Last time on Mockingjay, they take to the sewers and wake up to something, or somethings, whispering Katniss’ name in the tunnels. Unfortunately all possible suspense and creepiness has already left ages ago.

At some point, they realized that they had been tricked. And President Snow can’t tolerate being made to look like a fool.

Except they weren’t tricked, all the group did was walk out of the building during the relatively extensive lag time between the trap going off and the peacekeepers finally showing up. And as a result of this, no one made Snow look like a fool but the idiot ball he insisted on carrying around.

Katniss notices Peeta, who’s still asleep, is whispering along with the whatever it is that’s in the tunnels.

here is proof of how deep Snow’s poison went. “Katniss.” Peeta’s programmed to respond to the hissing chorus, to join in the hunt. He’s beginning to stir. There’s no choice. I position my arrow to penetrate his brain. He’ll barely feel a thing.

Here’s a nice second that Katniss isn’t perfect. Of course, Peeta isn’t really possessed, as makes sense because really, why program him to do this? Seriously. He actually wakes up to yell at her to run.

A less nice thing is that, yet again, Katniss’ first impulse is to shoot to kill.

This is admittedly consistent. But it highlights that it doesn’t make sense she’s kept him alive this long. Either Katniss is willing to risk her life by keeping him around, or she isn’t. Before, they were dealing with him by restraining him and Katniss refused to kill him when he said he was going to go nuts again. Now, she’s ready to shoot him preemptively, without even attempting to restrain him.

Katniss says that since these things are looking for her, maybe they should split up. That’s quite a few leaps of reasoning. First, the hissing thing is obviously a psychological attempt on her, it doesn’t mean whatever the things are they’re actually focused on her and not killing everything, just like the fact the humawolves wore collars labeling which tribute they were didn’t mean they were actually made out of dead tribute. Next, even if their primary goal is Katniss, that doesn’t mean they’ll pass up a chance to kill someone else. Third, they’re likely not the only threat, so even if they split up and the rest of the group tries to retreat, they’ll just be running into peacekeeper areas. Fourth, she yet again isn’t offering them the map, so they have no real chance to escape on their own.

“But we’re your guard,” says Jackson.
“And your crew,” adds Cressida.

Jackson brings up point five, which is that, supposedly, Katniss is on a super important mission and their job is to get her there. There isn’t even a pretense of guilt from Katniss this time.

Then Cressy brings up point batshit. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for someone to mention that they’re dragging untrained noncombatants, but not surprised it’s ended up acting like filming is somehow useful, because that fuckery has been going on for the whole book.

I look at the crew, armed with nothing but cameras and clipboards. And there’s Finnick with two guns and a trident. I suggest that he give one of his guns to Castor.

Okay, why does Finnick have two guns and a trident? Why bother with his magic trident if he can use far superior guns, and why give him two either way? Is he dual wielding here?

And great, now you’re handing guns to untrained noncombatants, can’t see how this will shoot you in the foot. Then she gives out her and Gale’s guns because any excuse to let people use their magic bows.

We leave the room free of everything but our scent. There’s no way to erase that at the moment. I’m guessing that’s how the hissing things are tracking us, because we haven’t left much of a physical trail.

And 110% reliable narrator again. There’s no evidence whatever it is is tracking them at all. All they know is it’s in the tunnels with them. If it was tracking them, then given the acoustics of the place it could be zeroing in on the fact they won’t shut up, or there could be surveillance cameras and they’re just going to that location (you might ask “but why the hissing if they know where the group is?” Because when has Snow done anything that makes sense, that’s why. But it actually might be an okay idea, since they seem to have been in a relatively defensible room and this is getting them to leave it for the corridors again.).

But Katniss has just referenced the fact they’re being tracked without there being any reason for her to know that, so clearly, they’re being tracked and it’s by scent, nevermind how little sense it makes to do that in sewers.

The mutts’ noses will be abnormally keen, but possibly the time we spent slogging through water in drainpipes will help throw them.

If you’re actually concerned about this, start slogging through the actual sewage, idiots.

Incidentally, Katniss says she figures these things were released underground where Boggs’ body was, which means there was no scent trail there for them to find. They’d have to be able to pick up trace scents in the air itself, to find a trail hours old and blocks away in the middle of a sewer.

Oh, and if these things actually traced by scent, it makes no sense not to just have them track from where the body was and follow it into the sewers instead of Snow just guessing that’s where they went and putting them down there.

Outside the hum of the room, the hissing becomes more distinct. But it’s also possible to get a better sense of the mutts’ location. They’re behind us, still a fair distance.

So he released them in a single area, rather than at various points so they could box the group in. For further convenience, that means that running away from the things means moving further in the direction they were already going.

Also, you may recall the entire area is mined with pods that Katniss’ group avoided, so their hunters have to get through that gauntlet first.

My mind wanders to the wolflike creatures in the first arena, the monkeys in the Quarter Quell, the monstrosities I’ve witnessed on television over the years, and I wonder what form these mutts will take. Whatever Snow thinks will scare me the most.

No, whatever Snow thinks will work best. He’s trying to kill you, he has no reason to do a flashy shock and awe campaign against corpses. Especially when the capital has almost lost and doesn’t have the resources to make something new just for her. (And, possibly, the time. It’s quite likely the humawolves in the original games were made in advance, intended to be released on whoever survived for the final climax, rather than that they’re able to manufacture a human sized intelligent creature from scratch in a matter of hours.)

Anyway, Katniss thinks that they might be able to make it to Snow’s place before whatever it is catches up with them, which just highlights why dropping them way back there was so stupid. They get three blocks down before screams begin. Thick, guttural. Bouncing off the tunnel walls.

You know, I’m starting to be bothered by that description. I’m pretty sure screaming is mostly done in the throat, not with the tongue. That is, these screams should really sound like regular screams. And I just don’t like the “think, gutteral” thing the book keeps coming back to, because that’s the sort of description you use to indicate animal or subhuman sounds.

And, of course, they’re dying for no reason but Katniss’ stupid revenge attempt.

(And on a meta level, they’re dying for the cause of Katniss being emo. This area should have been evacuated. These people are capable of communication and they hate the capital, you would want to get them away from areas you’re about to lose to the rebels. And if you didn’t think of this, you’d still want to evacuate them before releasing the hunters, because as we’re seeing right now, they’re slowing down whatever it is when those things are supposed to be focusing on getting Katniss.)

here I am again. With people dying because of me. Friends, allies, complete strangers, losing their lives for the Mockingjay.

Oh fuck off with your martyrdom. How on earth can you make people dying needless deaths all about you? And Katniss’ “solution” to this? It’s to offer again to split up.

This actually could work, in a sense. Katniss is thinking they’ll be able to get to Snow because the creatures will stop once they get her. It’s the part where she’s offering as if it’s some sort of response to the fact other people are dying right now that pisses me off. It isn’t doing anything about that, and despite the fact Katniss just mentioned it, it’s clear she doesn’t actually care in any meaningful way.

Katniss freaks out because she starts to smell roses. So these things that are tracking by scent in a sewer also reek of flowers so strongly that the smell overpowers sewage? In fact, it overpowers sewage even with just the tiny fraction of it that’s preceding them in a area that has little airflow.

I really hope we’ve hit the bottom on just how stupid this can…

No, wait, how the fuck did Snow have time to manufacture special rose-smelling monsters just for her?

Okay, but now that had better be the bottom. I don’t know how this whole smell sidetrack can get worse. There just isn’t room. It’s hit bottom and it’s dug until it hit bedrock. There is no more room.

I swerve away from the smell and stumble right out onto the Transfer. Smooth, pastel-colored tiled streets, just like the ones above, but bordered by white brick walls instead of homes. A roadway where delivery vehicles can drive with ease, without the congestion of the Capitol.

Thank you. This really should have been what you said originally instead of that the trucks drove through the sewers, but better late than never. This is refreshingly sane.

I swing up my bow and blow up the first pod with an explosive arrow, which kills the nest of flesh-eating rats inside. Then I sprint for the next intersection, where I know one false step will cause the ground beneath our feet to disintegrate, feeding us into something labeled Meat Grinder.

Jesus book. It’s like you’re trying to make me feel bad about every bit of grudging praise I give you.

Instead of a rant on what ridiculous overkill this all is, I’m just going to point out that rats already eat flesh. Snow, this is why you don’t let the Department of Redundancy Department have a say in the pods.

I plan for us to skirt around the corner and then detonate the Meat Grinder

Why would you do that? You’re being chased by monsters, wouldn’t you want to leave the traps in place and hope they trip them?

While she’s concerned with this, they hit an unlabeled pod.

the wide shaft of golden light that radiates from ceiling to floor. Inside, Messalla is as still as a statue, poised up on the ball of one foot, head tilted back, held captive by the beam. I can’t tell if he’s yelling, although his mouth is stretched wide. We watch, utterly helpless, as the flesh melts off his body like candle wax

Okay, if they can do that, why didn’t they set it to go off over the entire street instead of one tiny area that’d only kill one person, the way the meat grinder thing is supposed to work?

In fact, why is it possible to bypass the meat grinder thing? If you’re supposed to be in the area, they should have turned it off. It’s not like these are regular landmines where you need a map for your allies because once they’re in you can’t do anything about it. The only reason to have a hidden safe path is because you want someone to steal your design plans and give the rebels a chance to get through safely.

But then, it’s hard to really get worked up when the answer to every question is “but if they cared about practicality, they’d just have set up some guns to spray the entire area with bullets.

Suddenly, peacekeepers appear! Like all good videogame foes, instead of using cover or anything they run into broad sight before attacking, and they’ve gone to the Stormtrooper academy for their aiming skills. They shoot most of the squad (about twenty people) dead immediately, without getting hit once.

we’ve still got six original members of the Star Squad

You mean the bunch of soldiers picked to be fake fighters instead of doing anything useful. Clearly, an unbeatable group.

Then we finally find our monsters.

They are white, four-limbed, about the size of a full-grown human, but that’s where the comparisons stop. Naked, with long reptilian tails, arched backs, and heads that jut forward. They swarm over the Peacekeepers, living and dead, clamp on to their necks with their mouths and rip off the helmeted heads.

See? They’re wasting time ripping open corpses when they could be continuing on. Why would you make something like this? It’s so pointless. Also, if they attack everything, what happens after they get Katniss? Then more resources will have to be wasted on killing them instead.

Of course, also pointless is releasing something human sized that lacks any way to attack its opponents but its teeth. Snow has brought lizards to a gunfight.

Apparently, having a Capitol pedigree is as useless here as it was in 13.

Actually, Katniss, a ridiculous proportion of the higher ups in the rebellion appear to be capital folk. The entire propaganda department at the least, and they seem to be calling most of the shots. Patriarch seems like the second most powerful person in 13.

Anyway, while shooting peacekeepers armed with guns is no problem, clearly shooting lizards is beyond their sharpshooter skills so Katniss orders them to run. Then she compounds this idiocy by immediately triggering the meat grinder trap as soon as they’re past, turning it from a trap that might have killed all the lizards in one go to a barrier that’ll slow them down for a few minutes as they find a way around.

I’ve talked about the books being written on a TV level, but this book fails even at that. You couldn’t even film this, the plot hole is right there in the visuals.

Katniss then makes this worse by saying she thinks it’s possible it won’t slow them down even that much: The wolf and monkey mutts I’ve encountered could leap unbelievably far.

The humawolves did not display any super jumping powers, just regular, believable levels of far.. And the monkeys being good at leaping made sense because they had to leap between trees. But somehow, apparently, human sized lizards have legs like springs.

Oh, and Jackson and other redshirt stay behind to shoot at the lizards.

So, chosen one narrative. This has been an underlying problem for some time, but this is where it gets blatant.

Besides the fact Katniss’ entire mission is fake, the behavior of the group is of the chosen-one macguffin type. That is, it doesn’t matter how many people die protecting the macguffin person, because their value is above anyone else’s. In fantasy, where you can say that someone really is the only one with the power to do X and that without them everything is doomed, this can work if handled carefully, and even then plenty of fantasy fucks it up.

But here? Here, there’s some supposed mission. Katniss has given no explanation for why she’s vital to it besides the fact she knew about it. We see that several other characters have knowledge that’s vital to their success – knowledge of the capital, knowledge of the sewers, knowledge of the map. Meanwhile, Katniss is the one everyone’s focused on, and apparently she in particular is the one being hunted, so if she’s caught the rest of the group has a good chance of succeeding. Instead, two people just died for the cause of Katniss getting to be the one who kills Snow.

Why? Because she’s the chosen sue. No other justification given.

I get a good look at them. A mix of human and lizard and who knows what else.

That’s stupid, book. Look, I tolerated the humawolves – well, okay, no, I said they didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t challenge the basic concept of combining people with wolves on a biological level. I mean, at least they’re both mammals. And it was, at least for this series, relatively reasonable to do something that really only worked on a psychological level because the games were all about getting a reaction. But what exactly is added here by making them part human? It sure as fuck isn’t brains, because all they do is rush blindly toward Katniss.

Lashing out with tails and claws, taking huge chunks of one another or their own bodies with wide, lathered mouths, driven mad by their need to destroy me.

So Snow deliberately designed something that, the closer it got to Katniss, the more it would tear itself apart. Jesus, why didn’t he just go all the way and make them have heart attacks from the excitement whenever they got within twenty feet of her?

She says her scent must be driving them nuts just as their scent is so repulsive to her.

Bear in mind their current location:

crawling through a tight, stinking pipe onto a ledge about a foot wide. We’re in the main sewer. A yard below, a poisonous brew of human waste, garbage, and chemical runoff bubbles by us. Parts of the surface are on fire, others emit evil-looking clouds of vapor.

But no, they can still smell it.

Thanks, book. You managed to make this even dumber.

I’m honestly impressed.

They’re mortal, but only just. No natural thing could keep coming with two dozen bullets in it.

They’re sharpshooters, why are they just shooting indiscriminately at the center of mass? Shoot them in the head. This isn’t hard.

Also, how many bullets do they have? They started off doing a bunch of fake shooting, then they shot all over the street during their escape to try to trigger mines, then they shot peacekeepers, and now they’re pumping twenty+ bullets into each lizard.

Also, they’re sharpshooters, nothing was said about being armed with automatic weapons so how are they even able to spray bullets everywhere like this?

Also, come to think of it, why aren’t they using those energy beams we heard one reference to back in book 2? Seems that’s a plot hole because we’ve seen nothing but bullets otherwise.

Oh, and their ability to take a lot of bullets has nothing to do with being natural or not. There are plenty of animals which have thick skin and relatively few areas where a bullet will hit something vital. I wouldn’t be surprised if a regular alligator took quite a few bullets to stop.

No mutt is good. All are meant to damage you.

Well aren’t we obnoxious.

Genetic engineering is a wonderful and versatile thing. Occam’s razor suggests that the capital labs are probably behind the presence of things like chocolate and similar items that the current America relies on trade for. It’s likely also the only way 11, however large it is, could be producing such a large variety of foods when its climate is limited. (11 is southern and warm, but many plants require cold to grow properly.)

We also know that Snow’s roses are genetically engineered, and for all Katniss’ endless flipouts over this fact, that’s really not an evil thing. And the fact she suggests that immediately instead of, say, that he’s just using regular perfume and also has a rose on him, means that genetically engineering plants for minor purposes is quite common.

Perhaps Katniss is drawing a distinction between genetically engineered animals and plants. But that’s a meaningless distinction. We’ve seen one example of an engineered plant, nightlock, and Katniss’ book one comments about only eating plants you’re certain you recognize supports the idea that the gamemakers have a wide selection of invented toxic plants they fill the area with. And certainly Haymitch’s arena was full of engineered plants as well as animals.

Some take your life, like the monkeys. Others your reason, like the tracker jackers.

You killed two people with them, Katniss.

Anyway, Katniss finally has a panic attack and freezes up, because the memory of one guy talking to her is more terrifying than everything else she’s been through, and the smell of it is too much.

They hustle her up the ladder. But Finnick doesn’t make it and he’s torn apart. Huh. Why was he even here in the first place? We know Katniss doesn’t care about the people she left behind because Katniss doesn’t care about people, and Gale is there because he wants to get into Katniss’ pants. But supposedly Finnick was really concerned with protecting Annie.

I’m assuming most of the team will be dead by the end of this. Either Gale will nobly sacrifice himself and clean up the love triangle that way, or Gale will survive and it’ll turn out he’s evil. Everyone else is expendable. Well, maybe not the camera team, Katniss might need them later.

Katniss drops the holographic map down into the sewer and sets it off.

Hunch against the wall with the others as the explosion rocks the platform and bits of mutt and human flesh shoot out of the pipe and shower us.
There’s a clank as Pollux slams a cover over the pipe and locks it in place.

…why wouldn’t you close it after dropping the bomb down there?

Also, if they can pack that much explosive force into a tiny device that’s mostly devoted to a different job, why isn’t anyone just carrying regular grenades too?

And why didn’t Katniss just use an explosive arrow?

Anyway, Peeta’s losing it, so Katniss kisses him and that fixes him so he doesn’t go crazy.

So then they climb the rest of the way out into the utility room that is, as you recall, inexplicably stuck in the middle of someone’s apartment. The reason for this nonsensical writing decision becomes clear when the apartment’s owner opens the door and sees them.

Without hesitation, I shoot her through the heart.

Katniss, you’re without hesitation every damn time.

In a good story, one written where casual murder was actually condemned, this could be a powerful moment. It would come as a climax. The character would start off killing when they had no other choice and having a great deal of trouble with it, but it slowly would become more and more normal to them. Slowly, classes of people it’s okay to shoot on sight would be created – first they hesitate even when they’re being attacked, but then they learn to shoot back as soon as someone shoots at them, and then to fire at any sign of the enemy, before the other person has engaged. And then, once they’re used to shooting people like the peacekeepers on sight – they see a random civilian about to shout, and fire without thinking.

There’s no chance of that here. It’s not that the book is simply failing to portray this, it’s that the book does not even recognize why anyone would think this way. It even tells us Katniss is justified here.

First, it describes the woman.

She wears a bright turquoise silk robe embroidered with exotic birds. Her magenta hair’s fluffed up like a cloud and decorated with gilded butterflies.

She’s ridiculous, but opulently so, with silk and gold. She’s just there to be hated. Don’t think this is supposed to be a sign we should be disgusted by her?

Grease from the half-eaten sausage she’s holding smears her lipstick.

See? She’s tarted up but she’s stuffing herself on fat-filled greasy sausage, and this has ruined her makeup – as usual, the book manages to both condemn women for dressing up and condemn them for not looking appropriately pretty at all times.

The expression on her face says she recognizes me. She opens her mouth to call for help.

And, having established she is an evil fallen capital woman not deserving of sympathy, we show why Katniss had to kill her. See, the bitch was trying to alert everyone! Katniss had no choice but to shoot her. It wasn’t Katniss’ fault, she wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for how the woman made her.

If the book means anything at all by saying Katniss doesn’t hesitate, it’s praise for how Katniss has grown as a character enough to know that was the right way to think.