Hello again! After a long journey, I've successfully finished this trilogy. The first book was about a bunch of people being stuck in a super huge maze, literally. The maze opens during the day, and they have to make it back to the Glade (which is the main area) before it gets dark. Some sort of spider-machine creatures called Grievers roam the maze at night. If they get stung by it, they suffer great pain although there's a serum for it. Without the serum they'd probably die. The thing is, they all lost their memories before being sent to this maze. If they get stung however, they recall bits and pieces of their memories. Apparently, getting back their memories can help them escape the maze, especially for the main character, Thomas. The story just ended with them successfully escaping the maze, by jumping through a hole which they found a long time ago, at the end of the maze.
Apparently, it wasn't all over. When they came out of the maze, they were directed to yet another sort of trial, this time with directives. They were support to cross (I forgot how far, 100miles perhaps?) a hot desert-like place, totally rundown, and some zombie-like creatures called Cranks are living at random places in this desert. This is where the reader is slightly enlightened with what happened in the real world. There was The Flare, from the sun that increased the temperature of the surface of the earth, together with a biological warfare that released a virus that kills the brains, making you go crazy and die. So people infected with virus are called Cranks. In this book, they were talking about Variables and Patterns. It seemed like they needed to get the pattern of emotions from Thomas' brain to develop the cure for the infection. This book ended with them fighting a huge number of Cranks and successfully getting to the main WICKED (the company running all these trials, trying to find the cure) base.
The third book was about WICKED giving the participants their memories back. Also, Thomas and most of the participants of the maze trials were immune to the virus, they called them Munies. However, Thomas and his friends were tired of WICKED and their human experiments. They refused to get their memories back because they didn't trust them. Perhaps 'giving their memories back' could be them just planting memories that they want them to have. This is all because Thomas and his friends were heavily manipulated along the way of the maze trials, and the scorch trials. On top of all of that, a couple of his best friends died, he was betrayed by another best friend/girl friend. Being betrayed was all part of WICKED's plan in arousing emotions for the development of the vaccine. They hate WICKED and eventually joined a right wing party against WICKED, called the Right Arm. In the climax, Chancellor Paige which is the boss of WICKED, leaves Thomas a message, showing him a way out, and also notifying him that there are other Munies still in the Maze. Thomas and his friends goes back to rescue them, successfully bringing them back to the base, and escaping through a flat transportation (some sort of teleport machine), to what seemed like paradise.
The trials failed. This paradise set up by Chancellor Paige was a fail-safe in case the trials failed. Since they couldn't develop the vaccine, mainly due to the fightback of the Right Arm being against human experiments, the Chancellor chose to just preserve the Munies instead and restart humanity from that bunch of 200 Munies, while the rest of the world, rots and dies. Did this story make sense? I don't know. I didn't like it. The ending seemed rushed and lazy for me. There weren't any exceptional writing style, mostly predictable. It seemed to have so much potential but the ending was just disappointing. I thought they could come up with some other cool idea. They just failed instead. It didn't make sense because the boss of WICKED just suddenly had a change of heart to abandon the experiment. On top of that, Thomas who was so 'the chose one' type, just suddenly got tired of saving the world and escaped to paradise instead. Everyone just gave up, when they seemed all too passionate at first. Of course reading the prequel will shed light on many other things I want to know about, such as the development of the maze and how The Flare started, but the ending is so disappointing that I'm contemplating real hard on whether or not I should read the book.
Of all the illogical things that happened, developing a vaccine for a virus from studying human emotions was what I couldn't comprehend the most. Seriously, what does emotions have to do with vaccines? There was also a part of the story where Thomas could telepathically talk to some of his friends. What was all that for, and how did it lead to the cure? Nothing was clarified. Judging by three books, I doubt the prequel will be enough to sustain the number of questions Dashner himself raised. I kind of expected the ending to be inadequate, but it was worse than my expectation. I still can't believe everyone just abandoned the experiment. Unable to be successful in an experiment is one thing, abandoning it is another thing altogether. To makes things worse, there's a prequel to the prequel, coming out in 2016. Probably I'll read all the prequels together when they are all out. Relative to the books that I've put down because it was extremely boring, this book is way better because it at least kept me going for whatever non-comprehensible reason. Maybe I didn't enjoy this book that much because I'm not so into post-apocalyptic stories. I like to delve more into human behavior and emotions, choices and whatnot. More of daily life issues. I can't even settle what's currently happening in life, I doubt I'm bothered about apocalypse hahaha. Till next time! :)
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