The two kids stay by the cliff until dawn and don’t get bothered by anything else in all that time.  When morning comes, we see that the cliff is miles high and they apparently can’t see the bottom of it.

…two years looking for an exit to this maze, and clearly here we have an exit, and yet everyone gives up because it would involve climbing to get to the bottom?  Did it not occur to these kids that maybe this is the out, since they can’t find any others, they should focus on solving this?

Also, apparently they can see all the way out to the horizon but there’s nothing interesting at all in the landscape.  So…Arizona?  (I kid, Arizona is pretty.)

At least the Doors would be opening soon

There are no proper nouns for anything in this book and it’s started to drive me into a rage.  Instead of naming anything, the book just capitalizes stuff.  GOD DAMNIT, BOOK, THAT IS NOT HOW THIS SHIT WORKS!  We have actual grammar rules regarding capitalization and proper vs common nouns.  If “door” is going to be used just exactly the same as every other fucking instance of the word door because IT IS A FUCKING DOOR AND THAT’S WHY YOU CALL IT A DOOR then it doesn’t need to be capitalized!  It’s not a name!  The same goes for glade, maze, and runner.

You wouldn’t say “I need to go to the Hospital and see a Doctor about this Gash that I got when I ran into the Table,” would you?  Because if you would, you need to go back to fucking elementary school and learn your shit over again.

It’s most annoying here, when he’s using actual everyday common nouns, but it counts for made-up words, too.  “Auror” should not be capitalized, just like you wouldn’t say “my uncle is a Janitor.”  “Andalite” should not be capitalized, just like you wouldn’t say “it’s amazing how Humans are so fucked-up and yet still managed to be top-Dog.”  Just because you made up a word, that doesn’t by default make it a proper noun.

“Are there more of them? Did we just kill them all?”

Minho snorted. “Somehow we made it to sunrise, or we would’ve had ten more on our butts before long.”

…did the PTB just take out the part of your brain that lets you answer questions?  That…I can’t even make sense of that answer.  Grammatically the second half of that sentence should be dependent on the first half, but logically, it isn’t.  It’s the other way around.  They made it to sunrise because they didn’t have ten more monsters chasing them.  The whole thing is structurally backwards and even if you flip it around it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense or answer the question.

There’s some tepid mystery about how the grievers “disappeared” when they went over the cliff last night, but their only evidence for this is that they stopped making noise long before they would have hit the bottom.  Maybe they’re robots and just got “turned off,” ever think of that smart boy?  When they toss rocks over, nothing special happens.

They walk back to Alby debating if he’ll still be alive or not, because this is a special case, and then Minho says that the serum (also does not deserve a capitalization) comes to them in their weekly supplies.

And for some reason, he kept thinking of the girl.

She has absolutely no point or significance, and she’s not even enough of a character to be awake, so the book keeps tossing this shit at us to remind us that she exists.

When you have to randomly mention that something exists because you can’t be bothered to make it actually important, you’ve done something very, very wrong in your plotting.

They get back to the door and meet up with the other kids and point out where Alby is still hanging in the ivy.  There’s also some bullshit posturing with Gally.  Since not one single part of any of this has made sense so far, I still don’t care.  They get trundled off to bed for rest and bandaids, then a few hours later Chuck comes in to pass along the news that Alby is still alive and changing.

It’d seemed such a victory just to save his life, bring him back from a night in the Maze. But had it been worth it? Now the boy was in intense pain

Oh, fuck you, book. 

Thomas sits around and mopes.

But even that wasn’t as bad as the heavy emotional weight of what he’d been through the previous night.

This means exactly jack-squat to me.  Why?  Because Thomas never does anything besides sit around and mope.  His actions haven’t changed in the least.  I don’t get to see him dealing with this or – heaven forbid – struggling with it.  No, all I get are some extra words that add up to jack-shit nothing actually happening.

Struggle is the root of all character growth.  If a character is sad but doesn’t struggle, then you might as well fuck off and go write poetry.

How could anyone ever be happy in a life like this? he thought. Then, How could anyone be evil enough to do this to us? He understood more than ever the passion the Gladers felt for finding their way out of the Maze.

Uh, you could not go into the maze full of monsters.  Since that seems to be the source of all your ills.  Just sayin’.

If Newt and the others hadn’t been able to solve the Maze after two years of searching, it seemed impossible there could actually be a solution.

Yeah, but as far as we know they’ve spent the whole time making maps that become useless by 12 hours later.  They’ve found one maybe-exit and all they use it for is chucking stuff over the side.  They claim to never climb the walls in spite of the fact that they have super-ivy providing a convenient ladder.

Maybe Newt and them just aren’t really hot shit, ever think of that?

He scooped the beef and noodles

You need about 2-5 acres per head to raise cattle.  It’s highly variable depending on your environmental conditions, grazing practices, and access to supplemental feed, but yeah.  Takes a lot of land.  It’s why, until recently, beef was considered a treat and not a dietary staple.  (It’s also the #1 reason rainforests are being cut down: to make room for cattle grazing because rich people like us have come to expect having plentiful beef and don’t realize how much space it takes.) 

Point being, how big is the glade?  Are they being sent beef?  At an earlier meal, they had steak.  Is this a rare treat and they’re serving beef a couple days in a row because one cow produces a lot of meat and they have to get through it all?

Does Frypan know how to make noodles, or are those coming up with the supplies, too?  Did the PTBs send him a cookbook?

Chuck blathers on about Thomas being special.

“The ‘wait-and-dive thingy’?” Thomas asked, rolling his eyes. “Any idiot on the planet would’ve done that.”

“Don’t get all humbly bumbly on us—what you did is freaking unbelievable. You and Minho, both.”

No, for once, Thomas got something right.

They talk about the changing, which it turns out just means getting really sick until you get better.  OoooOOOoOOOoOOOooOOoo.  Also, you sometimes remember stuff and then turn into a jerk afterwards?  Either way, that’s literally the first actual proof we have that these kids have past lives.  (And even then it’s not solid; for all they know, they could be hallucinating.)

The next day they have a group meeting to talk about Thomas, because he’s just so fucking special.

Besides the chairs, there was no other furniture except for a small table in the corner.

There’s nothing, except for that one thing.  *headdesk*

WHERE WAS YOUR EDITOR, BOOK?

They sit around and talk about Thomas for several pages, which is really just an excuse for authorial masturbation as every “good” character goes on about how awesome he is and Gally sits around and fumes because he’s the designated bully.

When Gally gets his turn, he finally says something new, which is that he thinks Thomas is a spy because no one could do what he did after being around for only a few days.  The big, huge, gaping, truck-sized hole in Gally’s logic is that NOTHING DONE IN THE GLADE ACTUALLY PREPARES ONE FOR THE MAZE.  It doesn’t matter how long Thomas spends there; unless there is some sort of maze-training program than he’d be just as suited things after two days as he would be after two months.

“We can’t trust this shank,” he continued. “Day after he shows up, a psycho girl comes, spoutin’ off that things are gonna change, clutching that freaky note.

If anything, though, that should make the girl the spy.  She is the anomaly, and she’s the one being freaky, but they’re blaming it all on Thomas?  Why?  Because she’s a girl and therefore incapable of doing anything significant or involving agency?  They’re treating her like a thing, like she’s just an object to be confused over, not like she has power or significance in her own right.  Everything about her is being thrown back on Thomas, even though there’s nothing to link the two.  A boy and a girl show up and weird stuff happens; it must be the boy’s fault. 

Yeah, she’s in a coma, but if they accuse Thomas of lying about being memory-wiped, why not wonder if the girl is faking her coma?  Maybe she wakes up every night and sneaks out to go chit-chat with those spy bugs.  Maybe she’s faking her sleep so that all the boys will talk freely around her.

Basically, she and Thomas are equally suspicious, and almost equally as proactive since Thomas spends 95% of his time silent and moping, but she’s getting treated like an object while Thomas is getting treated like a person who does things.

“There’s too many weird things going on, and it all started when this shuck-face Greenie showed up.

No, weird things started when the girl showed up.  The only way that statement is true is if you attribute the girl’s arrival to Thomas, instead of treating it as an independent event, which apparently we can’t do because, you know, girls and shit.

And then Minho speaks up and suggests that Thomas not only be a runner, but the fucking leader of all the other runners, too.

Fuck me, why not just dip him in fucking unicorn sparkles and give him a crown.  The amount of fucking praise this little shit is getting for being a useless lump on a wall most of the time and a whiny little fart the rest of the time is making me mad enough to start screaming at strangers.

Also?  Being brave doesn’t actually make you a good leader.  Also, also, if Minho was the leader of the runners he shouldn’t have been out there because as it turns out you can’t actually lead if you’re too busy doing a common foot-soldier’s job.