The more I read dystopian/speculative fiction, the more I realize just how difficult a genre it is. Everything has to be placed so perfectly, all plot twists in a nice, neat line. There has to be a great deal of logic to the world that is created and, when the final chapter is closed, all must be revealed or the author runs the risk of leaving the reader confused. Unfortunately, as I finished the last word of this book, my first thought was, "Huh?" Spoilers will follow, so don't read any further if you don't want to know any of the details.
When I read The Maze Runner, I thought it was a really innovative, creepy idea. It was interesting to speculate about who had thrown the boys and Teresa in the maze and why they were there. The small details that were doled out really helped this atmosphere. When I read The Scorch Trials, though, I felt like things started to fall apart a bit. There was still so little known, so little that made sense. And now, with The Death Cure, I can't help but feel unsatisfied with the story overall. There is still so much of it that I don't understand. As I read the book, I realized that a few things should have been happening: for one, more information should have been doled out over the course of the series. I didn't want Dashner to give everything away in the first book, but there should have been more flashes of memory on Thomas's part, particularly after he went through the Changing. This would have helped solidify details about the world, which would have gone a very long way toward making the events of The Death Cure make sense.
The biggest problem I had with The Death Cure was that it felt to me like Thomas was just flailing along the entire novel, with one instance of sheer dumb luck after another. The world was like a blur, and it was hard to figure out exactly what was going on. I had the sense that Dashner was rolling out setting after setting to show the reader, "See, this is what the world is like!" This would have been fine, had there been an actual purpose to each setting, but it felt more to me like I was being taken on a tour of the world, rather than watching the plot unfold. I strongly feel that there should have been a plan, that Thomas's actions should have had a more deliberate course of action. I just can't buy that he somehow manages to bumble around and, ultimately, is successful. I guess you could say that WICKED orchestrated this, but that just doesn't feel right to me. There were too many variables (yes, I know how much WICKED loves those) for there to be any reasonable expectation that things would play out the way they did.
The other major flaw, to me, lay in the fact that Thomas decided not to get his memory back. While I understood his reasoning, and could buy it, I think it did the novel a real disservice. Had Thomas regained his memory, and had the reader been given a window through which to view the gradual decline and collapse of the world, WICKED's motivations would have made more sense. As it is, I really feel that their motivations made little sense at all. Yes, they said they were trying to find a cure for the Flare. But that doesn't answer the question of why they had to set up such elaborate, physical experiments as part of their research. While one of the characters does explicitly state that WICKED was out of control, using up what few resources remained in their mad pursuit for a cure rather than trying to preserve what was left of the population, I felt that there was still just no good explanation for what they had done. Why couldn't they have simply hooked Thomas and his friends up to machine, induced hallucinations, and measured their brain activity that way? Why did they have to drop them into a maze to get the information they wanted?
Thomas's choice not to regain his memory also had a very adverse affect on Teresa as a character. She just does too many 180 degree turns to really be believable. I liked her so much in the first book, considerably less in the second, and was completely disappointed in her in the third. She becomes nothing more than a plot device, really. Her moment of redemption in sacrificing herself to save Thomas just fell flat because, by that point, she was such an enigma. Had Thomas regained his memories and had the reader been given more insight into what drove Teresa to become what she did, she'd have been more of a well-rounded character.
Lastly, I just couldn't get behind the idea of Jorge and Brenda, and the fact that they had been inserted from day one solely to achieve the ends desired by the Chancellor. Thomas trusts them much too quickly, and his friends acquiesce much too easily, even though they never cease to be suspicious of Brenda in particular.
The ultimate revelation also just didn't make sense to me. Exactly why was the Flare released? The Chancellor says that it was meant as a means of controlling the population, but there's no explanation of why the population needed to be controlled after the solar flares. If an author is going to drop a bomb like this, the reader should have a sense that everything is coming together, a sense that I felt was entirely lacking.
I'm really disappointed by the ending of this series, which is a shame because it was off to such an intriguing start.
