As we near the end of the first Divergent, Tris, her father, brother and Marcus all head towards Dauntless headquarters to foil Jeanine’s plans rather than doing the reasonable thing and heading to Amity for safety and banjo playing.
Also I made this important discovery.
1) Kate Winslet was in this? WTF. [Matthew says: It was probably the best-paid afternoon of filming of her life.]
2) Unless I’m crazy, this scene didn’t happen in this book. [Matthew says: As do a great many of them.] Maybe it happens in a future one and they smushed it into the first movie? I’m going to assume that the movie just somehow managed to make Tris declaring her Divergence even more annoying and stupid. It makes me laugh every time I watch the gif!
3) I am really proud we haven’t relied heavily on the movie for gifs. But I really wish I could find an Amity playing the banjo gif. Like that would have made my day. Instead I just kept finding the above gif or ones of Four and Tris staring at each other or kissing.
Here is an Amity gif I did find:
BUT WHERE ARE THE BANJOS I ASK!
Chapter 37
Tris and the gang have to do some good old fashion train jumping. So this is what all the train jumping has been leading to! I’m so amazed by how that came together so perfectly.
Marcus makes snide comments about Tris choosing the wrong faction, but she defends her choices. I wish he’d been like, “Oh, I don’t think you made the wrong choice because of how Dauntless leaders are working with Erudite, I just can’t stand this whole train jumping business.” [Matthew says: Actually, though, Marcus doesn’t have a single line of dialogue that isn’t a snide, “Oh, HO! I bet you didn’t think of this way that I’m better than you!”. His antagonist qualities are so perfunctory and irritating, he’s like a weird hybrid of comic book B-plot villain and annoying talking animal sidekick.]
Divergent basically just copy pastes the chapter where Tris first jumps from the train to the roof, then jumps into Dauntless headquarters. Thus saving me precious precious space explaining all of this jumping nonsense.
Caleb and my father stand at the edge of the roof, their hands around Marcus’s arms. He didn’t make it, but he hasn’t fallen yet.
Somewhere inside me, a vicious voice chants: fall, fall, fall.
But he doesn’t. My father and Caleb haul him onto the roof.
Best Tris moment we’ve had in awhile. How great would it have been if Marcus had just fallen to his death and spared us the inevitable confrontation scene between him and Four.
As Tris starts to scout the Dauntless compound, she runs into a beloved friend:
It’s Peter. […]
“How are you awake?” I demand.
He lifts his head, and I click the bullet into its chamber, raising an eyebrow at him.
“The Dauntless leaders…they evaluated my records and removed me from the simulation,” he says.
“Because they figured out that you already have murderous tendencies and wouldn’t mind killing a few hundred people while conscious,” I say. “Makes sense.”
“I’m not…murderous!”
Tris is skeptical despite Peter’s very sincere and convincing protests. [Matthew says: Once again, Divergent makes me miss the “The world isn’t split into good guys and Death Eaters” theme of Harry Potter, because the world here is literally split into Erudite and Banjo Farmers.]
Peter refuses to tell Tris where the computers are that are controlling the simulation, so she shoots his arm. [Matthew says: Sometimes Tris shoots people she doesn’t want to kill in the arm, but sometimes she shoots people she doesn’t want to kill in the head! She’s… Divergent!] Unfortunately, he still won’t tell her where the computers are unless she promises to get him out alive. I can see this going two ways, and I’m not sure how I feel about either. Here is my second list for this post because lists.
- Peter stays a total asshole and tries to sabotage the gang’s every move. Optional: he becomes the piece of shit son Marcus always deserved.
- Peter redeems himself and becomes a character that fangirls everywhere swoon over. [Matthew says: Man, he doesn’t even have to redeem himself for this. Do you know how big a fangirl audience there is for Cato? The character who only existed in The Hunger Games so that somehow in a book where children are forced to fight to the death, there are evil kids who exist to root against? Basically what I’m saying is that fangirls can be idiots. But this is Bad Books, Good Times, so you all probably know about that.]
I guess it’s possible there’s a third option where he fades quietly away into the shadows of the book or falls off a roof, but I doubt we’ll be so lucky.
Tris’ rag tag gang of misfits shows up.
“Was it really necessary to shoot him?” [Tris’s father says.]
I don’t answer.
“Sometimes pain is for the greater good,” says Marcus calmly.
Oh, Marcus, you big goof! [Matthew says: Haha, Tris’s dad. “Don’t shoot people!” “Daaaaad, you’re embarrassing me!”]
“Let’s go,” I say. “Get up, Peter.”
“You want him to walk?” Caleb demands. “Are you insane?”
“Did I shoot him in the leg?” I say. “No. He walks. Where do we go, Peter?”
Damn it, Tris, I love it when you’re at your sassiest! Is sassy a trait exclusive to being Divergent or Dauntless? Where does sass fit into things in the faction system?
Tris has to get past some guards. Luckily one happens to be Divergent and lets her past. Whew. That was a really tense two whole pages.
Despite being Divergent, this guard is otherwise useless as fuck.
The guard ducks into the fear landscape room, and he’s gone.
Can Marcus and Peter fuck off that easily and quickly please? Divergent Guard #1 is setting a fantastic example here. [Matthew says: Also, that’s the last we see of Divergent Guard #1 for the rest of the book. Either that was a totally useless deus ex machina, or we’re going to find out later it was Uriah, AKA literally the only other good guy that’s left.]
Sorry to gloss over this, but Tris’s dad also dies in a blaze of glory as a bunch of guards ambush them after they take the elevator up to the floor where the computers are. [Matthew says: But in our defense, the book glossed over killing off a shitton of main characters too.] Like the vast majority of children or YA books, now the main character is an orphan which will serve to…you know…build a tragic past and serve as character development without having to do any real work to develop the protagonist’s character whilst saving the trouble of having parents in the book to do annoying things like getting between teenage romance.
Tris finally makes her way to where the computers are and…
One of the screens has a line of code on it instead of an image. It breezes past faster than I can read. It is the simulation, the code already compiled, a complicated list of commands that anticipate and address a thousand different outcomes.
In front of the screen is a chair and a desk. Sitting in the chair is a Dauntless soldier.
“Tobias,” I say.
BUM BUM BUMMMMM!!!!!!
Have you been expecting Mr and Mrs. Tris’ Parents to die almost immediately after being reintroduced to the plot? Or were you expecting them to never be seen again? Or are you like, “Tris had parents????” because the start of this book was soooo long ago.