cow get dropped into the raptor paddock and then shredded to ribbon.) We’re told that they’re “lethal” at just eight months of age; that they can run upward of sixty miles per hour; that they’re “astonishing” jumpers; that they are extremely intelligent; that they hunt in highly organized packs; that they’re overseen by “the Big One,” a raptor of such might and ferocity that, upon being introduced to the existing group of raptors, she killed all but two in a show of power as she took over the pride. “That one,” says the game warden, “when she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.”

More things happen during Jurassic Park to really bang home the point (the most telling of which being that Dennis Nedry, the corrupt IT guy who hacks the park’s security system so that he can smuggle out some dinosaur embryos, makes absolutely certain not to affect the electric fences that held the raptors in place), and by the end of the movie we’re left with at least one unquestionable thought: The Tyrannosaurus rex might be the big-ticket item during a dinosaur renaissance, but it’s the raptors that are the most deadly, the most unforgiving, the most evil, and who we should fear above all.

But let me offer you a counterpoint: What if they’re not? What if the raptors in Jurassic Park were just misunderstood? Because think on this: Between the release of Jurassic Park in 1993 and today,⁶ four more movies have been added to the Jurassic Park franchise.⁷ And over the course of those movies, the reputation of the raptors has shifted completely.

In 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the raptors were still presented as villainous, though only situationally so; mostly, they just wanted to be left alone. In 2001’s Jurassic Park III, the raptors hunted a group of humans, but only because one of the humans had stolen a raptor egg. (A piece of evidence to show how nonthreatening the raptors were: After the humans gave them back the stolen raptor egg, the raptors left. They didn’t even bother to bite them or scratch them or anything. They just scooped up the egg and ran away.) In 2015’s Jurassic World, raptors were not only working in conjunction with humans to stop a hybrid super dinosaur, but sacrificing their lives to do so.⁸ And by 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a human (Owen Grady, played by Chris Pratt) and a raptor (Blue, played by Blue) were basically a buddy cop duo. (There’s a part where Grady says to Blue, “Hey, girl. You thinking what I’m thinking,” right before they tag team up together in a fight.)

The illustration to the right is a picture of two raptors getting baptized by John the Baptist. This being a chapter about raptor redemption, it made sense to do something like for the accompanying art. However, three pages from now there’s another illustration. And it doesn’t have anything to do with raptors or redemption. It’s Leatherface from the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre getting a massage. I wish I had a good explanation for why we did it, but I don’t. It’s just a thing I wanted to see Arturo draw. So there you go.

(An extremely tenuous linking relationship between the two could be that the raptors and Leatherface have very violently killed a number of people. Also, Leatherface is ugly and so are the raptors. Also, Leatherface had a family so I guess that means he was a pack hunter like the raptors were.⁹)

There are nine things that the raptors do in Jurassic Park that we have to be able to explain away if we’re going to successfully argue the position that they’re misunderstood and not actually terrible murdering monsters. Let’s do them in the order that they happen. There’s: