History Headscratchers / TheMazeRunner

** Indeed, given that the outside world ''is'' so dangerous, with fear and grief already a routine part of life for everyone living in terror of plague and Cranks, why was isolating the Immunes deemed necessary to study them at all? Why couldn't they simply rig a bunch of Immunes with monitoring equipment, leaving them with their families, and then track their brain patterns' response to the stresses that pretty much everybody is coping with, anyway? No need to build a huge Killzone to observe young people under siege from monsters when the rest of humanity ''already is'' living under siege from monsters.

** ...Let's imagine that you're a teenage boy. You wake up in a box at the bottom of a hole. When you climb out, you're somewhere you don't recognize, surrounded by people you don't recognize. You eventually find out that everybody's memories have been erased and you're forced into living like subsistence farmers despite at least having a general idea of what the modern world has to offer, and you're clearly being monitored by people who have sufficiently high technology to remove your memories and create robots/cybernetic monsters, the former of which they have helpfully labeled with the word "Wicked," and while they are giving you supplies, they deliberately choose to give you little to no luxuries. Your surroundings are clearly artificial (what with the zero precipitation), and you rely entirely on your apparent kidnappers for water and light, which they can shut off at any time. All around your new home is a shifting maze that has the aforementioned cybernetic monsters, all of which want to either tear you to pieces or dose you with a poison whose cure drives you temporarily psychotic and permanently depressed, randomly meandering/flooding it depending on the time of day, and you have to also rely on your captors to shut the doors at night to keep them from flooding in and killing you at their leisure. All in all, it's not surprising that one of Thomas' early theories is that they might all be horrible criminals who have had their minds wiped and the Glade and the Maze is their prison. There's a reason why the standard response to waking up there is to spend a few weeks bawling your eyes out and refusing to participate until you start working just to keep from thinking about the situation, or why they delegate their best and brightest to the task of running through the monster-infested maze looking for a way out.

* everyone discovered that these children were immune, and the world just started putting ALL of their resources into building multiple giant mazes? how long did that take? wouldn't it have been hard to accomplish with the outside world being so dangerous? with there technology, why couldn't wicked come up with a less time (and resource) consuming way to test the limits of those kids?

** It's the difference between begging for death and suicide -- it may not look like a huge leap from the outside, but it's much easier to be a DeathSeeker than to commit suicide. Likewise, the Cranks still recognize ''each other'' as sufferers -- it's those who don 't have a slow death by excruciating dementia in their future that attract their ire.

* This is a movie only one, but if grievers only come out at night, and no one has ever survived a night in the maze, how exactly did the person who attacked thomas near the beginning get stung by a griever? Made stranger by the fact that the gladers recognized it as a griever sting. Also, they specifically say no one has seen a griever and lived. He did die, but it wasn't as immediate as the phrase implies.

* In the movie why did Minho keep trying to drag a stung Alby back to the glade? Not only did he himself get locked out of the glade but had he made it to the glade wouldn't Alby have been forced back out into the maze like Ben? There is such an emphasis on rules, especially by Gally, and they didn't have a cure yet so there was no reason to bring him back.
** Alby is their respected leader. People ''will'' break rules to protect a good leader, especially when their other options are leaderlessness or tyranny (if, say, Gally had seized control).
* In the film they only remove the brain from the creature, and leave the rest. Surely some of that metal would have come in handy for something!

** Alby is their respected leader. People ''will'' break rules to protect a good leader, especially when their other options are leaderlessness or tyranny (if, say, Gally had seized control).

* In the movie why did Minho keep trying to drag a stung Alby back to the glade? Not only did he himself get locked out of the glade but had he made it to the glade wouldn't Alby have been forced back out into the maze like Ben? There is such an emphasis on rules, especially by Gally, and they didn't have a cure yet so there was no reason to bring him back.

* Didn't WICKED know it's name was really bad publicity?

* ''Why'' did the Gladers want to leave in the first place? They constantly talk about surviving, but most of their time their lives are free from conflict or any real problems. They live comfortably and get supplies weekly, so the possibility of them starving to death or dying from thirst isn't a very likely one. Also, they all get their memories wiped, so none of them know what lies beyond the Maze, which effectively ruins the whole motivation they would have for wanting to get out of there. I'd understand if they remembered things about the outside world and wanted to get back to their friends and family -- but the thing is, they ''don't.'' Plus there's the mess with the constantly changing Maze and the Grievers...why not just stay put in place? Is it really worth all the effort?

** In retrospect, this makes chancellor Paige's interference less of a [[HeelRealization Heel Realization]] and more of a moment of her grabbing the [[SanityBall Sanity Ball]].

* What they were looking for were brain patterns. As far as i could tell, the immunity lay in the way their brains worked differently to non-immune people, since the virus' main symptom was insanity. They don't actually need the subjects alive to study these patterns, and in some cases them dying would give them patterns they may have never experienced. This is why Theresa betrays Thomas, because she understands the need to get these brain functions and thus cooperates in making him feel betrayal.

** Ropes? How about some freaking ''ladders''. There's wood everywhere in the glade, and the Gladers are obviously skilled with building. Okay, so you can't clime the walls themselves, but why not make something that can lean on the walls? The possibility is never even brought up.

* Why did an organization capable of engineering entirely non-human creatures find it so hard to isolate a simple immunity? Not to mention that the techniques used were scientifically dodgy to begin with, given that their precious cure-carrying kiddies could have been killed by said inhuman monsters at any time.

** Actually, the movie seems to remove the ambiguity. Yes, the attack was planned. Everything, except for maybe how good Thomas was at leading a group of people who had no reason to trust him, was planned.

** The way I see it, based on the movie, is that the rescuers were a contingency plan. Since the plan was to send one child every month, they wouldn't have sent Thomas and Theresa in so close unless they knew they were running out of time. They sent Thomas in, the attack happened, and they rushed Theresa while their barriers held. This would explain why Theresa remembered Thomas and her name: the memory-erasing process wasn't complete. They planned for someone to be there to 'rescue' the survivors of the Maze, but who it was specifically that 'rescued' them didn't matter.

In the end of the novel, the gladers are rescued by a group of people and taken to a dormitory. However, the memo in the epilogue states that it was part of the plan. Does that mean that the 'rescuers' were working for WICKED? If so, did it mean that the attack was faked? If not, how did WICKED plan everything in advance so that the timing was so perfect that the attack happened just as the everyone exited the maze?