The series has some of the grimmest and most serious moments and scenarios Gordon Korman has ever written, but there are occasional moments of great levity.
- Aiden marvels at how another inmate at the juice center, a hacker, launched a devastating multi-state cyberattack but is unable to open a bag of chicken feed.
- In the sixth book, after a snooping detective is attacked by a guard pig, he orders all of the pork food he can at the local diner and explicitly describes this as revenge against the pig. The counter man treats his story as an Unusually Uninteresting Sight.
- Every time Aiden thinks up a new survival plan based on one of the Mac Mulvey books their dad wrote, Meg goes along with it but keeps reminding him that those books and the survival tricks in them are made up. During the Big Damn Reunion in the final scene, their father ends up agreeing with Meg, saying that he made up all that stuff and is horrified that someone (let alone his kids) actually did it.
