Ahead of the release of Disclosure Day, persistent online rumors suggested the film might be a clandestine follow-up to Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The speculation grew so intense that Spielberg himself addressed it in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, explicitly stating, “It is not a sequel in any way, shape, or form to Close Encounters.” While that theory has been soundly debunked, I recently uncovered a much more authentic and mind-bending connection between two other pillars of Spielberg’s filmography.
In the original Jurassic Park, Gerry Harding (Gerald R. Molen) serves as the park’s primary dinosaur veterinarian. He is the professional the protagonists encounter while tending to the ailing Triceratops, and he shares a brief moment with Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) before the narrative shifts. While he vanishes from the screen thereafter, it is widely presumed that he managed to escape the island on the same transport intended for Dennis Nedry.
Image: Universal
Jump to the sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and we are introduced to Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), an animal behaviorist currently in a relationship with Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). As a central figure who successfully survives the ordeal, her background becomes increasingly significant: it turns out that Gerry Harding is her father.
This lineage is never explicitly clarified on screen, and it remains a curious narrative coincidence that both the father and the boyfriend survived the horrors of the initial park breakout. While John Hammond mentions that Sarah pursued Ian after the fallout of the Isla Nublar incident, one would think he might have acknowledged that she was the daughter of the very veterinarian he employed. Yet, the connection remains unmentioned by everyone involved.
Image: Universal/Everett Collection
In Michael Crichton’s source material for The Lost World, the relationship is hinted at, albeit in an incredibly oblique fashion. During a scene where Sarah is tending to a juvenile T-rex, she offhandedly remarks, “My father was a vet.” Ian, clearly taken aback, questions this, to which she adds that he was a bird specialist at the San Diego Zoo. Given Alan Grant’s earlier revelation that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs, the thematic link is clear—yet Sarah shuts the conversation down before any further elaboration can occur.
This dialogue perfectly mirrors the character description in the original Jurassic Park novel, which identifies Gerry Harding as the former chief of veterinary medicine at the San Diego Zoo and an authority on avian care. Beyond that brief interaction in the sequel’s book, the topic is dropped entirely.
The only time this familial bond is addressed directly is in the 2011 video game Jurassic Park: The Game. Here, Gerry Harding takes center stage alongside his youngest daughter, Jess. A moment of domestic tension arises when Jess asks, “Have you even talked to Sarah lately?”—followed by Gerry’s admission that “Sarah got away from me,” suggesting a strained, perhaps estranged, relationship.
While the canonical status of that game is frequently debated—especially given contradictions with Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous—the idea of an estranged relationship provides a tidy explanation for why Sarah never openly discussed her father’s history with the park. It suggests that their history is fraught with unresolved tension, offering a compelling, if unspoken, layer to Sarah’s character and her decision to follow in her father’s footsteps in such a dangerous field.
Source: Polygon
