Well, I got to hand it to these books. Unlike some of the others we covered on this blog, at least these know how to make a climax. Jeanine has just been shot before Tris can get the information she needs, others arrive in the secret lab, and Tori brands Tris a traitor for trying to save Jeanine’s life.

I mean, it doesn’t make too much sense in context, but at least it’s tense!

Tobias and Uriah storm in as if to fight a battle—Uriah coughing, probably from the poison—but the battle is done.

Earlier they said that the lab some extreme security measures, but now we’ve got four people who have passed it. Basically 100% of the people who attempt to break in are successful. Kind of makes their attempts to call it badass fall flat, yes?

Tobias comes into make it an argument about trust again, and at least Tris verbally slaps him down for him not trusting her and then daring to make that argument. Although I still think there was far too little talking in this book for this narrative to pay off. I mean, she tried to convince him…what, once? Way back at the start when it was just Marcus’s vague (vaguer) comments.

Tris is hauled off to sit with the other “war criminals” and I get the feeling the book doesn’t really understand what that means. I mean, it’s possible that these people who have never been in a war don’t really know that such a term carries pretty specific charges. I guess they could, in their exuberance, claim everyone who fought them is a “criminal” during a “war” thus “war criminal” instead of “enemy combatant.” That makes a hell of a lot more sense than assuming that there’s just so very many war criminals already identified 12 seconds after the end of a one-sided curb stomp.

Uriah takes Tris through the building where they see much destruction and smashed computers (so, yeah, I guess that was their “destroy information” plan. Then again, the Erudite aren’t that smart, so maybe it worked.) until she gets to hang out with Christina and Cara in a room full of “ some of the Erudite who didn’t get away, and the Dauntless traitors who survived.” So, yeah, garden variety enemy combatants.

I mean, the Dauntless aren’t any more familiar with war that the Erudite are with backups, so of course they don’t know the terms.

They sit around for a while, just chillin. Tobais comes in to grab Caleb and make him ‘disable the security’ around Jeanine’s personal computer. How a guy who’s been in the faction all of…what, a month? can handle that, I don’t know. I mean, it just seems like there should be someone around with more experience. But hey, Tris became a master marksman after 3 hours of training, right?

Really the problem here is that the book isn’t willing to have enough one-off characters and thus it keeps recycling people into tasks they shouldn’t be able or likely to do. So we can’t have random “Jeanine’s assistant” doing the computers, we need Caleb. We can’t have random Dauntless person guarding the Candor divergents, we need Peter. It’s all in the name of keeping the cast size small, without realizing that these roles do not require people with complete arcs; they are one-off roles and it’s okay to give them to random people.

Hell, the book managed to kill off Fernando in a second, but it can’t make Erudite Lady in the Bathroom a computer wiz?

They spend a while pointing out that Jeanine’s security simulation doesn’t make any sense according to the rules of their own universe, but I find that hard to care about when they tend to change the rules on a whim. I’m sure the rules will just change once again to accommodate this latest chicanery.

Uriah comes in with Lynn, who has been shot in the stomach. He starts screaming at a one of the doctor Erudite’s to fix her, and the doctor does make a willing effort, but after she sees how bad the damage is she turns to cooly reminding Uriah that they, for some reason, set all the hospital floors on fire and this is the consequence of pulling shit like that.

I might be more shocked if only the factionless/Dauntless hadn’t been astoundingly stupid already. As it stands, this isn’t much of a revelation. “OMG, you mean if you set fire to everything that gives us technological progress and comfort, we won’t be able to still use those services? WHAT CRUEL TWIST OF FATE IS THIS?”

Lynn wakes up just long enough to tell everyone she was a lesbian and then dies. Because of course. We can have lesbians in a YA story, just make sure they’re not living or happy!

Later Johanna, Hector, and Tori have a meeting in front of Tris, so that our viewpoint character can report on it. That’s about the only reason I can fathom for why they’re doing this. Tori isn’t happy that the Amity people were out and about and “getting in the way.”

“Yes, that was intentional,” Johanna replies. “Since getting in the way meant standing between guns and innocents, and saved a great number of lives.”

I’m digging Johanna. She and the Bathroom Lady should meet up and trade dry remarks.

Color fills her cheeks, and I think it again: that Johanna Reyes might still be beautiful. Except now I think that she isn’t just beautiful in spite of the scar, she’s somehow beautiful with it

About fucking time.

Tori announces that there’s going to be a new political system in which the Amity will be subjugated, getting no representation but being forced to still grow and provide food. This is their “punishment” for not picking a side during all the fighting.

Look, I’m kind of glad that Dauntless’s fucked-up-ness is finally getting to be outright evil, but why is it every time a faction’s extremitude becomes bad there’s a woman delivering the news?

“I didn’t think so,” says Johanna. “Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.”

And exit Johanna, pursued by applause.

Tris notices that somehow the factionless got all the guns, and then Evelyn comes out to lay out her “I’m a woman in charge, therefore this is going to be ominous” plan. She announces that the faction system is no more, and anyone who wants to argue with her about it is going to have to do so sans-firearms.

“I have not been starving for more than a decade just to give in to a Dauntless woman with a leg injury,” Evelyn says. “So unless you want me to shoot you, take a seat with your fellow ex-faction members.”

Even though the tone so far is “mwahaha evil,” she seems pretty reasonable. She even got all the guns through pure low-level deception and she’s only doing it so the people who fucking gleefully repressed hers won’t be able to do so again.

“Those of you who resisted us will be tried and punished according to your crimes.”

God, not this again. I swear, ever since they said the words “war criminal” I’ve had such deja-vu for Mockingjay.

Then Tobias comes in quietly and sits next to Tris and tells her that they found the secret info, which then begins playing on screens all around the lobby and interrupting Evelyn’s (probably) completely reasonable speech.

The info is a video of a woman talking about how her organization is fighting for peace but can’t win because *random images of violence that probably don’t shock any of the people who just had to shoot zombified civilians.*

This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for—to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence.

Well…you sure are trusting, to believe the stranger on a video who is vaguer even than Marcus and gives you nothing but stock footage that for all you know could have been gathered from centuries of filming history.

The lady in the video says that they are the “cure” to human nature and thus have been kept separate from everything. The sign that these people have finished their…IDK, gestation or whatever they’re supposed to be doing, is that the Divergent will become abundant and then they need to come out of isolation and help everyone else. How? Who knows. The woman says once she’s done recording she’s going to amnesia all her past and become part of the experiment, taking the name Edith Prior.

Is the fact that she’s Tris’s ancestor important at all? No, of course not. I’m sure it was just slapped on there because the author thought she needed to keep a cap on the number of names she could use.

Well, that’s it. We’re finally done with Insurgent. And no, I will not start Allegiant right away, no matter how much you people have cackled and anticipated. I need a break.