Lewis Dodgson

"You shouldn't use my name."

- Lewis Dodgson to Dennis Nedry.

Dr. Lewis Dodgson is the main antagonist of the Jurassic Park novel series. He serves as a minor antagonist in the 1990 science fiction novel of the same name, and the main antagonist of the 1995 novel The Lost World. He is also a minor antagonist in the film series, appearing in the 1993 Jurassic Park film. He was the head of research at BioSyn. He was known for his law-breaking studies, including a rabies vaccine test conducted on farmers in Chile without their knowledge of consent, which led to at least ten casualties. However, Dodgson was able to escape prosecution.

Originally, he had hired Dennis Nedry to steal embryos from Jurassic Park while on Isla Nublar, so that Biosyn could clone its own dinosaurs. He met with Nedry in Costa Rica to discuss the arrangement and give him equipment to complete his task: a can of shaving cream with a secret compartment to hold fifteen species of dinosaur. However, Nedry was killed by a Dilophosaur and dropped the embryos while attempting to leave the park.

He was portrayed by Cameron Thor in the film.

Background
Lewis Dodgson began his controversial career as a graduate student at Hopkins. He had been dismissed for planning human gene therapy without FDA permission. Later, Dodgson went from one criminal activity to another, and kept on doing experiments on genes and animals, until joining BioSyn. He worked his way up, manipulated many scientist from other companies and established a network of people who work for him, until eventually becoming the head of research. Arguably his most notable crime was a rabies vaccine test conducted on farmers in Chile without their knowledge of consent, which led to at least ten casualties.

Jurassic Park
In the novel, Dodgson met with Biosyn's board of directors to discuss the opportunity of stealing Ingen's dinosaur embryos and bring them back to Biosyn, so they can create dinosaurs just like Ingen did. Dodgson meets Dennis Nedry in a San Franciso airport coffee shop and reveals a briefcase of $750,000 and Dodgson tells Nedry that that's only half of the money Nedry will get for stealing the embryos. Nedry says he wants all the money on Sunday and tells Dodgson to have a boat by the east dock. Dodgson says he will and gives Nedry a shaving cream can, revealing a secret compartment to collect all the embryos and get past security.

The Lost World
When Nedry failed, Dodgson prepared to locate InGen’s Site B and collect dinosaur eggs. He collected a team that included Howard King and George Baselton. When Sarah Harding was trying to get to Isla Sorna, Dodgson gave her a ride on the fishing boat with him and his gang, but was really plotting to get rid of her-throwing her overboard and attempting to drown her.

Upon arriving on Isla Sorna, Dodgson and his team started collecting dinosaur eggs using a sonic device Dodgson used to deter the dinosaurs. However, during the attempt to steal  eggs, Dodgson's machine failed. Baselton was eaten by the dinosaurs, and Dodgson fell off a small cliff, knocking himself out in the attempt to escape being devoured.

His vile plot and evil scheme was practically undone by the angry T. rex parents. It was believed that Dodgson had died when he fell off the cliff. But he awoke later to find Compsognathus attacking him, and was able to seek refuge from them in a shed. Upon waking later he discovered the electric car that Sarah Harding was hiding under. When he prepared to steal it and escape the island, Dodgson was attacked by Harding and then captured by the Tyrannosaurus rex mother, and carried to the nest, where Dodgson was presented to the T. rex babies as their first hunted meal.

Jurassic Park
In the films, however, Dodgson has a significantly smaller role. He meets Dennis Nedry at a Costa Rican restaurant, and they make a conspiracy to steal dinosaur embryos so he can give Dennis $750,000 for it, giving Nedry an item (disguised as a Barbasol shaving cream can) for help for him to steal the dinosaur embryos. It is unknown what happened to Dodgson afterwards.

Personality
At first glance, Dodgson appeared to be charismatic, sophisticated, polite and attentive. But in reality, Dodgson was a greedy, treacherous, cold-blooded, arrogant, manipulative and ruthless psychopath. Unlike other scientists, who use their creativeness to invent new things, Dodgson's creativity was used almost exclusively to steal other people's ideas. He was willing to pay any price, whether in money or human lives, for achieving his goals.

Unlike most of Jurassic Park villains, who had some caring toward family members, Dodgson didn't even care about his own parents. He even compared shooting his own parents to shooting a tiger, which indicates he saw them as no better than the animals whom he cruelly experimented on. The novel heavily implies that Dodgson has a history of abusing children, starting from sending at least one child to the hospital due to experimental marketing of genetically engineered food products, to killing at least one child in the rabies vaccine's experiment and finally trying to abduct a baby T. rex.

Trivia

 * Dodgson and his team were completely written out of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, having been replaced by Peter Ludlow and the InGen crew. Thus, he is left inconclusive in the films.
 * Lewis Dodgson was the first human in the franchise (before Billy Yoder and Eli Mills) who tried to kill another human with his bare hands. However, unlike Yoder, Dodgson was successful. That makes him the first human in the franchise to succeed at killing another human being, the second being Mills.
 * In the first book, they said Dodgson was 34 years old. But in the second novel, they said that he was 45 years old even though it was 6 years since the Isla Nublar Incident. So Dodgson should be only 40 years old instead of 45 years old.
 * Dodgson was the Greater Scope Villain in the novel Jurassic Park, and the Big Bad in the novel series, because he had not bribed Nedry to steal the embryos, the story would not have happened.
 * It is possible that he may have hired Vic Hoskins, who recruited Dr. Henry Wu.
 * He is the only Jurassic Park villain to be Pure Evil.
 * It is unlikely that Lewis Dodgson will return in the upcoming sequel and final installment Jurassic World III, since his actor Cameron Thor was sentenced to 6 years in prison for assaulting a 13-year-old girl.