Last time on Mockingjay, Peeta’s still a mess and Katniss joins the army.

It seems like she is getting fast tracked for actual fighting after all, because she’s getting to train in the fake city blocks they made for the assault.

You know, this is really the point that any possibility this conflict was suspenseful, already a shambling zombie, was finally shot through the skull, dismembered, and burned. This is not the story of an underdog taking down a superpower. 13 has every conceivable advantage, and that’s never more obvious than right now when we see that they can blow time and resources on making an incredibly complex replica and then obsessively training their soldiers in it.

Peeta starts showing up for basic training as well, despite still being a mess. They’ve unchained him but he’s still under guard. This is stupid, book.

The explanation is that it’s just for the sake of footage, so let me repeat: this is stupid, book. They could easily stage Peeta doing anything they want without actually putting him into training. In fact, it’d be less trouble than what they’re doing now.

There is much talk of the opening offensive, which will be to secure the train tunnels that feed up into the Capitol.

And the rebels being idiots continues.

Way back in the first book, Katniss claims the place was so hard to beat during the first rebellion because there’s mountains around it and trains run supplies through those. Way back during the first Let’s Read, before it had quite given into sheer hate, I pointed out this made no sense. Train tracks are very easy to destroy. In this case, since there no longer are any trains running into the capital, since all the districts are theirs, they can just hop over the area entirely. If they really, really need trains for transporting troops, still won’t need all of them. The supplies it takes a city to run in luxury is far, far more than what it’d take to move in soldiers and supply them.

Naturally, Katniss is recommended for the final exam. It includes a written tactics exam, which somehow Katniss passes despite there being no real evidence she’s even particular literate and plenty of evidence she knows nothing about tactics.

The last part is a simulated combat test. One boy says, under his breath, that he’s heard it’s designed to target each individual’s weaknesses.

That doesn’t sound particularly plausible. I mean, it’s a lot of work to try to figure out everyone’s weakness and then design the perfect test for it. I could see something like that based on what their weak point during training is, though.

I find a quiet spot and try to assess what they might be. The length of the list depresses me. Lack of physical brute force. A bare minimum of training. And somehow my stand-out status as the Mockingjay doesn’t seem to be an advantage in a situation where they’re trying to get us to blend into a pack.

And that’s an even dumber line of thought. If it was brute force, she would have failed to pass basic training. Same for minimum of training, only even more obvious. And seriously Katniss, we get it, you’re the mockingjay, you don’t have to remind us every five sentences.

my squadron leader, who’s been fairly useless up to this point, quietly orders me to hit the ground. Every instinct I have screams for me to ignore the voice, to pull the trigger, to blow the Peacekeepers sky-high. And suddenly, I realize what the military will think my biggest weakness is. From my first moment in the Games, when I ran for that orange backpack, to the firefight in 8, to my impulsive race across the square in 2. I cannot take orders.

Well, that’s certainly a valid thing to test, and fits with the more reasonable idea that they’re just testing obvious weaknesses from training. On the other hand, it’s so obvious. I mean, Katniss didn’t even need that last-minute revelation. Even if she hadn’t realized this specific time, she should be playing along and following orders this whole time, because none of this part matters and she doesn’t want to give them any reason not to pick her to go.

(Also, she didn’t run for the backpack because she ignored orders. She ran for it because she was going to disobey orders and got distracted so she didn’t have time to get something else.)

Katniss passes, but only to find out she’s going to a special group of sharpshooters under Boggs. …so presumably, they’d have done that no matter what she did. This is only confirmed when we learn Finnick is in it. Finnick is trident guy, not shooty guy.

Anyway, we learn that the capital is protected by pods full of random things, which is apparently how the arena works too? This makes no tactical sense. Why would you have a pod of mutated things sitting around for seventy years? How does that even make sense? And why would you want such diversity in traps instead of just focusing on the most effective ones?

They have an accurate map but they’re going to be pretending they don’t. How is that supposed to work, they let people walk into them every now and then? It’s especially dumb given the capital isn’t in any position to change the traps around if they did know.

Katniss snarks that as victors, she and Finnick are super prepared. Bullshit, they just ran around and tried avoid this stuff. Surviving by luck doesn’t mean you’re going to survive again. Certainly doesn’t mean you’ll do better when it comes to fighting it. And I’m not even convinced the arena is a good comparison because it was pretty clear that normal games have gamemakers triggering this stuff manually, not using it as a more interesting/impractical version of a landmine.

Johanna isn’t around, and we find out that, because she was tortured by getting soaked and then electrocuted, for her test they flooded the area to trigger a flashback. Because they are colossal dicks. (Among the many disappointments, I’m irritated this didn’t reference waterboarding instead. But this book has passed up every other chance to make any meaningful real-world reference to its supposed inspirations, so it’s certainly expected.)

This doesn’t make sense. If Johanna is too unwell for combat, the psychologist should never have allowed her to try this. And if the test is supposed to be about what will cause the person to break down, Katniss has a list of things that’ll do that and instead they tested her on if she’ll follow orders. And Finnick’s already had a complete breakdown, I can’t imagine it’d be hard to set off another one. So this is just an excuse to remove Johanna from the story. Fuck you, book.

The book then insults our intelligence further by claiming that Patriarch hates this because it gets in the way of his propaganda spots, yet doesn’t do anything about it. Again: Finnick. There is no earthly reason Finnick should be allowed in if they have any standards at all.

And then it does it again when Katniss goes to say goodbye/make friends with Johanna and instead of demanding Katniss help her break out, she just tells Katniss to promise to kill Snow, because this book really needed more of people telling Katniss it was important she do the thing she was already planning to do.

my squad’s on the shooting range full-time in training. I practice mostly with a gun, but they reserve an hour a day for specialty weapons, which means I get to use my Mockingjay bow

And now it’s time for a new flavor of stupid with military tactics fail. Why bother having her train with the bow unless she’ll be using it? And if she will, why spend her time learning how to use a gun? It’s a completely different weapon.

It doesn’t even make sense in the first place for Katniss to be on the sharpshooter squad if they’re using guns, because bows and guns aren’t the same thing and skill with one doesn’t mean skill with the other.

The trident Beetee designed for Finnick has a lot of special features, but the most remarkable is that he can throw it, press a button on a metal cuff on his wrist, and return it to his hand without chasing it down.

I think this is the most ridiculous thing in the entire series.

 Jackson, a middle-aged woman who’s Boggs’s second in command, looks kind of sluggish but can hit things the rest of us can’t even see without a scope. Farsighted, she says.

This would be ridiculous, but, trident. Nothing beats trident.

Incidentally, a major part of accuracy is being still and calm when firing. So it makes no sense to say someone looks sluggish BUT is accurate. It’s like saying someone looked muscular BUT was strong.Good sharpshooters are not twitchy people!

Also, two of them are twins, which I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to put in the same squad in the army if you can avoid it.

Patriarch finally says they’re going to be the special fake squad who gets followed by the camera crew. Coin, dammit, why are you still trying to protect Katniss? She’s already done her job of inexplicably helping convince people to fight by shouting about fire. Now she’s desperate to be in the front lines. Just send her and get things over with. Please. If not for her sake, then for mine.

Everyone is unhappy except Katniss, who doesn’t care because she’s planning to disobey orders later anyway.

She goes on to lie to her mother about how the thing she didn’t tell her she was going to do will be perfectly safe because she’s just pretending for the cameras. I guess you could see this as her recognizing others’ feelings and trying to make them feel better, but I’m pretty sure her motivation is to keep her mother from bothering her with such petty human emotions as ‘caring about someone’.

A hovercraft takes us to, of all places, 12

Of all places indeed. We know 12 is nowhere near the capital, and they control all the districts. So why rebuild the trains there enough to use them instead of using another district?

They get to the capital train tunnel area.

This area has been secured for over a week. Rebels pushed out the Peacekeepers, losing hundreds of lives in the process. The Capitol forces fell back and have regrouped farther into the city. Between us lie the booby-trapped streets, empty and inviting. Each one will need to be swept of pods before we can advance.

So let me tell you what current military tactics are:

Bombs.

That’s it. Everything else is obsolete.

We know they have hovercraft. We know they have bombs. Nothing else is needed to take the city. You don’t need to go piece by piece into fortified areas. You definitely don’t need to pick your way through empty but trapped areas making sure to hit every last trap before continuing. Why? For exactly what the book just said there – hundreds of lives were lost taking a completely unneeded area. Hundreds more are going to be lost sweeping streets that have no useful resources. Do you know how real military people deal with minefields? By leaving them the fuck alone.

Now, sure, if you want to take the place intact, but the capital has nothing they want. In fact, the only reason to even bother bombing it and not just leaving them to starve is that presumably they still have enough military capacity to launch a few suicidal counterattacks if they’re left alone long enough. We’re told they definitely don’t have hovercrafts left to fight back.

The book claims their own hoverplanes were mostly destroyed too. Then just build more, you idiots. You have access to the full infrastructure of the country now, the one the capital used to build its fleets, and you were able to build hoverplanes when it was just your one isolated district. Also, why the fuck were you flying so low that antiaircraft missiles were an issue in the first place, and also, are you too stupid to figure out how to launch missiles without planes? You definitely don’t have any distance issues by this point in the game.

This war will be battled out on the streets with, hopefully, only superficial damage to the infrastructure and a minimum of human casualties.

What’s really amazing about this line is the supposed inspiration for this involves the Iraq War. You know, the one that’s about how battling things out on the streets is never done with a minimum of casualties?

Also, really, they don’t need the infrastructure. The infrastructure is a bunch of fancy useless buildings.

The rebels want the Capitol, just as the Capitol wanted 13.

So, for absolutely no reason but plot, then.

Cressida and her team take shots of us firing. They tell us we’re part of the disinformation team. If the rebels only shoot Plutarch’s pods, it will take the Capitol about two minutes to realize we have the holograph. So there’s a lot of time spent shattering things that don’t matter

This is relatively reasonable at first glance, but if they’ve got super pods, you’d figure they could have set a few cameras of their own going to observe the rebels. We know they have super invisible everywhere cameras for the games. Again, no reason but plot not to use those.

Not to mention, the pods should be reporting if they’re activated or not, so the other teams sweeping through and nailing them all should be enough to figure it out.

Similarly for no reason but plot, we’re told the “holo”, which is to say, the computer map with the pods on it, is locked to the commander’s voice. Of course, if the commander is taken out it’ll respond to anyone’s voice, but only they can activate it…so if the commander was taken first they’d be shit out of luck. Anyone who recognizes the need for other people to be able to use it would know other people might need to activate it too.

In an inevitable plot development, one of the twins gets accidentally killed. See, that’s why you don’t put people who are related to each other in the same group. You don’t want them refusing orders because someone’s injured or having a breakdown because they’re killed.

Anyway, the twin’s replacement is Peeta. Everyone is shocked.

if Coin sent Peeta here, she’s decided something else as well. That I’m of more use to her dead than alive.

Katniss, if she wanted you dead she shouldn’t send Millstone. I mean, let’s look at this rationally.

One, you did better in the arena by a mile or two. It comes down to a fight between you two, my money’s on you, honestly. All that’s changed is Peeta’s one point of advantage, the ability to plan, is also gone.

Two, you know he’s coming. So he’s not going to get any chance. Any ordinary person would be met with acceptance and trust, and could easily stab you immediately. Indeed, Peeta is promptly disarmed and told to sit in the corner while everyone watches him for any sudden movements.

Three, if Peeta does kill you, it’s going to look like Coin’s fault. If she wanted to get blamed, she could just shoot you herself and cut out the middleman. Any other assassin, she could claim ignorance.

Four, you want to be on the front line, and once there you want to run off into enemy territory and try to personally assassinate Snow. No one needs to kill you. You have already registered your suicide wish loud and clear.