Film / Cube

Don't Look For A Reason...Look For A Way Out.

Holloway: I think we have to ask the big questions. What does it want? What is it thinking?
Worth: "One down, four to go."

Cube is a Canadian science fiction/horror film series, consisting of Cube (1997), Cube 2: Hypercube (2002), and Cube Zero (2004). The first movie is directed by Vincenzo Natali, the second by Andrzej Sekula, and the third by Ernie Barbarash.

The three movies are each based on the same premise; there is a gigantic, mechanical, cube-shaped structure (the purpose and origin of which are almost completely unknown) that is made up of lots of smaller cube-shaped rooms. Each of these rooms has 6 doors, one on each wall and one on the ceiling and one on the floor, which lead into adjacent, identical rooms, only differing by color. Some of these rooms are safe, while other rooms are equipped with booby traps that instantly kill those who enter them.

In each case, a group of strangers wakes up in this mysterious structure, with no knowledge of how they got there or why they are there. In order to escape from the prison, however, they must band together and use their combined skills and talents to avoid the traps and navigate out of the maze, while also trying to solve the mystery of what the cube is and why they are in it. However, the pressure of being in the cube usually drives one or more of the characters insane, and they start killing the others.

Cube Zero was slightly different from the original two movies, in that it also dealt with some people on the outside of the cube whose job it was to control the cube and oversee those within. It also attempted to answer some of the questions of the series.

Lionsgate is currently working to reboot the series.

Not to be confused with The Cube. A Japanese remake of the first film was released in October 2021.

---

This series contains examples of

The entire series

• Anyone Can Die: It's rare for anyone to survive the cubes, and they don't tend to have much of a lifespan even if they do. The survival rate in the series' entries is, successively, 1:0:2.
• Big Labyrinthine Building: The Cube has to be traversed to find the exit before the prisoners die. The first one has 17,576 rooms in total and the hypercube over 60 million or just one, depending on how you look at it, both filled with boobytrapped rooms.
• Closed Circle: The eponymous contraptions of the series are these. The protagonists are doomed to roam around a maze of cuboid rooms until they can figure out its particular structure and escape.
• Death Course: The Cube again.
• Dwindling Party: Reduced one by one.
• Final Girl: Used one way or another in every movie:
  • Cube features a cute, innocent girl in the cast of prisoners, but it's the mentally disabled boy who survives, apparently by being even more innocent.
  • Cube 2: Hypercube appears to play it straight, with a wholesome blonde surviving to the end but not much further — she's revealed to be a government operative who, after her de-briefing, is executed to keep the secrets secure.
  • Cube Zero plays it straight with Raines.
• Happy Ending Override: Cube ended with the Sole Survivor escaping the labyrinthine Death Course and walking into a white void before a Fade to White, leaving his ultimate fate unknown. In Cube Zero, this happens to a different character... who is then chained up, asked if he believes in God, and incinerated when he says no.
• A House Divided: Recurring plot point. In the original the booby traps only kill two of the seven characters. In the second it's the guy with the knife who goes on a killing spree, while the third has one character wirelessly "reactivated" as a supersoldier.
• Industrialized Evil: The focus of the series is on a network of giant, mechanical Cubical mazes built up of thousands of smaller cubes, some of which are boobytrapped. It's inferred that they're some way of testing human behavior under stressful conditions, punishing dissidents of the regime and/or testing chemicals and other weapons, with one captive deciding that they have no purpose but were simply the product of a senseless, secretive bureaucracy gone mad.
• It May Help You on Your Quest: Those imprisoned in the Cube have their memories wiped on How We Got Here, yet are often left personal items that help them (Leaven's reading glasses in Cube, so she can read the numbers on the rooms) or hinder them (Simon's knife in Cube 2: Hypercube, which makes him a threat to the others) or simply taunt them (Simon has a photo of the woman he was hired to find who has also been dumped in there, and a colonel is left with an empty Handcuffed Briefcase whose only use is to help him commit suicide). Unlike per usual for this trope, this is neither a Contrived Coincidence or an attempt to help them succeed.
• Locked in a Freezer: Obviously, nearly the entire Cube is a trap. There's also the added bonus of having a limited time frame to escape (before you simply starve to death or die of dehydration, that is).
• The Maze: The series entirely revolves around a mysterious cubical labyrinth filled with death traps that the protagonists must escape from.
• Malevolent Architecture: Also the whole point of the series.
• Mechanical Abomination: The Cube sometimes feel less like a maze or building, and more like an inscrutably unknowable thing that seemingly random people find themselves trapped within. While the cube is implied to be man-made, there seems to be no real purpose behind it and it just exists as a giant prison full of deathtraps.
• Mind Screw: The first movie intentionally gives no explanations for anything. The second and third movies do, but as they were written and directed by different people, they can't get the internal logic straight.
• Minimalism: There is only one set throughout the entire first film; after all scenes set in cubes of a given color were shot, the panels were replaced with a different color and another set of scenes were shot. The sequel didn't even bother with that; every room of the cube was identical, and the final set was green-screened. The third was atypical simply because it had any sets besides the cube.
• Ominous Cube: The eponymous Cube is a Big Labyrinthine Building made up of a bunch of smaller cube-shaped rooms. The entire building is one colossal Death Trap, which the protagonists are expected to navigate and escape.
• Ontological Mystery: Aside from being a basic survival story this is the major plot point of the movies, particularly the first one, although the sequels adhere to this progressively less and less.
• Sanity Slippage: Happens to everyone to some extent, but special mention goes to Quentin in the first film who goes from the calmest and most rational to a mass-murdering lunatic.
• Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere: The mazes featured in the series, doubly so the Hypercube, which is implied to be non-Euclidean space folded into a single room.
• World Limited to the Plot: Deliberately invoked in the series. The inconsistent internal logic from movie to movie is designed to eliminate the possibility of a wider world beyond the Cube.
• You All Meet in a Cell: The series has characters meeting after being mysteriously imprisoned for no known reason in a shifting death trap.
• You Wake Up in a Room: All the victims of the cube wake up in a cube-shaped room with no memory of how they got there.

Cube

• Arbitrary Skepticism: Holloway and Quentin both during their discussion of each other's pet theories on the origins of the Cube. She believes that the military-industrial complex created the place, but he points out that for the most part, government organizations are just composed of people like him, whose goals in life are to "buy big boats," not conspire. Quentin's theory is that the structure is a rich psychopath's entertainment, and the two argue over this.
• Asshole Victim: Quentin. From letting Holloway fall to her death, to actively killing Leaven and stabbing Worth, he was the only one who deserved to be in the Cube in the first place, and he definitely deserved getting crushed between the walls.
• Audible Sharpness: The Razor Wire trap gives a sharp "whoosh" as the victim is diced.
• Ax-Crazy: Quentin once he shows his true colors.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Discussed and actively defied by Worth. He reveals that he worked on the construction of the Cube, but when the other characters question who is ultimately responsible and secretly controlling and watching their lives, his theory (also very likely) is that the Cube no longer has a purpose or an owner, and is nothing more than somebody's forgotten project, being used simply because it is there, and nobody wants to admit how pointless it is. He caps it off with "Big Brother is NOT watching you."
• Bait the Dog: Quentin at first appears to be a noble cop who will lead the prisoners out of the Cube. It turns out he's actually a vicious psychopath with homicidal tendencies who cares only for himself.
  • Inverted with Worth who, though seeming like someone who doesn't care about anyone but himself and believes there is no way out of the Cube, over time shows himself to be a kindhearted man who eventually starts to genuinely care about the group and proves himself in the end to be more of a hero than Quentin.
• Big Bad: Quentin, who snaps and starts trying to kill all the protagonists when they defy him. Whomever is behind the Cube is never seen.
• Big "NO!": Holloway, as she falls to her death.
  • Worth, when Quentin murders Leaven.
• Bizarrchitecture: The film is set in a building made up of a three-dimensional moving matrix of cube-shaped cells, most equipped with various booby traps that will kill the prisoners inside.
• Blood from the Mouth: Worth near the end due to his injuries.
• Butt-Monkey: Worth is basically Quentin's punching bag who he regularly beats and throws into rooms.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: When it's revealed that Worth designed the outer shell, Quentin tries to kill him in a rage, but Leaven and Holloway both convince him that would be completely insane because he's literally the only one who knows anything about the place they're stuck in.
• Cardboard Prison: There is a character nicknamed The Wren who has escaped from seven different prisons. Sadly, he's not so lucky in the Cube.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The film includes a seemingly detrimental character, Kazan, who turns out to be an idiot savant and critical to solving the formula needed to escape.
  • Rennes seems like another pointless addition to the team who dies incredibly quickly. After he’s long dead, the group stumbles on his corpse, which is how they’re able to figure out the Cube moves on its own and they’ve been moving in pointless circles.
• Clean Cut: In The Teaser, a character is in one room when something happens. The character freezes in shock, and seconds later falls apart in neatly diced cubes. The something turns out to be a moving grid made of razor wire.
• Color Motif: Played with. The room color has nothing to do with whether there is a trap or not. On a meta level, however, the colors sometimes signify what happens within them:
  • White represents discovery. Any time the characters make some kind of discovery, it's within a white room.
  • Red represents death or distress. Kazan is disturbed by red rooms, and often characters will confront one another and fight in red rooms.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Holloway believes that the Cube was constructed by an evil government while she mocks Quentin for his own idea that it's some rich psycho's entertainment. She turns out be only half-right when Worth (who worked on the Cube) explains that the Cube is a public project with no bureaucratic oversight.
• Contrived Coincidence: The characters all end up meeting each other very quickly despite the enormous size of the maze. Regardless of whether this was intended by the people who put them in or if it's simply the writer's choice, it's this trope. The ending suggests they were just all dumped into one room from the entrance.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Alderson (who serves no real purpose in the film other than serving as a Decoy Protagonist) enters an orange-lit room from an adjacent one. When he takes a few steps a loud sound is heard, and for a while he just stands erect. He then collapses into a loose pile of bloody chunks that fall to the floor. It is only then that the audience sees a razor-wire trellis silently folding up and realizes how he has been killed.
• Cut and Paste Environments: All of the rooms look the exact same minus the colors; justified because it's a maze. The set of the first movie actually is the same room over and over, with differently colored lights. (They didn't even have the budget to use six different colors like they wanted to, so it gets somewhat repetitive. Luckily, that repetitiveness actually adds to the film's oppressive mood.)
• Dead-End Room: The titular Cube is a gigantic series of these. Some are booby-trapped while others are safe, with almost no way of knowing either way until it's too late. Escape is made all the more difficult because the rooms move.
• Deadpan Snarker: Worth. Also, Leaven sometimes.
• Dead Star Walking: The guy billed as the star of the movie and pictured on the poster gets diced five minutes in.
• Decoy Protagonist: Alderson. Most of the other characters also fit this trope at one point or another, as one of the selling points of the movie is that the viewer's perception of the characters is meant to change as the movie progresses.
• Delayed Causality: The Clean Cut in the opening scene is followed by the character standing still for a few moments before the body parts fall apart.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The chances of Quentin being in the room right next to the bridge room where the other characters are is about 20,000 to 1, considering that the rooms move around.
• Diagonal Cut: The first trap seen seems to do nothing except go "schinggg" — until the hapless victim collapses into a pile of meat dice.
• Disability Superpower: Kazan is revealed to be an autistic savant, low-functioning in most situations but also able to factorize prime power series nearly instantly in his head.
• Domestic Abuse: It's implied that Quentin's wife left him because of his violent temper, and that he was also abusive to his children.
• Door to Before: A rare movie version of this; justified because the rooms move around.
• Downer Ending: Characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all end up dying by the traps or being killed by another character, except for the lone survivor: the mentally disabled character. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.
• Dramatic Drop: Quentin drops the boot when he finds Rennes's body despite travelling lots of rooms away from where he died.
• Enclosed Space: The individual cubical rooms, which are no more than 15 feet in diameter on the inside.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: A good 95% of the rooms and at least one of your fellow prisoners.
• Evil Is Petty: Quentin starts to hate Holloway because she laughs at his theory of the Cube being constructed purely for some random, rich asshole's pleasure.
• Eye Open: The film opens with a tight close-up of a man's eye when he wakes up to find himself in the Cube.
• Fade to White: At the end, when Kazan exits the Cube and enters the white void beyond.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: As the characters stand at the exit of the Cube, moments before Quentin reappears and stabs Leaven, the sound of one of the doors opening can faintly be heard.
• Foreshadowing: Quentin's introduction is his hand covered in blood that may not be his own. Later we see him give Holloway a Death Glare that at first could be chalked up to annoyance...right up until he slaps her.
• Good with Numbers: Leaven, and Kazan even more so.
• Gorn: Many of the traps have extremely gory results.
• The Government: At the end, one character declares that the eponymous deathtrap was built by the government, but no one in the government really knows why; it just sort of organically grew out of too much red tape and "boundless human stupidity."
• Government Conspiracy: Subverted. The protagonists at first speculate that the government is responsible for the mysterious cubical death maze and putting innocent people in there. A character who is revealed to have worked on it explains that there is no grand master plan behind it and it sort of grew by itself without any oversight.
• Hanlon's Razor: The doctor's assumption that the Cube is part of some maniacal government plot is immediately shot down by the revelation that it's just a senseless project on which no bureaucrat had the cojones to pull the plug. Once the truth sinks in, she admits that's actually worse.
  Worth: Not really. Just more pathetic.
• The Hero Dies: Worth and Leaven are stabbed by Quentin.
• Hannibal Lecture: Quentin and Holloway let fly at each other when things get particularly tense. This costs Holloway's life later, when Quentin suspects from her (apparently accurate) "The Reason You Suck" Speech that she's a spy and kills her.
• Hollywood Acid: One of the characters meets his end when a trap splashes incredibly corrosive acid in his face. Death occurs within seconds.
• I Can Live With That: Upon reaching the exit:
  Worth: I have nothing...to live for out there.
  Leaven: What is out there?
  Worth: Boundless human stupidity.
  Leaven: I can live with that.
• Humans Are Bastards: The film repeatedly rams this point home while intertwining it with Humans Are Morons as the entire reason why the Cube exists in the first place. The Cube is apparently the result of a bureaucratic mix-up with separate agencies all working on different parts of the structure and putting people in it without knowing about each other's existence, then being too dumb to actually just get rid of the Cube. Everyone is part of and upholds a broken system run by incompetent and uncaring stooges and are so content to go about their own lives that they never question it. The revelation essentially destroys Holloway's Conspiracy Theorist mindset and puts Quentin through Sanity Slippage. Both end up chewed out by Leaven and Worth for their ignorance.
  Leaven: Have you been on glue all your lives?! I've felt guilty for ruining the world since I was like, seven! God, if you need someone to blame, throw a rock!
• Idiot Ball: Holloway continuing to insult and argue with Quentin after the point where it becomes blatantly obvious that he's become a violent psychopath. Generally speaking, going out of your way to mock such a man is fairly counter-intuitive to your own survival, which she unfortunately finds out to her cost.
• Idiot Savant: Kazan, a severely mentally handicapped man who, to the rest of the people trapped in the Cube, is a nuisance at first, constantly banging his head against the walls, making loud, annoying whining noises, and babbling about gumdrops. Later on it's discovered that he can easily find the prime factors of huge numbers in his head, and he ends up as both their savior and the only survivor.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How Quentin kills Leaven.
• Inventional Wisdom: Worth believes that the only reason they were put into the Cube was because it had been built, rather than to admit that building it was pointless.
• It Can Think: Applied to a structure instead of a monster, but it still fits the purposes of the trope. The protagonists openly wonder if the Cube is actually watching them and calculating.
• It Was With You All A Long: The prisoners/subjects of the deathtrap-filled Cube start out in an unremarkable cubical room which happens to be the room one door away from the exit (after some shuffling), at the very end.
• Killer Cop: What Quentin is revealed to be, as he introduces himself as a beat cop in life, but becomes a murderer when he's had enough.
• Kick the Dog: Quentin trying to rape Leaven after Holloway's death.
• Laughing Mad: Worth, briefly, upon rediscovering Rennes's dead body.
• The Load: Kazan starts out this way. He's an autistic man who is somehow able to survive in the Cube long enough to meet the other characters, especially given his knack for springing traps. Near the end it's discovered that he has a very useful skill, as he can perform the arithmetic required for navigating the cube extremely fast.
• Location Theme Naming: All the characters are named after prisons. Quentin is named after San Quentin State Prison in California, Holloway after the Holloway Prison in London, Kazan after the prison in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. Rennes is named after a prison in Rennes, Britanny, France, Alderson after the prison in Alderson, West Virginia, and Leaven and Worth after the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.
• Meaningful Echo: Partway through the movie, Quentin says, "Trust me on this. It's my job to read people like an x-ray." This is later echoed as, "Try and see what I see. How my mind works. The flash when I look into someone's head like a fucking x-ray!" turning a previously innocuous line into proof of just how crazed and delusional he really is.
• Meaningful Name: The characters themselves reflect the prisons they are named after in their personality traits. Kazan (the autistic man) is a disorganized prison. Rennes (the "mentor") pioneered many of today's prison policies. Quentin (the policeman who eventually goes Ax-Crazy) is known for brutality. Holloway is a women's prison. Alderson (who is killed before even so much as seeing another human being within the Cube) is a prison where isolation is a common punishment. Leavenworth runs on a rigid set of rules (Leaven's mathematics), and the new prison is corporately owned and built (Worth, hired as an architect).
• Mind Screw: The film intentionally offers no real explanations to what the Cube is and why the characters have been placed in it. It just developed by itself, with one architect behind it saying, "Because it's here. You either use it, or admit it's pointless," which in and of itself is pretty mind-screwy.
• Minimalist Cast: Only seven people. One of them appears only in the first scene and doesn't interact with the rest.
• Mobile Maze: The Cube is a highly malicious, non-sentient (we hope) one. Near the end, the characters discover to their horror that all the rumbling machinery they've been hearing are rooms shifting around and they've been jumping from multiple locations the whole time. The Cube is only escapable when a specific room reaches the outer edge before the entire thing locks and the room makes its next days-long journey through the maze. It's actually the very room they started out in.
• Moral Event Horizon: Quentin crosses it in-universe when he allows Holloway to drop to her death, then goes even further along when he tries to abandon Worth and Kazan, tries to rape Leaven, and violently beats Worth with a boot. It is after this that Leaven refuses to go anywhere near him.
• Nobody Poops: Averted, as at least one character takes a leak in a corner.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Quentin literally gives Worth "the boot" by beating him with it.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Quentin, now insane, gets pulled down into a cube room and left by the other survivors, who have to use the composite of their knowledge and mathematical prowess to figure out how The Cube works and avoid the traps. They manage to get to the exit, but then he shows up, kills Leaven, and mortally wounds Worth. How he managed to get there without their aid to avoid trapped rooms and to figure out the final pieces of The Cube's puzzle is unknown. Even if he did somehow get there by sheer blind luck, Leaven and Worth also don't notice him opening the door, which is quite loud and clunky. That in itself leans on Breaking the Fourth Wall. The door opening sound effect is played before Quentin reappears. Be honest, viewer: did you hear it?
• The Oner: After Quentin kills Holloway, there's a near two-minute-long single take of everyone's reactions to it.
• One-Word Title: Cube.
• Portal Cut: Non-magical variation. Quentin dies when he's trapped halfway into one room and halfway into another, right as they start to move...
• Prison Escape Artist: Rennes is a French escape artist known for getting out of prisons. Subverted when he triggers a fatal booby trap shortly after he's introduced. There'll be no easy way out of the Cube, folks.
• Psycho Party Member: Quentin.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Although there are no direct examples, it's implied that the builders of the Cube were of this nature.
  "Have you ever been to the Military-Industrial Complex? I have, it's not that complex. It's made up of guys like me. Their desks are bigger, but their jobs aren't. They don't conspire, they buy boats."
• Razor Floss: Grids of such wire are used to kill off the first character we see. Many traps in the movie are like this.
• Room 101: While never specifically revealed, there is some speculation that the Cube is one of these. Even if you manage to live through the deadly deathtraps of death, the massive psychological horror experienced within might make you wish you hadn't.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Discussed. It's eventually revealed that the giant death maze in which the protagonists find themselves trapped has been—bizarrely—built and used without a genuine purpose. One of the architects who worked on the project concluded that there wasn't a malevolent master plan behind it, it was just the result of a bureaucratic mix-up with separate agencies all working on different parts of the structure and putting people in it without knowing about each other's existence. Whether or not he's right is ultimately left up in the air.
• R-Rated Opening: The dispatching of the initial prisoner is...graphic.
• Rule of Symbolism: The mentally handicapped Kazan is the only person to make it out of the Cube alive. The meek shall inherit the Earth, anyone?
• Sir Swearsalot: Quentin. While the amount of profanity in the movie as a whole isn't particularly remarkable, the fact that about 90% of comes out of his mouth alone certainly is, especially when he nearly gets killed.
  Quentin: You fucking fuck!
• Sarcastic Devotee: A good part of the film is spent establishing Worth as a villainous character — and he is indeed eventually revealed to have some relation to their predicament — but in the end, he proves to be more heroic than de facto The Captain Quentin.
• Scary Black Man: Quentin — a police officer — starts out as the apparent hero and leader of the victimized group. However, the stress of the situation erodes his sanity, and he ends up becoming the film's biggest threat besides the dangerous Cube itself.
• Shout-Out:
  • Quentin believes that the Cube is just some rich weirdo's funhouse, like Scaramanga's.
  • As Worth is explaining to the group that the Cube isn't part of some evil scheme or government conspiracy, he tells them, "Big Brother isn't watching you."
• Sinister Geometry: The protagonists are trapped in a grid of cubic rooms filled with deathtraps.
• Sole Survivor: Kazan is the only one out of seven people to escape the Cube alive, only to disappear in a white void right before the credits roll.
• Spikes of Doom: There's a room where sound-activated spikes move out of the walls in every which direction.
• Straw Nihilist: Worth, which he lampshades. He ends up helping the others, though.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: Worth postulates that the Cube's designers don't even have an end-goal in mind with what they're hoping to get out of putting people in it. They just figured that since they had already put so much money into building it, they might as well use it merely to justify the expense.
• Take My Hand!: Subverted. As Holloway is lowered into the unthinkable abyss outside the Cube by the other characters using a rope made of their clothes, the structure shakes and everyone drops the rope. She begins to fall and Quentin is the only one who quickly manages to grab the slipping rope, almost getting pulled down himself. He then manages to pull back all of the rope and grab Holloway's hand, but just as she lets out a sigh of relief his smile turns to a psychopathic stare and he drops her.
• The Teaser: The opening scene depicts the gruesome death of an unrelated character, setting the mood for the movie.
• Traitor Shot: In the beginning, Worth gets a fairly extreme and suspicion-raising closeup. About halfway through the movie, he confesses that he helped design the Cube in which the characters are trapped.
• The Un-Reveal: The movie ends just as the lone survivor has found the exit and manages to escape. To twist the knife further, he's so severely mentally disabled that he would be unable to tell anyone what he discovered.
• Unusual Euphemism: Averted, as most characters will drop F-bombs when adequately frustrated, but as for Holloway...
  Holloway: Cats! Holy, holy cats!
• Wham Shot:
  • After Holloway almost falls to her death climbing outside of the Cube, Quentin lunges out and grabs the clothing she'd been using as a rope. He pulls the rope back up and grabs Holloway's hand; both of them are relieved. Quentin's expression then hardens. Holloway's turns to fear. He lets go.
  • Immediately after Leaven remarks "I can live with that," her face suddenly explodes into shocked pain as we hear a stabbing noise. She then rises up...because, as we soon see, she has been impaled on a sharp object being held by Quentin.
• Where It All Began: In a cruel twist of fate, the test subjects learn that the exit room is the very room they started out in, making their trek through the titular deathtrap dungeon a pointless waste of time and human life (although they wouldn't have found Kazan if they had stayed put, but then again, he might have gone off wandering on his own before everyone else woke up).
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): The group of people trapped in the death maze are quickly joined by Rennes aka "The Wren," a notorious escape artist who has gotten out of six- seven- different prisons around the world. He introduces the idea of checking trapped rooms by throwing their boots in, advises the others to focus only on getting out lest they turn on each other, and promises to get them all out of there if they can keep up. He dies minutes after being introduced due to a molecular-chemical sensor he doesn't notice.
• Writers Cannot Do Math:
  • Factoring a 3-digit number into its prime factors is not actually that difficult to do mentally; it just takes a minute, and some are easily memorized (e.g. the powers of 2).
  • Leaven, the team mathematician, also takes much longer than she should in working out if a number is prime or not, given it ends in a 5, and then factors a more difficult composite number relatively quickly. The worst case would have to be when she has to stop and think if 372 (an even number) is prime. Possibly justified, since the stress and energy spent clearly exhausts her as well as the others.
• You Wake Up in a Room: Or a cube, in this case. The characters all awaken, totally stumped as to where they are and how they got there.

---