Last time on Mockingjay, a photo shoot goes wrong and Boggs explodes.

It’s as if in an instant, a painted window shatters, revealing the ugly world behind it. Laughter changes to screams, blood stains pastel stones, real smoke darkens the special effect stuff made for television.
A second explosion seems to split the air and leaves my ears ringing. But I can’t make out where it came from.

And yet this sounds exactly like a made for television scene. Right down to the character doing the “omg this is so different than television” thing.

This kind of thing can work really well. But this book has been treating made-for-television as real and authentic far too much, to the point that Katniss regularly will look at herself on the screens as if the televised version is more real than her own experience, and here – it’s just a string of trite observations describing the usual scene.

I mean, “real smoke”? Real smoke is lighter and more insubstantial than special effect smoke. Mistaking impact for reality is the most basic mistake you can make, because the fake version is usually more noticeable. Fog, blood, sound – they’re all things that are exaggerated for the viewers, to the point that actually seeing the real thing can be confusing not because you feel like the veil is suddenly ripped from your eyes, but because it’s so underwhelming and unconvincing, clearly low-budget hackwork and not the real thing. You know what violence and death is supposed to really look like, and this isn’t it.

It should be pointed out that while this can just be an amusing quirk, it can just as easily lead to serious problems. People are unmoved or outright dismissive of real events, or misinformed about how something really works (I’ve heard many horror stories of juries acquitting someone because the prosecution didn’t do some test they saw on CSI to double-check every piece of evidence, no matter how irrelevant it was to the case). It’s likely also related to the stories you hear of people walking around accidents or even taking pictures instead of doing anything to help.

Boggs clutches my wrist. His face, gray with dying and ash, seems to be receding. But his next words are an order. “The Holo.”
The Holo. I scramble around, digging through chunks of tile slick with blood, shuddering when I encounter bits of warm flesh. Find it rammed into a stairwell with one of Boggs’s boots.

This, ironically? Continuity glitch.

Boggs is holding it in his hand trying to find a position where he can see the map best when the mine goes off under his feet. It’s quite likely he’d lose his grip on it in the process, but it wouldn’t be in the same pile as his exploded legs and if the force was sufficient to jam it into a crack somewhere when it started in his grip, then the force should also have been enough to blow off a finger or two.

Also, the holo should be on because he was just using it.

Homes has the stump of Boggs’s left thigh cupped by some sort of compression bandage, but it’s already soaked through. He’s trying to tourniquet the other above the existing knee.

Oh. Well, nevermind, he’ll do fine.

See, there’s this experimental stuff we’ve got, artificial clotting factor. You slap it on anything and it forms a thick scab. Awesome stuff! I refuse to believe that they have magitech – biologically focused magitech, even – and it’s less impressive than our current technology. For that matter, I’m not even sure why only one stump is getting a tourniquet here. If there’s enough to call it a stump, there’s enough to tie.

Now, if the explosion managed to blow apart his pelvis, that’s the point I could buy this being a fatal wound. A decent bomb would have involved actual shrapnel built into it, which could easily lacerate him beyond help.

I know it’s too late. As a child, watching my mother work, I learned that once a pool of blood has reached a certain size, there’s no going back.

Bear in mind that other fatal things included “a heart attack” and “an injured leg”, because Katniss’ mother couldn’t grasp the concept of teaching people CPR or basic amputations. What’s especially annoying here is this you can make an argument for Katniss thinking this, but not for it being true because they obviously have the capability for blood transfusions.

Things like this are why I refuse to believe the theory Katniss is an unreliable narrator. Katniss is more reliable than a reliable narrator, she’s right even about statements she has no reason to know about. There is no textual distinction between her viewpoint and reality except for a few very clearly marked points.

“Unfit for command. Transfer of prime security clearance to Squad Four-Five-One Soldier Katniss Everdeen.”

And here we get our inevitable resolution that avoids Katniss having to make any decision of her own. It must be nice living in a world where everyone rolls over and dies for you.

Katniss, being one of the dumbest people to ever exist, promptly asks what he just did. Katniss, for fuck’s sake, he just said what he did! Try to keep up, would you?

Black, oily matter spouts like a geyser from the street, billowing between the buildings

Okay, this is pretty creepy! It’s a good trap – overkill, perhaps, but maybe most groups move in larger numbers? The description is pretty…

creating an impenetrable wall of darkness.

…no wait, the description is now painfully stupid. It wouldn’t even look like that. It’s “oily” which means a shine, and even without that, if the stuff is solid it’s going to look 3D, so it’s going to look more like a wall of solidish stuff that’ll smother you instead of just creepy and black.

It seems to be neither liquid nor gas, mechanical nor natural.

Um, what? You’re saying it’s shooting out in a geyser, which means it’s acting like a liquid. Maybe a gas if it’s a particularly heavy one, but the slow speed of it means there’s no point in making it a gas, it must be relatively solid and kill by trapping and smothering, because if they were trying to gas them to death they’d use something people can’t escape by just walking away. I would personally have guessed a semi-solid given how it seems to be piling up quite high while moving forward only at a crawl sufficient to run away from.

This, though, begs a new question, namely, why not just make it water? It sounds much too high to say the purpose is to trap people for capture – anyone on street level will be smothered. Water is cheap, easily available, solid enough to smash people over and quite good at suffocation, and you can’t outrun it like they do this.

Honestly, even stuff much thicker than water should still be able to move too fast to outrun. Never forget the Great Molasses Flood!

Also, not mechanical or natural? WTF? Why is this even a meaningful distinction? It’s obviously manufactured but it’s not a machine and somehow that’s breaking your brain?

Peeta looks down at me, gone, mad, flashing back into the land of the hijacked, his gun raised over me, descending to crush my skull

Oh, come on, since when is black wall he’s never seen before a trigger? The only way this makes sense is if he was programmed to respond to any threat to him by assuming he had to kill Katniss to make it stop, and while it’s possible to do that, that’s not how it’s worked so far and there isn’t any reason to do it. Peeta attacked Katniss the first chance he got, if that didn’t work the odds of him later being put in a high stress environment after being rehabilitated enough that his regular kill on sight response was lost are so incredibly small that it’s a waste of effort. The only reason he’s here is apparently because Coin is trying to kill Katniss, and when your backup plan only works if your opponents are trying to help you out, your backup plan sucks.

I mean, you could make an argument that this was actually a better idea, since if they hadn’t made him attack Katniss and be an obvious threat it’s likely Peeta would have ended up around her as a fellow soldier, and that the best time to make an attempt on her life would be when there’s chaos. And had they done that, Katniss would be dead now, because Peeta would have had real bullets and just shot her in the head.

Oh, and one of the other soldiers tries to stop him and gets thrown into a pod for his trouble.

They run into a house for some reason? I guess the idea is that the wave will go by, but given how slow it’s moving that actually doesn’t follow. It’s clearly not flowing like a liquid, so the force isn’t going to be funneled. Plus, they just shot their way in, so the door shouldn’t close.

A better option would be for them to notice the black wave either wasn’t reaching the rooftops or was just barely above them, and assume that their best bet was to go into a building and climb upward rather than continue running on the ground. This would even make sense from a design standpoint – if the goal is to trap people, then setting it up so your best chance of survival is to run into a building that’s going to end up surrounded by tar.

They’re too dumb to be thinking that clearly. Instead, they’re shocked when the windows inevitably break (the door somehow is holding?) and have to start staggering away. Apparently the stuff is heralded by fumes, not that anyone appears bright enough to put on their gas masks. Instead they just try to stuff things into the cracks in the door of the inner room they’re hanging out in.

Mitchell, who Peeta chucked into that pod earlier, is dead. His name isn’t Katniss, so people just make a quick sadface and move on.

“Don’t trust them. Don’t go back. Kill Peeta. Do what you came to do.”

And with those convenient words telling Katniss to do exactly what she was already sure she should do, Boggs just as conveniently dies. Because this is REAL unlike that FAKEY FAKE STUFF and in REALITY people say perfectly coherent sentences for their last words before instantly dying.

“We need to get out of here. Now. We just set off a streetful of pods. You can bet they’ve got us on surveillance tapes.”
“Count on it,” says Castor. “All the streets are covered by surveillance cameras. I bet they set off the black wave manually when they saw us taping the propo.”

What.

But.

If the cameras are currently running, then how can the propaganda thing work? We’re told they’re the disinformation team to convince the capital they don’t have a map of the exact location of the pods, and Boggs is fucking around with his giant glowy map of the exact location of the pods in plain sight! They assign who gets to shoot what pod!

THERE ARE NOT WORDS FOR HOW FUCKING STUPID THIS IS

I’ll get us back to camp. Give me the Holo.” Jackson reaches for the unit, but I clutch it to my chest.
“No. Boggs gave it to me,” I say.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. Of course, she thinks it’s hers. She’s second in command.

I quote this because I think it’s a good example of the low key sueism that often goes unnoticed but is quite bad.

Jackson here is making a reasonable statement, but she’s being characterized as unreasonable and snapping. The book, rather than saying this is understandable, feels more like it’s criticizing her still further with that explanation – that she thinks it’s hers. In fact, if it is true that it goes to the second in command on the commander’s death, as would make sense, then it is hers now.

But no, she says, Boggs transferred it to Katniss. Jackson demands to know why the fuck he did that, and Katniss, despite being told why he did that, starts thinking about how she doesn’t know and it’s so mysterious, kind of like how it was so mysterious what “transfer command to Katniss” could possibly have meant.

“Don’t trust them. Don’t go back. Kill Peeta. Do what you came to do.”
What did he mean? Don’t trust who? The rebels? Coin? The people looking at me right now? I won’t go back, but he must know I can’t just fire a bullet through Peeta’s head. Can I? Should I? Did Boggs guess that what I really came to do is desert and kill Snow on my own?

I will never understand why authors are so sure that the best protagonist is a moron. I don’t feel really clever for figuring it out when Katniss didn’t, I feel pissed off she’s so dumb and frustrated that we’re going to have to resolve this before the plot can continue.

Katniss defaults, naturally, to what she was going to do anyway, which luckily is clearly exactly what Boggs was trying to tell her. Namely, don’t trust anybody and go kill Snow.

But how can I justify this? Make them let me keep the Holo?
“Because I’m on a special mission for President Coin. I think Boggs was the only one who knew about it.”

jesus fucking christ Katniss I’d ask how you live with yourself but we already know the answer is because you’re a sociopathic monster.

This in no way convinces Jackson. “To do what?”
Why not tell them the truth? It’s as plausible as anything I’ll come up with. But it must seem like a real mission, not revenge. “To assassinate President Snow before the loss of life from this war makes our population unsustainable.”

What the fuck? The “truth”? It’s not the truth! It’s what you already want to fucking do, that doesn’t make it true!

Jackson, not being an idiot, doesn’t believe it.

“As your current commander, I order you to transfer the prime security clearance over to me.”
“No,” I say. “That would be in direct violation of President Coin’s orders.”

Hey, remember how Katniss’ weak spot the test was supposed to target was her refusal to accept orders?

We now have textual confirmation that wasn’t a flaw, just what 13 didn’t like about her. Obeying a chain of command and working together with others is bad, and that’s why 13 is bad. Good people lie to their superior officer so they can do whatever they feel like doing.

Unfortunately, Jackson may be smart but half the squad isn’t. Inexplicably, this means suddenly people are pointing guns at each other just because Katniss said no. I’m assuming that Katniss said no and aimed a gun at Jackson, because otherwise it doesn’t make sense things would escalate that suddenly.

Someone’s about to die, when Cressida speaks up.

So if we look past the terrible writing of this sentence we find the terrible morality – Katniss is about to let her squadmates shoot each other to death because she lied about having a mission to assassinate Snow.

But once again, gooddirectorlady inexplicably supports Katniss and like all good people lies and otherwise ignores the rules to give her special treatment to make it easier for her. She backs up Katniss’ story in a way that anyone with ears could see was a lie – if it really was true, she would have chimed in immediately, instead of waiting to speak up. Instead, she acted exactly as you’d expect someone who was trying to decide if they should support someone else’s lie.

This gives even Jackson pause.

No! No it doesn’t it’s so fucking obvious it’s a lie!

But instead Jackson finds this totally convincing. But despite how airtight “I have a secret mission you never heard about and this other person eventually spoke up to back me up after remaining suspiciously quiet for a while” is, there’s still a hole in the story. It’s Millstone.

There she has me. I can think of no sane reason that Coin would send an unstable boy, programmed to kill me, along on such a key assignment. It really weakens my story.

Yes. Because you’re lying and it isn’t true and how the hell can someone think this is heroic?

Cressida, though, spins more nonsense: “Because the two post-Games interviews with Caesar Flickerman were shot in President Snow’s personal quarters. Plutarch thinks Peeta may be of some use as a guide in a location we have little knowledge of.”

That’s not even true, okay? And it should be obvious it wasn’t true because why would Snow be filming in his own house, and even if it was filmed there Peeta wasn’t exactly getting a guided tour and I’d assume Snow has a relatively roomy place. Filming would have been done in a back corner.

That said, this does have a glimmer of plausibility because Peeta’s reason for being there in the first place was never adequately explained, so the idea it’s for a secret mission would actually explain that.

I want to ask Cressida why she’s lying for me, why she’s fighting for us to go on with my self-appointed mission. Now’s not the time.

She’s lying for you because you’re a mary sue, Katniss, and the reason you won’t ever ask is because the author can’t think of an excuse.

I should point out here that Katniss was just told to trust no one and that Cressida, helpful as she’s been, is from the capital. So she really should want to get a chance to talk alone and demand to hear why Cressida is doing this, even if it’s inevitable that even if Cressida’s evil and trying to get her caught/killed, people in this universe seem to believe any nonsense reason they hear.

Somehow, this means Katniss is now the leader.

“Lead on, Soldier Everdeen.”
I don’t know how to lead on. I look at the Holo for direction. It’s still activated, but it might as well be dead for all the good that does me. There’s no time for fiddling around with the buttons, trying to figure out how to work it. “I don’t know how to use this. Boggs said you would help me,” I tell Jackson. “He said I could count on you.”

What the fuck, book.

So she’s leader and gets it even though she can’t lead or use it? If she actually convinced Jackson, Jackson should still be in charge but trying to carry out a new mission. If Jackson isn’t in charge because she’s still not convinced there is a mission, then what they’re doing here is mutiny.

Also for god’s sake Katniss can you stop lying for two seconds?

Jackson scowls, snatches the Holo from me,

Fuck off book.

And no, this doesn’t mean Katniss has realized Jackson should be in charge. She examines the resulting map because apparently she’s making the decisions about what next.

I bite the inside of my lip, feeling everyone’s eyes on me. “Put on your masks. We’re going out the way we came in.”

Why? She doesn’t know shit about what the best way to get to Snow is, and Jackson does.

Also, see, they do have masks, they were just too stupid to put them on (or more likely, the author didn’t think the scene would have been as pretty if they were wearing them, and the way REAL FIGHTING goes is obviously everyone’s primarily concerned with how things look.)

Anyway, Pollux, the mute guy, starts signing to his brother, because the slave cast totally has an established sign language, this makes sense. Also, you may recall earlier that Katniss said he was enjoying whistling at the mockingjay because it was the first conversation he’d had since losing his speech? So either that’s an obvious continuity error or there’s an implicit one in acting like sign language is fundamentally different than communicating with people out loud, despite the fact what he’s communicating here seems to be relatively complex (the tar could have disabled the cameras by coating the lenses).

Incidentally, there was just an EMP pulse, which you’d think would be a better bet for disabling cameras.

When I gingerly test it with the toe of my boot, I find it has the consistency of a gel. I lift my foot and after stretching slightly, it springs back into place. I take three steps into the gel and look back. No footprints. It’s the first good thing that’s happened today

That’s not how I would describe reality once again tying itself into a knot for your convenience.

Why should the stuff harden up this fast? Most substances like this don’t, so it would have to be specially constructed to solidify, despite the fact that solidifying like this makes it far less effective as a trap.

A large teardrop hangs above the street. Two shapes project from it. A gun barrel and a human hand. Mitchell. I wait on the sidewalk, staring up at him until the entire group has joined me.

This is a gruesome image, but I feel like pointing out here that’s it’s possible he’s alive – the wave seems to have just receded, and it seems like the highest point would get hit last. It’s not clear quite what size this is, but we know he was trapped in a larger net and that seems to have been completely covered which means it’s possible there was an air pocket.

I bring this up because it illustrates that there really isn’t any concern for others involved here. Katniss’, and the book’s concerns in general for that matter, are simply a matter of being personally worried she’ll be hurt or annoyed at the inconvenience of the deaths of others.

On the fifth block, I can tell that we’ve reached the point where the wave began to peter out. The gel’s only an inch deep, and I can see baby blue rooftops peeking out across the next intersection.

This doesn’t make any sense. The wave is “petering out” because it’s just started to be below roof level? That’s still pretty damn high.

What’s particularly confusing is the buildings are referred to as apartment buildings, so on top of that, they should be relatively tall.

But somehow, that’s how it works. They open up a door on the petering-out block and the house inside isn’t damaged at all.

Katniss starts to have second thoughts. She’s okay taking Gale and Finnick on her suicide run (why Finnick? She hasn’t told him this whole thing is a lie and maybe he’d rather live. I mean, supposedly he’s devoted to Annie, shouldn’t he care about leaving her alone?) but not the rest of them.

The book can’t rationalize why Katniss is right to do this, so it has an explosion interrupt her. The exposition is several blocks back, where they started, and then the television turns on by itself? Despite the EMP pulse, no less.

There we are on-screen, just after the bomb took out Boggs. A voice-over tells the audience what they are viewing as we try to regroup, react to the black gel shooting from the street, lose control of the situation.

Why aren’t they showing the group fucking around with the cameras? That’s pretty damning too.

Coverage continues from the courtyard behind the apartment where we took shelter. Peacekeepers line the roof across from our former hideout. Shells are launched into the row of apartments, setting off the chain of explosions we heard, and the building collapses into rubble and dust.

Things continue to make no sense. This isn’t even genre survival, like throwing someone off a cliff, where it’s normally a pretty good idea and only doesn’t work because authors like to bring back characters. They don’t even confirm the group is still in there, the group is totally outnumbered if they are, yet they explode the place without making any effort to see what’s inside?

Now we cut to a live feed. A reporter stands on the roof with the Peacekeepers. Behind her, the apartment block burns. Firefighters try to control the blaze with water hoses. We are pronounced dead.
“Finally, a bit of luck,” says Homes.

No, a bit of people acting in a way that makes no sense but to make things easy for Katniss, even though it’s shooting themselves in the foot. They have no reason to say she’s dead without confirming it.

For that matter, the capital is currently under attack! They’ve retreated from these areas because they can no longer protect them and are fighting in other locations. Why would they bother sending in firefighters? If a fire is that big of a deal, they just shouldn’t start one.

I guess he’s right. Certainly it’s better than having the Capitol in pursuit of us. But

No. No shut up I am not going to listen to yet another rendition of how whatever happens is the newest worst thing ever.

The rebels made no attempt to break in during the broadcast, which leads me to believe they think it’s true.

That doesn’t follow. Why would the fact it’s true mean they shouldn’t try to convince capital citizens it isn’t true? It isn’t like anyone cares about the actual facts right now. They should start insisting Katniss is still alive and back at 13 just to fuck with the capital.

Gale wonders what their next move is. Uh, I believe continuing to do exactly what they were doing? The whole point of the fake death thing is just to make that even easier.

But Millstone’s woken up and he’s emo about going crazy, so he tells them to kill him. If only, Millstone, if only.