I suppose I've read worse. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So the fifth wave, it was, well, it was pretty popular back when it first came out, and it's not hard to see why, you know. It's a little bit different from most of what was coming out before, and this is just the first one. Now I set the other two back here, don't worry. And I, you know, it was different. It was not quite all the, or not quite the same as all the dystopian crap that was coming out around that time, and it was still kind of similar, though. Like it still had a teenage girl protagonist, it was still primarily an action-adventure story, and it still dealt with a different society than the one we have today, but, well, that's because the society in this is completely gone. I will say right off the bat that this is probably the best example of great, great ideas. I really mean that.  And you won't hear me say that very often just because, well, it's not really saying anything. And also it's raining outside, I don't know if the mic picks that up, but, uh, and, well, I just remembered I need to talk quieter, so, yeah. Just saying that something has good ideas and bad execution really doesn't mean anything because most stories in all forms of media have good ideas and it always comes down to the execution. Like, it's very rare that something will have just bad ideas and that's why it fails. And the fifth wave is, well, I mean, more than anything I'm just disappointed in it. And, uh, well, enough talking around the issue. This is about a teenage girl named Cassie who lives in Ohio, in the United States. And one day this alien ship appears basically out of nowhere and starts floating around in the sky. At first people are, you know, scared, but the aliens don't really do anything to them so they're thinking, okay, we can deal with this. But then, uh, it hits the whole world with these a successive, a succession of attacks. There's the first wave, which is where it just sends out an EMP which knocks out almost all the technology throughout the world. Then there is the second wave, which is the ships drop these giant tungsten rods onto the faults in tectonic plates and it causes massive earthquakes which then cause massive tsunamis which just wipe out almost all the coastlines all over the world. And there is the third wave which is just a flu, or not flu, a virus that goes around and kills pretty much everyone that's left. When the book starts they're in the midst of the fourth wave which is, uh, just aliens have apparently taken over human bodies and so you don't really know who to trust anymore and the human alien parasite takeover or hybrid, whatever you want to call them, are going around killing folks. And as the title oh so subtly implies, this one starts off right before the fifth wave really gets going. Now, I will say that even though I didn't read this back when it first came out, I kind of wanted to because the covers for it are really solid. The marketing for it is really solid. The titles are attention grabbing and I just never got around to it. And it was only over, uh, the next couple of years that I kept hearing about it that I thought, oh, that sounds like it's pretty bad so I guess I'm not that interested anymore. So a couple of months ago I announced I was doing this after I got through, you know, throwing up glass and House of Night and some other stuff and just out of curiosity I watched the movie and it was really bad.  Those are pretty solid and Chloe Grace Moretz's performance as Cassie is also pretty solid other than that, it's just crap. So basically I knew the story of the first book at least in broad strokes because there are a couple of changes from book to film but after that I was going in totally blind and well, shit, there's no more talking around it, let's just get right in here. Now the book starts with a prologue which sounds fine at first but, uh, well it kind of gives away a major part of the story. Intrusion 1995. There will be no awakening. The sleeping woman will feel nothing the next morning, only a vague sense of unease and the unshakable feeling that someone is watching her. Her anxiety will fade in less than a day and will soon be forgotten. She will not awaken, neither will her husband beside her. The shadow falling over them will not disturb their sleep and what the shadow has come for, the baby within the sleeping woman, will feel nothing. The intrusion breaks no skin, violates not a single cell of her or the baby's body. It is over in less than a minute. The shadow withdraws. And that goes on for just about a page but it's pretty clear just from the beginning that okay the aliens are taken over human bodies and at first that doesn't seem like a major spoiler or anything or like it gives away anything but people who have read the book or seen the movie know that later on a character enters the stage who well is pretending to be human so the readers from the beginning know that he's not and that he's lying. You just gave away a decent, what could have been a decent twist, 200 pages before it actually happened and that's not the only time this book does this. But you know what, whatever, after this it goes to part one of the book and part one follows Cassie's POV because this book is split into like 10 different parts I think and every time it enters a new part it switches to a different POV. It switches from first person to other characters in first person to third person and well it's kind of clunky but I'll get more into that later. The first line of the book where you introduce the main character and really get a chance to show off her personality and show her shine, that's very important obviously. So how does this book introduce Cassie?   No contest. No, I'm talking about the aliens inside our own heads. The ones we made up, the ones we've been making up since we realized those glittering lights in the sky were suns like ours and probably had planets like ours spinning around them.  You've seen them a million times, they swoop down from the sky in their flying saucers to level New York and Tokyo and London or they march across the countryside in huge machines that look like mechanical spiders, ray guns blasting away and always, always. Humanity sets aside its differences and vans together to defeat the alien horde. David slays Goliath and everybody except Goliath goes home happy.  So right after that Cassie, it's revealed is hiding out in the woods after the world has already kind of been destroyed and she goes searching for food and water in an abandoned convenience store. And while she's there, she finds this guy who's dressed as a soldier and she, he's asking for help. He's wounded, at least he says he's wounded, and he has his hand under his jacket clutching at his stomach. It's not really in frame, but you know, under his jacket clutching at his stomach and she tells him show me your hand, show me your hand, and she has a gun on him and he starts pulling it out and she sees a little blint of metal and she thinks he's pulling out a gun. She shoots him and then afterwards she sees it's a cross. Now this is a good moment and actually in the movie I think it's a pretty great moment mostly because of Chloe Grates Moretz's acting. She really, I'm surprised she's not hunched over from carrying the entire film on her back really. But here's the thing. In the book it just started off with that like tongue-in-cheek, silly description of the aliens meant to show off Cassie's personality and how, oh I'm so quirky and funny and amazing. Sorry, it's like 90 degrees in here and I was just trying on all those hats so I'm really hot right now.  It feels like, okay the story's gonna be somewhat lighthearted and not all that serious and then it immediately goes into, oh, okay, I just murdered an innocent person and everyone I know and love is already dead. They don't really fit together that well. What makes it even worse than that is that it kind of keeps cutting back and forth between Cassie in the store with the soldier and flashbacks to her life before and it cuts back and forth between this and her remembering when the alien ship first came and recalling some of the waves and then back and forth and back and forth and so the structure of it is just confusing and I mean even if you set that aside this is just incredibly overwritten. At one point it spends a page and a half describing Cassie's backpack and its contents but even worse than that is just here's the scene where Cassie shoots the guy. The stunted light kissed his bloody hand and flicked along the length of something long and thin and metallic and my finger pulled back on the trigger and the rifle kicked against my shoulder hard and the barrel bucked in my hand as I emptied the clip and from a great distance I heard someone screaming but it wasn't him screaming it was me screaming me and everyone else who was left if there was anybody left all of us helpless hopeless stupid human screaming because we got it wrong we got it all wrong there was no alien swarm descending from the sky and they're flying saucers or big metal walkers like something out of Star Wars or cute little wrinkly ETs who wanted to go pluck a couple of leaves eat some Reese's pieces and go home that's not how it ends that was all one sentence by the way and it it's only describing I saw a glint of metal in his hand I pulled the trigger and shot him you could do so much more with so much less like it could have been a pretty impactful scene if it had been like quick and simple which I'm not gonna try and compare this to the movie too much but honestly as bad as the movie is it does a lot of things better than the book does not everything but a lot of things and in that case it was very quick and to the point which granted it can be a little quicker just because it's a visual medium but nonetheless all it does is show the guy see the glint of metal shoot and then see oh it's across oh shit and like you get the picture so yeah then we go back to flashbacks in earnest right and at this point it stays in flashback mode for a while which is good because flopping back and forth more than that is really annoying and when Cassie is describing how the other ship first arrives I did like that there's a decent like sense of dread about what's gonna happen who is this gonna hurt who's this gonna kill and it's even worse because you already have seen ahead and you know oh shit things are things are gonna get bad so like I said Cassie described the various waves in succession the first wave where all the technology gets wiped out and she describes how a plane crashed nearby when the when the EMP went off and I I mean I don't think that's how it would work I think if a plane already had forward momentum it would just glide for a while before it crashed but whatever and then there's second wave which is earthquakes and then third wave and the fourth yada yada and so while it's doing this it does still cut back and forth a little bit but just not as much as it was before and Cassie is going around by the highway and she gets shot by a sniper and we know or at least we assume at this point that it is an alien possessing a human body Cassie hides under a car and then eventually at the end of all the flashbacks and everything she comes out but let's focus on the flashbacks for now so like I said she was a pretty normal girl she had a crush on this dude named Ben who is not actually shown at this beginning part but he becomes important later and the way they decide to show that she has a crush on Ben is to show her going on a date with another dude after the ship arrives and them not really having any chemistry which is I mean it's a very awkward scene but it's also awkward on purpose so I guess I can't fault it too much but you know average normal girl lived with her mom her dad and her five-year-old brother named Sammy and after the first two waves you know shit is getting real and they're you know gathering up supplies and all that and then the third wave her mom dies she dies of the virus but her her dad and her brother are presumably immune because they just don't get sick there are a couple of people who get sick and get better but most of the time if you get sick you're you're just start counting down from there so after her mom dies her her dad and her brother head out to a refugee camp and I feel like this scene went on too long okay we get it's a bunch of ramshackle huts put together people are banding together gathering up weapons just to protect themselves and staying away from the aliens or human bandits or whatever that makes sense but it spends like 20 or 30 pages on that and it just you really don't need to now at this point the book isn't well it's not bad per se but the structure is horrible like I kind of described thrown a blast the same way where you have a bunch of pieces of a good story there like all these pieces individually are fine but the way they're assembled just it does not work very well at all there's also a really awkward bit where there's a 13 year old boy there and Cassie who is 16 has to keep putting off his advances like he keeps saying hey are you a virgin because I'll have sex with you and it's just it's just kind of unpleasant so anyways after they're at the refugee camp for a while the military shows up they're from right Patterson Air Force Base which I looked it up that is a real base and they're led by a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Bosch who is played by Lee of Shriver in the movie which admittedly he's great but he doesn't really do anything in the first book or the first film for that matter but still it was nice to imagine him playing this as I was watching this so you know it could be better but anyways the military shows up and they say hey we're here to help we're here to get you out of here because we think this camp is gonna get attacked so they brought on they brought in some vehicles which were either shielded or repaired from the EMP and at first they say okay we can only we only have enough room to take the kids under the age of 15 or 16 and so Sammy has to go off by himself and Cassie and her dad stay behind now this is one of the things that the book actually did better than the movie because in the movie it's just Cassie stepped off the bus for a minute and then it goes off without her so we have this really cheesy scene of her running after it with her hand out like no don't where isn't this it's just yeah we don't have room for you so wait here we'll come back so all the remaining people the military tells them to gather ups because they have announcements to make and all that and when they're all gathered up Cassie notices that the 13-year-old kid who was hit and honor is gone and so she's like oh hey where'd he go and Colonel Vosh tells another soldier like hey go with her find that kid we need everybody here and so he goes off with her and he's actually in front of Cassie most of the time and as soon as they get to the latrine where the kids hanging out or the latrine the ash pit where they have all the dead bodies burned the soldier just immediately shoots the kid with his back turned to Cassie remember and then she in a haste just pulls out a gun that she had and shoots him this is a really really really really really dumb moment you don't turn your back on someone if you're gonna kill them and as this is going on Cassie here's a bunch of other gunshots from back at the camp and so she runs up and she doesn't go right into it she's still hiding back in the woods but she runs up she sees her dad is shot and he's crawling away but before she can go to him he looks at her and just goes no don't and then Colonel Vosh comes right up and shoots him in the head kills him and once all the adults are dead the military people bring out this weird futuristic looking bomb which they call the eye and it's pretty clear from the beginning that oh this is alien technology and so we the audience immediately know oh shit okay these soldiers are controlled by aliens which is I mean I mean it's it would be better if I didn't already know it but anyways they set off the bomb and Cassie in order to escape hides among the dead bodies and it's the first action scene but it's also like over in a page so you know nothing right home about so Cassie is on her own her dad is dead her mom is dead her brother is missing somewhere and this is another area where the movie handled it a lot better than the book did because the movie it's made pretty clear right away Cassie just says in her narration okay my brother is at right Patterson he's with the aliens I don't know what's being done to him but I gotta go save him so she immediately sets off to go and find him and then that's when she ran into the convenience store and found the soldier dude who was innocent that she accidentally killed in the book she says that she wants to go after Sammy but then she also mentions that she's camped out in the woods in the same spot for several weeks so okay I feel like those are contradictory like that's something an editor should have gotten like he should have said hey you mentioned at a couple of points that she's been hiding out in the woods for weeks would wouldn't it make more sense to just have her be hiking through the woods when she runs into that dude and then later runs into the sniper would that make more sense hello anyone so by that point it catches up to the present where Cassie is still hiding under the car where she was shot by the sniper and as a brief aside at one point she mentions that he must have a high-powered sniper she got shot in the leg by the way and at one point she mentions that he must be having a high-powered sniper rifle and I'm just thinking girl if he had a high-powered sniper rifle you wouldn't have a leg anymore but you know whatever not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but you know it ends with her popping out of the car and running off and then it cuts to part 2 Wonderland and it cuts to a different characters first person POV now having watched the movie I already knew that this was Ben the girl that she had a crush on but in the book I realized about halfway through this first chapter of this part where it's in Ben's POV I realized that it hadn't told us what his name was yet so this was just some dude you know we we didn't know it was Ben we didn't know it was someone Cassie knew it was just some guy who has the plague and is hiding in a refugee camp not far outside of right Patterson Air Force Base and he later gets better from the plague maybe you could have done something with that where maybe at the end of a chapter it's like oh by the way Ben and you're like oh okay it's that guy but like I said he's literally never shown up in the book before this point so what when when you realize it's been it's more of an oh really now that's okay that changes nothing but what's even worse than this is that this part is pretty long and it's just Ben's POV for a while and it so it takes us away from Cassie's story which was just starting to get kind of exciting like imagine if one fourth of the way through Harry Potter like just as he's arriving at Hogwarts it suddenly switches to Dudley's POV and that it's about his adventures and you know maybe Dudley's adventures are great but it's not what we were invested in before so it's just really clumsy this is what I mean when I say it has horrible structure and all the pieces are not put together well it's just horribly clumsy so anyways Ben through some clumsy exposition explains that his whole family is also dead they were killed by some human marauders who came to their house they killed his mom his dad and his younger sister who coincidentally is around the same age as Sammy and I mean this is kind of a good character bit like where he feels like he failed because he ran away and he wasn't able to protect people that were depending on him but at the same time that's kind of all that is to there is to Ben's character like he really never evolves past that and as annoying as Cassie's over-the-top quirkiness gets at some points when it's from her POV Ben's POV has no personality whatsoever so Ben after he's all healed up from the plague he hears some fighting inside Wright Patterson Air Force Base and then the soldiers come out to the refugee camp and they start saying hey guys come come on with us come on in and the people inside there they tell them that this is pretty clearly alive they tell them oh some other soldiers were controlled by the aliens which they're called the others in this which is just really lazy like just come up with a name dude doesn't have to be a good name but something that isn't just a noun with a capitalized first letter so Ben gets basically conscripted as a soldier which makes sense because they're facing a massive manpower shortage they they mentioned not long after this that 6.98 billion people have died which means there's about 20 million left in the entire world so okay that makes sense and then they I feel like this could be good but like because we the audience already know that okay yes these guys are aliens these guys are others it doesn't really mean much so basically Ben gets a tracker put in him and they can script him and there's like a bunch of big science saying foreshadowing and stuff like that and then they have a computer program called Wonderland which they tell them that it oh it's a program that we got from the others but I feel like that would be a hardware issue rather than a software issue and anyways it just reads all his memories and cool another weird bit is that Colonel Wash like personally goes up to Ben and asks him to join up and I'm just thinking shouldn't someone lower ranking be doing that um okay and again it tries to make Vosh seem like a friendly dude like yeah he's on his side but we the audience already know that he's an alien at this point and later on in the book it's treated as like a big twist when Ben realizes oh shit I've been working with the aliens this whole time but we the audience know that it's given away like over 200 pages before it comes so that's not even a twist at that point basically Ben's part ends with oh okay I'm gonna start training and then we get to part three which is from the Snipers POV sort of it's in third person POV which as an aside I just really hate when they switch between first first and third person POV like it's very clumsy like here's the thing it's mentioned that Cassie has a journal at multiple points and so at first when I was reading I just thought oh okay like this is her journal you know like uh obviously it has more detail and everything that than a real journal would have but you know you sort of suspend your disbelief for that sort of thing like uh the serp to freak series for example was done using this uh narrative idea I'm not sure what the uh this framing device let's call it uh and it worked out fine it just was mentioned a few points that Darren writes in a journal and it's all from his first person perspective so we know okay the series is from his perspective uh another kind of similar example is in the king killer chronicles it's just both telling the story to somebody else so when it's all in first person we know okay he's just talking like this and you can suspend your disbelief for that you know that it wouldn't actually have this much detail in real life but you can just you can get over it it's fine but when you switch not only between multiple characters but between first and third person it just makes you question it like you're not supposed to question it but doing that forces you to do that so anyways the sniper who shot Cassie um has apparently been stalking her for a while and reading her journals so like he knows about who she is and all about her life and everything that's led her up to this point and apparently he loves her as well which is um okay and so we get his entire backstory all at once and his name is Evan by the way it's not really a spoiler because you find that out not long after this but yes his name is Evan Walker and apparently he was a normal kid for like 13 or 14 years and then his programming uh kicked in one day and he realized oh i'm an alien inside a human body um okay sure and now he's like working with the with the others and killing people the way he's supposed to but he's having pains of conscience and well we already understand him and we know that he genuinely does care for Cassie so when he uh tracks her down where she's uh falling into snow and then brings her back home and patches up her leg and everything there's no tension when maybe there should be even if Cassie is scared of him we the audience know he's fine you know he's not gonna hurt her or anything and this is another thing that the movie did better it showed uh it didn't give us Evan's inner thoughts it just showed Cassie waking up there and she doesn't know can i trust this guy or anything so then we come back to Cassie and she wakes up in his house with her leg patched up and she's kind of horny over him because what's more romantic than being shot am i right and i feel the need to bring up here this isn't the only time it happens in this book at all but in fact it happened before this and it happens a bunch of times after but it seems to have a very hollywood idea of atheism where people only stop believing in god because of tragedies in their life and there's like oh god did bad things therefore i don't believe anymore and i'm just that that's not how it works most of the time guys like that's still believing in god you're just angry with him because you think he did something bad to you most of the time atheism is just oh i don't believe in god you know i looked i looked at the facts and everything and it just it doesn't convince me that that's how it usually works so we we just go through this whole uh rigor marole where cassie is being rehabilitated because you know you can't just patch up your leg after it's been shot you gotta do some physical rehabilitation to work back up to where you were before and well that's the main thing that happens in this part of the book like evan and her argue a little bit but well that that's about all although there is one really cringy sex scene let's read it he lifts me into his arms i seem to float upward forever like when i was a little girl and daddy flung me into the air feeling as if i just keep going up until i reach the edge of the galaxy he lays me on the bed i say right before he kisses me again if you kiss me again i'm going to knee you in the balls his hands are incredibly soft like a cloud touching me i won't let you just he searches for the right word fly away from me cassie sullivan he blows out the candle beside the bed i feel his kiss more intensely now in the darkness of the room where his sister died in the quiet of the house where his family died in the stillness of the world where the life we knew before the arrival died he tastes my tears before i can feel them where there would be tears his kiss i didn't save you he whispers lips tickling my eyelashes you saved me he repeats it over and over until we fall asleep pressed against each other his voice in my ear my tears in his mouth you saved me at first when i read that i was like not even sure if they had sex which is a common thing in young adults like you can just say someone had sex like you don't have to get into graphic description of it but when you're so flowery with the language like that it's it just becomes confusing and uh also again what's even more romantic than being shot being in a room where someone's family died and actively thinking about that while you make out with them and while they suck on your eyeball so then we have a way too long part where like i said it switches to a different part every time it goes to a new perspective it really didn't need to do that like if this book had just been in third person the whole way which i really think it should have been uh then it could just switch to different characters now and again and it wouldn't be confusing you wouldn't really think about it but anyways we get 25 pages uh following sammy where it's third person present tense and it's kind of confusing because i don't like third person present tense it just feels awkward but that's just me some other people can get over that and anyways he's recruited as a soldier which is it um okay he's like five years old i'm not sure what he's gonna do and i know child soldiers are a thing don't get me wrong it's just that the military conscripting people who are like 15 16 17 i totally buy because in this they actually do full-on train them to do stuff they don't just give them a gun and say yeah go go fight which is how child soldier training usually goes with sammy he's again he's five he's too small to carry most of their equipment for starters or to use it properly and he's not mentally or emotionally developed enough to properly well properly learn anything like it's mentioned at a couple points later that he doesn't even remember how to read so how you gonna train him to do all this and they also uh mix kids up by age like they don't just have a bunch of 15 year olds uh working in one unit together they have like 17 year olds like ben working with five year olds like uh sammy and then they have kids all in the middle too like you really think a five year old is going to be able to keep up with the rest so anyways uh yeah sammy is assigned to ben's unit ben is the sergeant and they just go through a whole bunch of training uh the instructor man the instructor in this is really stupid because it feels like it genuinely does feel like ricky enci just watch full metal jacket and saw the uh all the yeah what sort of boot camp scenes he saw all those and he just thought oh okay drill instructors are supposed to horribly abuse people and the more they abuse them the better soldiers the tougher soldiers they'll be and that's not how it works at all the idea is to break them down and then build them back up so that they just will follow your orders all the time and you know obviously there's some other stuff in there like teaching them how to shoot and stuff but this drill instructor is like actually physically abusive like he will hit them and will scream at little kids who I just want to mention again they're not emotionally and mentally developed enough to handle that like hell a lot of adults can't even handle that that's why people wash out of basic training but if you're 18 19 joining the military you can you understand that okay this is nothing personal he's just training me to be better whereas if you're a kid you're gonna think oh okay he's just being mean to me you're it's not gonna work well so anyways they introduce another character named ringer to the team and she's a girl who is she's described as Asian in the book she's very blatantly not Asian in the movie but you know let's let's not open that can of worms and anyways she's like super hashtag edgy super hashtag badass and she helped their team climb up in the rankings because all the different units are ranked based on their performance and it's mentioned that apparently only high ranking teams graduate which is um but that's really dumb like okay it makes sense if you're talking about like an elite cadre of soldiers like if you want the absolute best of the best then you could do something like that you take all the different groups of soldiers that volunteered to try and be the best of the best and you can say okay only the top four are gonna make it through here so do your best and then they compete against each other and it would probably help them whereas these kids are supposed to be normal soldiers like as long as they can complete the training what does it matter if they did better or worse like if they really weren't fit to be soldiers they wouldn't complete the training at all god i am there there is so much this is this is so much god i hate it so anyways after they complete their training uh vosh comes up to ben who remember is the sergeant and he basically tells him hey we captured someone who has an alien in their head and we read their mind using the wonderland and there's going to be a bunch of them over in Dayton which if you don't know that's a city in Ohio and uh so ben is thinking okay yeah we're gonna go kill some aliens and then it cuts to cassie so yeah every time it starts to get exciting it just cuts away to another character so cassie is still with evan still on his uh farm still uh getting better from being shot in the leg which remember evan did that to her god that's so stupid i mean the one good thing i can say about her and evan's relationship is that he's age appropriate for her which is surprisingly uncommon in young adult stuff but uh you know whatever and cassie at one point is starting to get suspicious of him which again there's no tension there because the audience already knows that one evan is an alien and two he means her no harm he really is on her side because we got to be inside his head and look through his perspective you can't like you could have easily just cut out that chapter and whatever so cassie just eventually decides to trust him even though she finds her gun that she dropped by the car in his barn and she thinks how could he have gotten this and he's just like oh um i uh i i i i found it and she she believes him basically there's enough content for one chapter but it goes on and on and on for way too long so ben and his squad go on a mission minus sammy because he's just too young you know that which makes sense you know he's like five years old but at the same time they're sending in kids that are like eight so never mind so they have these uh magical uh eyepiece things which when they look through them they can see whether someone is infected by an alien or not it glows green and uh things go bad while they're on the mission they wind up cornered uh they get shot at a bunch and uh ringer uh in because she's suspicious she cuts the tracker that they implanted in her out of her neck and then her head lights up through the eyepiece so they realize oh okay this isn't actually telling us who's an alien it's telling us who isn't wearing these trackers these people are just humans and then she literally just says we're the fifth wave which is stupid but the thing is like i said this isn't a twist because it was given away 200 pages ago and for that matter if they're already going to use human soldiers and they already have people that are high up in the military why didn't they just turn countries against each other before the invasion even happened like wouldn't that soften them up already kill a bunch of people uh strain the infrastructure break down society a little bit couldn't that no all right so then their drill instructor shows up and they kill him and he has this uh little switch with him and uh bend and ringer go to the others and they tell them what's going on and they tell them hey uh we think this button's a kill switch if if we push it it's gonna set off the tracker so we need to cut those off and then there's one kid that doesn't believe him so he pushes the button and kills himself and i guess this is supposed to be serious but honestly i just started laughing hysterically imagining that so they know that they can't stay anymore but sam is also still back at the base so ben decides okay you know what uh we're gonna i'm just gonna go back i'm gonna tell all of them that you guys were all killed and i'm the only one left and then i'm gonna grab sammy and we're gonna go then we cut back to cas and evan again and they agree to leave um his house and then he apparently is lurking outside her room while she sleeps which is again creepy and like all young adults see books that start a female protagonist at this time cassie has a haircutting scene where she metaphorically gives up her childhood and grows into a new person cool anyways she goes back to the refugee camp uh where her father was and where everybody died so that she can pick up the trail of where sammy went but they literally told you where they were taking him cassie are are you that stupid are you that fucking stupid so they're attacked by some soldiers who are you know kids just like ben and all the rest and evan kills all of them because he's like a superhuman and that's the thing about the people that have the aliens inside them it's not they're not just mentally different they're also physically crazy over the top they have crazy reflexes super strength uh they heal really fast that sort of thing and uh so cas finally realizes or cassie excuse me finally realizes that oh he's an alien and he admits the truth with no detail okay he admits that he shot her but he doesn't say anything else he doesn't tell her about what's going on he doesn't tell her about how hey i i just had this in my head ever since i was born but i don't want to be that way anymore i i care about you i want to protect you he just says yeah i'm an alien and then cass leaves and then he chases her down and he won't let her leave cool one small dumb thing that i want to mention is that every time in the series when they're describing aliens being put into someone's head uh it's not really a physical thing you know it's not like a physical little leech or slug or anything that went inside their brain it's just like they uploaded a program into it which is kind of cool and actually evan mentions that the aliens the others no longer have bodies they uh uploaded all their consciousnesses into a mainframe which is on their mothership up in the orbiting earth and okay that sounds cool and all but um they they refer to it as downloading a program onto their brains and it's uploading guys when you're sending information to someone else it's uploading god this is this is so long okay so cassie infiltrates the base by just pretending to be a kid who's uh running around by herself and uh they think that she is younger than she actually is she mentions that she's pretty uh she mentions that she looks younger than 16 to begin with and she also mentions that with her haircut she could pass for 12 and she tells them that she's 12 and they believe her now i don't want to read too much into this but that's also kind of a point of this well of this long ass in-depth review if she looks 12 years old and evan is attracted to her what does that say about evan so then it goes back to ben who is uh at the base in the hospital uh and he's also trying to get samuel while at the same time cassie is trying to get samuel and i should mention that as this is going on cassie is constantly remembering instructions that evan gave her because apparently he already knows how to infiltrate and he already knows most of what's going on so he literally just gave her an instruction guidebook and for the most part she just follows that to the letter and that's what gets her out so cassie really doesn't have any agency in this bit even though she's the main character and even though she's doing stuff she's just doing what she's being told to do so it's not that interesting and this is another thing that the movie did well because at this point she had just broken off from evan and he had actually stayed away from her and she managed to infiltrate and do all this by herself and you can say maybe it's unrealistic that she's able to do all that sure i i wouldn't doubt it but at least the main character had agency and was doing stuff so cassie finds sam and ben and she looks at him she's like wow ben i don't remember that but uh okay cool whatever and sammy and she's like oh i've missed you and they hug and have a little reunion and then vosh starts destroying the base um why? evan makes it sound like if he thinks that it's gonna be captured or something then he would have a self-destruct ready to go which would make sense but if it's literally just a couple of prisoners escaping that feels like throwing your car out with the bathwater and then the recaptured and vosh gives a villain monologue and he mentions how ha ha i was always watching you because i don't know we have to have him do something in this fucking book and evan then shows up and apparently he hacks into the mainframe all right because he's a hacker now whatever uh and then they manage to escape they meet up with the ringer and the rest of the squad and then the base blows up and that's the end of the first book now it's bad but it's far from the worst thing i've ever read and it does have potential especially at the beginning like i like the idea of an apocalypse in progress you know we don't see a whole lot of those uh at least we don't see a whole lot of those that are anything other than zombie uh and you know bringing up these aliens who are like so far beyond us that they can do all this crazy shit and you know cause earthquakes and break out all our technology without even trying they make for an intimidating force like they're not even really a villain they're a force of nature yeah there's just it never really does much with that the climax is okay i will say while they're going through the base and all that that's okay it's not great but it works and um i guess the waves are cool but really this story again just like thrown a glass is a simple story that's trying to be told in a complex way and as a result it winds up being a muddled mess like i said this should have been just third person so you're not going back and forth and being confusing and it also should have just focused on cassie because here's the thing her storyline gives away the big twist moment of ben's storyline and we know that he's okay so there's not really any tension about something bad gonna happen to him is something bad gonna happen to sammy there there's none of that there so i think if they had just focused on cassie and just focused on her journey going from uh the refugee camp to right patterson which is it is pretty far away i think she mentions it's over a hundred miles or something i i actually don't remember and i can't be bothered to check but she it would take her a while to get there and she's going through very dangerous terrain so the book could have just focused on her going through that and uh maybe occasionally cut back to ben and sammy and you see that they're going through all this training and everything and you know like oh shit those are the aliens something bad's gonna happen like there could be little bits of tension in just a couple of chapters but trying to spread it throughout it just doesn't work and plus if you just cut out the prologue and cut out a few other bits then you wouldn't be giving away twists hundreds of pages before they happened because that's the thing dramatic irony it that's when uh the audience knows something that the characters don't that can be used effectively uh it can be used very effectively like if uh we the audience and cassie saw the soldiers kill everybody at the refugee camp and we know oh those are aliens and then we see them training ben and sammy then we would know oh they're working for aliens and it would be kind of tense it's horribly it's horribly structured that's the end of book one let's just go on so now we move on to book two which is the infinite seat and i just want to say that this book is the shortest out of all of them like the fifth wave is around 450 pages uh the last book is around 340 this one is 300 pages exactly and it still took me the longest to get through like the other two books i read in two days this one took me almost a week so we have a prologue where some unnamed strangers uh who are also survivors of all this uh they die and it's really super sad and stuff and then we cut to ringer's pov which is you know great another one another first person pov to keep track of another reason that i wish this just focused on cassie is that she has a little bit of actual personality in her narration and stuff and granted it lays it on thick at times but uh after the beginning of the first book it's not quite as bad after that and ringer and ben have very little so they're hiding out in this hotel and winter is coming and uh ringer is out on patrol and she thinks about how she loves ben because there must be romance obviously and then uh one of the other soldiers a kid named teacup is out there and uh she accidentally shoots her and she realizes oh okay um this is bad well i should run off to the aliens because they can help her and my friends can't if you wanted to have ringer get captured then just have her get captured like having her accidentally shoot someone just makes her look like kind of a dumbass so then we cut to cassie and all the rest and cassie tells sammy that uh their dad is dead and i thought this was an okay scene not great but it's okay uh and she also hates ringer because i guess women are catty i guess which really sums up the emptiness of her relationship with evan it really does because she hates ringer mostly just because uh she gets attention from ben and cassie you know she had a crush on ben for many years before the story starts and so she feels like oh i own him or something and it just it's it's dumb it makes it seem like she doesn't actually love evan even though that's supposed to be one of the emotional cores of the story by this point i had been wondering actually since pretty early on in the book or the first book why the aliens hadn't utilized more effective ways of killing all the humans like maybe they could have made an even better virus or uh it makes sense that they wouldn't just use nuclear weapons or anything because that would damage the planet and presumably at this point they wanted to colonize it at least that's what i was assuming because we don't really get much explanation before this and it's mentioned by evan that apparently they want to destroy humanity's humanity um okay sure and evan also apparently loved cassie before he met her because he was stalking her and evan runs into another uh silencer which is another alien with a human in or a human with an alien in their head uh her name is grace and they've actually known each other since before the arrival and apparently the silencer's purpose was just to herd humans into specific killing grounds like a rape patterson and if the silencer is supposed to do that then why would they bother using kid soldiers at all like um and for that matter why have they bothered killing most of the humans this way like if they can just download themselves into human head upload upload themselves into human heads they could just put a few million of themselves into strategically placed humans and then they could take over all the world's major countries and just control the planet without a shot being fired so evan uh runs away from grace uh because she figures out that he's no longer on her side uh she shoots him but he lives and he gets sort of cut off from the mothership so he's no longer able to access or communicate with the other aliens uh and then he finds the hotel where cassie and company are staying and he decides to sneak in why would you sneak in dude like these are friendlies just come out with like your hands up and say guys it's me it's evan i helped you escape from base remember and then they could you know i i get that you're afraid that they'll just shoot you without asking questions but cassie is there she can she can vouch for you so after he sneaks in he winds up fighting some people which again could have been avoided and then just out of nowhere it cuts to a kid named pound cake now pound cake is one of the kids in the squad and we get um this well we just get his whole backstory over the course of a chapter which is okay admittedly in a vacuum this is really good it's a heartbreaking dark backstory uh because basically he's eight years old he had a three-year-old brother his dad died really early on and then his mom got sick and he was trying to take care of her and his brother at the same time but they were just running out of food at their house and he couldn't go out because you know there's bandits and stuff it's dangerous and eventually he is forced to go out and he comes back his brother is gone and then his mom dies not long after that and then he's on his own he wanders off and eventually he finds the others and they recruit him and that's a really sad story it's really depressing it's dark as hell and well we get the feeling that this is a major tragedy because it's happened to literally millions of other people who are still alive so yeah this is good in a vacuum but at the same time pound cake is a tertiary character at best who has done nothing in the story so far like it's not even just that i haven't mentioned him it's that he's done nothing this entire book is filler up to this point by the way and we're like a third of the way through so they decide that okay we need to leave this hotel because it's dangerous and ringer and teacup have just disappeared they don't know where they are at this point but they can't move evan because he's wounded and they argue about it and they argue about it and they argue about it and then a little girl shows up with a bomb in her throat that they have to surgically remove and they just barely managed to do it here's my question if the others know where they are in the hotel why not just bomb the hotel like they not only have access to american military hardware which can definitely do that you know you can launch missiles from silos or you can just get a plane out and fire one but they also have alien technology which is presumably leagues beyond that so why not just kill them at the hotel oh right that would make sense so ben almost kills the little girl with the bomb in her throat before they remove it because it's like really risky and but he decides not to and uh cassie and ben actually share a quick kiss but and i liked this moment because it's she kisses him but then she realizes while she's doing it that you know what i don't actually like him anymore you know a year ago she would have been super happy about that because she had a crush on him but she realized okay they're both different people now they've both changed a lot and i like that because one it's just a good character moment for both of them it makes it really shows how much they have changed over the course of the story and two it's made clear that there's not going to be a love triangle here like it felt like there was going to be a cassie evan and ben one and it also kind of felt like there was going to be a cassie ringer in ben one but with her breaking off from ben that way and it being confirmed there's no longer going to be a love triangle so whatever issues i have with this series that's not one of them so grace the other that was with evan comes back and they fight her and while they're fighting cassie keeps looking at her boobs and thinking about how nice her body is and she's like girl i'm gonna destroy that perfect body because men writing women am i right so then evan stays behind while the others flee because he's there to like distract grace and all that and then uh while they're gone they hear the bomb go off at the hotel and at first we're thinking how did that happen but then it cuts to pound cakes pov now during the fighting he had been shot and they were think and at first they tried dragging him along but then they realized you know what he's dead and he's not gonna we're not gonna be able to save him and he's just slowing us down so we're just gonna have to leave him and so they do and then it cuts to his pov or not really his pov but it cuts to third person where it follows him and he actually crawls all the way back to the hotel and vines the little bomb that they uh removed from the girl's throat and blows it up and it destroys him grace and the hotel all at once and i mean i guess this means a little bit more because we got his backstory but at the same time he doesn't do anything up until this point so how are we supposed to care about pound cake's death so at this point we're about two-thirds through the book and the entire last third just follows ringer and uh that's not good because ringer is uh well one she's just not a very interesting character and two there's not anything interesting happening in this last bit keep in mind the last third of this is a little over a hundred pages so she mentions that she doubts bosh is human which i feel like we already know he's not human so why are we doubting that that's that's weird editors should really get that sort of thing uh she plays chess with him which is a very overdone thing because i don't know the villain playing chess is just a cheap way of making him seem smart and sophisticated without him having him actually do anything smart or sophisticated because throughout all of this even though vosh i will say he has a little bit of personality he hasn't really done anything smart to show that he's intimidating like the aliens have a whole as a whole have because you know the first three waves killed almost seven billion people but vosh himself is kind of a dumbass like he hasn't been able to catch these kids he's come up with this system where he arms and trains people who if they ever discover what's really going on they will actively try to kill him why is he supposed to be a good villain here so ringer while she's being held captive here uh she gets this they call it the 12th system put in her and basically what that is is it's supposed to give her the superhuman abilities that all the others that are aliens and human bodies man they are really not good at coming up with names for this it makes talking about it confusing but yeah basically they put this thing inside her body which gives her super strength speed all that but she has to take some time to heal up and she's still being held prisoner and while she's there she's hanging out with this dude named razor that's obviously not his real name his real name is alex but razor sounds better so i'll use that and basically they just hang out together while she's in prison they play chess and stuff and eventually they become friends and eventually they're able to use it to send or they're able to use chess to send messages to each other and then uh ringer is just she's here for weeks and weeks by the way like the timelines in this book are not super well explained but at least we know that much and anyways uh man you're you're gonna think i'm making this up but no this next part is totally 100 real i last for a few hours after he leaves long after lights out in every other part of the camp deep into the belly of the winter night before the pressure becomes unbearable and then when i can't take it anymore i start shouting for help waving at the camera and then rolling over to press my chest against the cold metal railings pounding my fist into the pillow in frustration and fury until the door bursts open and claire charges in followed closely by a big bear of a recruit whose hand immediately flies to cover his nose what happened claire says though the smell should tell her all she needs to know oh crap the recruit burbles behind his hand exactly i gasped so if you couldn't pick up on that uh ringer purposely shits all over herself so that they'll come in and then they bring her to the showers to clean off and then she kills the guards and escapes which really raises the question why the fuck would they give powers to a prisoner why would they yeah okay i think we've established by this point that vosh is not a very intelligent villain but it's also it also turns out that she was supposed to escape at this because she gets a helicopter flies away she winds up on the other side of lake eerie in canada and uh she crashes near a warehouse i don't know and she runs into vosh he's actually there waiting for her now i don't know how he knew she would come to the specific spot but you know what i'm already this is already long enough so let's not uh yeah okay the escape was a test so aliens are just wanted to test her abilities even though they gave her this technology and it's already been used with a bunch of other people so they should already know how it works and how well it works okay now at this point we get another big twist where vosh reveals and or ringer sort of figures it out but i don't know vosh kind of just talks he doesn't even give exposition he just talks around exposition like oh what do you think this means and then the heroes are like i'm not sure and he's like oh i'm so i'm so mysterious cool villain like i don't know but anyways we get the second big twist of the series which is that aliens aren't actually in people's heads you see when the aliens came through here uh like decades ago and apparently they've been watching humanity for thousands of years as well um why didn't they just come here and kill all of us when we had like spears and stuff we couldn't fight back at all but okay never mind whatever that's it's not a big deal it's just if because if they do that then we don't have a story okay i'll buy that but it also turns out that when the aliens were going around putting themselves into people's heads it wasn't actually alien consciousnesses because you know they would be risking themselves they'd be in real danger of being hurt if that was the case they actually took like computer programs uploaded them into people's heads so that they think that they have aliens in their heads does that really make a difference at this point no no i mean for real like the aliens are here and people like vosh are on their side does it really matter if they're human or alien at this point like because vosh knows that he is actually a human with an alien program but all the others don't and he's still going along with it and for that matter why would he bother telling ringer about it um yeah okay so vosh uh then beats the crap out of ringer she's injured and he leaves razor to take care of her uh razor and ringer have sex and then uh vosh eventually returns ringer says aliens want to leave some humans alive like she said i figured out you guys want to leave some humans alive which is like why why would they want to do that there's really no better time to bring this up because the aliens never really give a proper explanation for why they invade the earth like not even kind of a little bit like at first it seems like okay they want to just wipe out the humans so they can colonize which would be you know that would make sense we're a life-bearing planet and you can just say yeah that's rare in the universe and they need more space cool it's not like humans haven't done similar things in the past like that's a simple motivation and we can understand it but then vosh uh through some of his monologues brings up how like oh humans have poisoned the air and the water and all that so it seems like it's an environmental thing and the aliens want to protect the environment which i i think that's what it is i i think and the way that they're doing that is they wipe out most of the population and then the remaining population they're going to uh quote change human nature or destroy humanities humanity by uh making it impossible to trust excuse me making it impossible to trust one another not only by putting the silencers out there so you don't know oh these might be aliens uh and they might kill me but they also um are going around putting you know bombs in little kids throats and sending them out so that people will see a kid and go like oh okay let's help this kid and then they'll get blown up so that they'll no longer trust each other and they'll no longer have that instinct to protect children and by doing that humans will never build up a proper civilization again and the earth can heal um that's stupid that's that's really really really stupid and i feel like there's so many better ways you could do that like why not just infect humans with a viral plague that sterilizes most of us or better yet make it so that uh our birth rate drops drastically like uh something like the genophage from mass effect if you ever played that basically an alien race gets uh infected with a genetic bomb basically which makes it so that uh only one in a thousand of uh their pregnancies actually come to term so most of them like they can't grow their population anymore why not just do that with humans all right they know enough about our genetics to make a virus that'll kill most of us why not just you know just just throwing that out there you know i'm literally just a dude who read this and came up with a better plan than these aliens did after watching us for thousands of years now the reason that vosh uh puts the modifications into ringer is that okay so apparently evans uh programming went faulty and it's later revealed that it was love that made him do it because love is just so special and apparently none of the other silencers who none of them ever fell in love okay sure that's that's fine that's fine that's fine it's not fine but i don't feel like complaining about it anymore anyways uh evans programming went bad and so vosh wants uh ringer to capture him bring him back so that they can study him and figure out what exactly went wrong and so they can see that they can prevent it from happening ever again that kind of makes sense i just wish they hadn't spent so long trying to get to that so ringer leaves vosh and goes off to find them and says in her head i want to kill evan because i don't know it's just it's just um don't question things anymore and then it uh that we have a brief epilogue where it cuts back to cassie and them and evan is alive he wasn't caught up in the explosion and cassie is super happy and that's the end of book two now book one started off as mediocre but like it could have been so much worse it really could have been book two just went full filler like this entire book barely anything happens and i i just really can't help but feel that this series was horribly horribly mistreated when they made it into a trilogy because like i've said there are some good ideas here uh and i think that had all of these just had most of the fat cut off and been combined into one long book it wouldn't even be that long really be 400 500 pages if you really did it that way and it would probably be better but just having so much filler and jumping around so much and having a climax in the second book which isn't even really a climax it's just ringer escapes and then she realizes oh okay i don't want to escape i'm just gonna leave and go kill evan like it's not really built up towards and it's not an impressive spectacle when it happens it just it just happens so then we get to the final book which is called the last star now man this one the second book dropped the ball and went from being mediocre to just straight up bad this one goes from bad to yeah it i don't know literally the first sentence doesn't even make sense many years ago when he was 10 her father had ridden a big yellow bus to the planetarium that's supposed to say when she was 10 there's a typo in literally the first the first goddamn sentence of this book if you needed more proof that it was not properly edited there it fucking is so we have a prologue where we follow a nameless priest and some survivors in the cave they talk some more about hollywood atheism it's it's dumb they talk around religion this book series has like 18 different conversations where characters talk about religion but they never really say anything profound about it you know like i didn't particularly like uh Mistborn's take on religion like mostly in the last book when Cezed decides well i don't want to spoil it but i didn't particularly like that take but at least it was a take on religion this one doesn't even have anything other than a couple of characters going oh i don't believe in god because the world sucks like if you're gonna talk about it have something to say don't just use words to say nothing my god but anyways the priest is a silencer he's an alien he kills a bunch of people uh he reveals in his inner monologue that the mothership has a bunch of bombs prepared and they're gonna drop them on all the major population centers to kill any humans that might still be nearby which makes sense you know there's probably still millions of people hiding out in big cities or near big cities not even big cities but uh they mentioned big and moderate sized cities so basically anything over a couple thousand people is gonna get hit and you know that makes sense that's where most of the people probably are and i guess it's supposed to be an ominous moment but well it isn't he also mentions that after the bombs dropped the fifth wave is supposed to be unleashed which wasn't it already released cool whatever uh so then we go back to ringer she's in the wilderness she wants to meet up with the other so she can kill evan and uh one improvement i will say this book makes is that whenever it switches to new characters pov it puts their name on it so you know right away that okay this is ringer this is cassie or this is ben and you know it's it's something that should have been there from the beginning but you know whatever just i'll take what i can get at this point now uh when ringer runs into the others and they're talking with cassie and all them uh evan uh he believes uh well he knows about the bombs being dropped okay and he believes that the mothership is going to send down some pods to get all the silencers and you know evacuate them up to the ship before the bombs drop and so evan is planning to hop on one of those pods when it comes go back to the mothership and then blow it up before the bombs can drop okay that that seems like a decent plan and actually uh that could be an interesting plot point later on like that could be a good climax at least that's what i was thinking at the time i should mention that this has been several months since the last book like ringer's captivity was a long time and then she escaped and was out in the woods for like 40 days i think she says before she comes back to vosh and he sends her out so it's it's been a while winter is almost over and it's been nearly a year since the invasion first started at this point now ben wants to rescue ringer and teacup because he thinks they're being held hostage or being held prisoner he doesn't know that teacup is actually dead at this point and i didn't bring that up because it's really not important however i will say that this little moment with ben wanting to go back and get them is good because it's it's his only bit of characterization is that he's not over uh failing his younger sister you know he's not over the fact that she's dead and he was not able to protect her and now he feels like all these kids under his command are his responsibilities so he needs to protect them that that's like his one personality trait but it's it's something and i do think it's good i think that it could be the core of a really good character they just don't really spend enough time with ben to do anything with it so ringer and vosh plan to lure evan to some caves uh that the human kids were planning on going to after they left the hotel uh there are some caves somewhere in uh ohio i don't know if they're real or not but you know they're they're there ringer is planning on luring evan there so that he can be captured but luckily she's gonna or but she's planning on killing him instead so that vosh can't get the information he needs we have a chapter following sammy where he's really edgy and thinking about i want to kill all the aliens i hate people gur and the plot doesn't progress at all um ben and another kid in the squad named dumbo uh leave to go to caves to go to the caves that i mentioned because they think ringer might be there and man this bit like could have been it really could have been something let me tell you like it could have just been characters have to go off and they uh wind up in trouble on the way and they just you could have done so much with it but instead we get shit like this you ever been to urbana dumbo i ask he shakes his head i'm from pittsburgh really i'd never asked it was the unwritten ruling camp talking about our past was like handling hot coals well go stealers nah he bites off a hunk of power bar and chews slowly i was a packers fan i played some you know quarterback wide receiver my brother played baseball shortstop not you i quit little league when i was 10 how come i sucked but i kill at esports esports you know like cod competitive fishing he shakes his head with a smile no call of duty zombie oh you're a gamer i was borderline mlg oh mlg right i don't have the first clue what he's talking about max level prestige 12 wow really i shake my head thoroughly impressed except i'm totally lost you have no idea what i'm talking about he crumbles the wrapper in his fist he glances around at the garbage littering every square of urbana then slips the wrapper into his pocket there's something that's been bugging me sarge that was an entire page i hated that conversation so much and basically their entire field trip is stuff like that it's it's nothingness and there's huge parts of the first two books that are also like that just nothingness it's so overwritten like like i said one book could have been one book you could have told the same story in one book and it would have been a lot better so anyways as they're going through the city they notice a little red dot appears on ben and they're like oh shit it's a sniper and so dumbo dies in the way and gets shot by a sniper and he survives but um he's very badly wounded obviously and i'm just wondering why the fuck would a sniper have a laser dot anyways like it's dumb when they do it in movies too because then people can see oh shit there's someone aiming at me that defeats the whole purpose of being a sniper being a sniper is about being so far away and hidden that they can't shoot back at you and most of the time they don't even know you're there until after they're already dead having a laser sight defeats the purpose so anyways ben goes off and kills the silencer who is an old woman and then he patches up dumbo as best he can and he's like well i can't take him with me i need to go get i need to go to the cave so i can get ringer and so he's like okay kid just hold on and then he leaves so then we cut back to cassie she's like super thirsty over evan and then she's insecure now because she knows he kind of dated grace for a while and she thinks grace is prettier than her presumably because grace doesn't look 12 years old seriously what the hell like this this relationship starts with him stalking her and then shooting her and then patching her up bringing her to his house making her dependent on him and then it's really revealed she looks like such a kid it's it's i'm very uncomfortable so ringer is air dropped into the caves along with another silencer she meets the priest that was there the priest beats her up for whatever reason they they really don't make this they don't explain this and then ben runs into them and they managed to kill the priest and ringer lies about escaping and the the other silencer she's with is named constant and ben is like this is kind of convenient that i happen to run into you and you just happen to have this friend here named constants and constants just cries like fake cries and says oh some horrible things happened to me and then ben just believes her because he's a dumbass and anyways they go to where dumbo was back in urbana and uh he's gone they don't know where he went and they managed to follow up trail and then they find him and then he somehow crawled 10 blocks walk while he was shot which is yeah uh sure sure we'll we'll say he can do that we'll say you can do that uh also remember he's 12 years old when this when this happens so a 12 year old gets shot by a sniper and then crawls 10 blocks and then he's still alive at the end of it but anyways they find him and they talk to him a little bit and he dies and i'm just thinking if you were just gonna have him die right away then why not just have him they why not just have him still be at the spot where ben left him and then he dies this is a waste of paper so they go back to the others and constants tries to kill sam but they fight her and then they kill constants and i just feel like ringer could have killed her earlier and saved everyone some trouble but whatever and then anyways ringer tries to kill evan but then the aliens arrive and they catch him and go okay that's um yeah that's fine it it doesn't really change all that much in the grand scheme of things like so what if the aliens figure out uh how the program went wrong with him like they're still planning on dropping bombs and him being gone doesn't really change anything especially because we learned at this point that they're not sending pods to save the silencers so they won't have a way up there they'll need to find a different way this this really doesn't have any sort of tension it doesn't change the plot in any way it just adds another obstacle for them to jump over so then they get attacked by a wave of fifth weight or a squad of fifth way of kids and we get a chapter from their perspective for some reason i i really don't know why they bothered with that because it just makes things kind of confusing anyways ringer kills them and buries them and buries herself as well and uh ben actually threatens to shoot her at this point because he's like hey you betrayed us you brought constants here and then the others were able to find us and take evan why shouldn't i kill you now and she just says because i'm pregnant which is just the cheapest cheapest cheapest easiest way to try and add artificial trauma to a story like this like just just say eh someone's pregnant and all of a sudden everything's more dramatic but the thing is that her being pregnant doesn't change anything for the rest of the story like it makes ben not shoot her okay but the rest of the story she's still able to do all the things that she did before both physically and mentally so um you know all right she's able to use those powers that were just given to her she didn't have to work for so she's not an interesting character in any way okay they whatever they argue about what to do for a little bit and cassie mentions that they're specifically bombing the cities because the cities hold human memories which kind of makes sense in that yeah the cities have vast repositories of knowledge like libraries and stuff and if you destroy all that then we're gonna be set back significantly but i'm pretty sure the main reason is that they're trying to kill people you know that's what they've been doing this whole time cassie so they make a plan to hijack a helicopter and then go back to the base and rescue evan now i will say that after they've uh come up with the plan but before they actually put it into motion there's a brief conversation between cassie and ben that i did like i've had a crush on you since the third grade i whisper i wrote your name in notebooks i drew hearts around it i decorated it with flowers mostly daisies i had daydreams and dream dreams and nobody else knew except my best friend who is dead like everybody else looking away looking at nothing but you were where you were and i was where i was you could have been in china for all it mattered when you showed up out of nowhere at sammy's camp i thought it had to mean something because you lived when you could have died and i lived when i should have died and we were both there for sam who also should have died just too many coincidences to just be a coincidence you know but that's all it is a coincidence there's no divine plan there's nothing faded in our stars no meant to be in any of it we are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe and that's okay these seven billion billion atoms are good with that so basically she's saying that like yeah life there's no real point to it but that's okay because life is still enjoyable you know we get to have friends we get to love we get to do stuff and i genuinely liked that moment you know unlike all these parts where they're talking around religion and talking around the idea of god and around the idea of morality this is something that actually says something it's actually meaningful so basically they managed to call a helicopter in and a ringer and cassie get on it and they sort of hijack it and start moving back to the base where vosh and evan are and meanwhile ben takes sammy and another kid named megan who i haven't mentioned because she's not important but she was the little girl that had the bomb in her throat that they removed anyways he takes them back to the caves which there's a weird fixation on the caves in in this but you know whatever and i do just want to give another plus in that they're actually building towards a climax here like they're actually saying like hey if we don't do anything or if we don't get out of the way we're gonna be killed by all those bombs and evan clearly wants to do something to stop the bombs in the first place so it's not a lot but it's something so they charge into the base and then it cuts to evan uh he gets tortured with cold which is kind of a hardcore scene i guess in fact i will say i need to keep i need to stop bringing this up because it's doesn't really mean much anymore when it happens this often but basically the series even though it's young adult it does get pretty violent at times and the characters do swear and stuff so it doesn't feel too sanitized it feels a little hardcore and this scene where evan is tortured like he's stripped naked and sprayed with cold water and just put in a cold room for hours at a time like yeah that's a pretty hardcore scene he talks with vosh a bunch and vosh like goes around and around and around and around and around and around in circles and this is when vosh confirms that no pods are coming down to rescue the silencers and he also confirms to evan that there are no aliens not only inside them which evan doesn't know like he he still thinks he's an alien that just sided with humans but vosh informs him about the fact that they're just computer programs that think they're aliens he also mentions there's no aliens on the mothership it's like a big drone basically they sent in which means this is an alien invasion story where humans never actually interact with the aliens in any way they never talk to one they never fight one oh my fucking god and and the thing is part of the fun of introducing new species or new race or anything like that is that we get to learn about that race we get to learn about their strange societal customs we get to learn about how they fight we get to learn about their biology and stuff like that and we get none of that here because we learn literally nothing about the aliens other than they want to destroy humanity in order to save it so when evan got cut off from the mothership back in the last book he also lost his powers like a super strength and super speed and all that uh vosh gives him back his powers vosh you are so stupid but then he erases his memories and it's confirmed that love is what broke the program because i guess none of the other silencers ever fell in love because they never met kassie because kassie is just that special man can only fall in love with her it's not something that people do all the time cool so ben gets attacked at the caves by some soldiers and he starts fighting them off and they throw a bunch of gas in there uh like or like smoke grenades basically to confuse your enemy and ben is again able to get out of trouble because one of them used the laser sight and he knows oh he's aiming at me and he jumps out of the way but okay in close quarters a laser sure that that can make sense i can understand that but if there's smoke going around it's not gonna jesus christ like it's very clear that ricky antsy did next to no research about military matters or weaponry before wrote this and it's just very annoying annoying but yeah anyways so ringer and kassie uh kassie is guided through the base just like in book one so she doesn't get to actually do anything ringer just tells her everything and then she does that uh they fight a bunch of soldiers and kassie doesn't have any agency but she manages to run to the command center and then we find out evan had his memories erased and he's just evil now he's like a totally robotic follower of what he's supposed to do which raises the question why if you can make somebody who is just robotic like that why didn't you just do that to all the silencers you know like why why would you give them a personality and make them think that they're alive why not just turn them into automatons that'll do whatever you tell them to now in evan's head he starts thinking about how he no longer has empathy empathy is evil empathy is bad and i'm just like empathy is what created human civilization like caring about other people and being willing to work together is what allowed us to do shit like that that's what allowed us to get to the point where we can fucking write shitty books and oh i had that backwards it's a right shitty books and then have other people read them and think that they're shitty and then complain about it on the internet and then get paid for that like that all starts with empathy Jesus right so ben is captured by the soldiers along with sammy and megan and he tells them about the bombing and he's basically like hey uh stay away from the cities and everything if you don't want to fucking die and okay cool and at this point it's switching back and forth very quickly like we'll get a chapter that's like two paragraphs with one character and then two paragraphs with another and then it just goes back and forth and honestly it's only switching to ben in all this so that it feels like he's doing something but even though he's doing action stuff even though he's fighting off bad guys he's not actually contributing to the story here like cassie and ringer are the ones that are actually going to the base and trying to get evan back and fighting the aliens directly ben is just kind of like if he dies then that's bad for him and you know ideally uh we wouldn't want him to die because we care about him as a character but plot wise it wouldn't it wouldn't change anything so cassie finds out that evan's memories are gone and so she needs to find them again so that she can upload them back into him and so okay they can't find his memories just in the data banks and then uploaded in the cassie they they just have no time to search for it so she tells ringer to just put all like 10 000 people put all their memories into my head and see this is another thing that could have been cool because she does it and then we get like a chapter of cassie thinking about how man all these other identities are in here i don't know where i stop and they begin anymore and that's cool that's very cool but it comes in like the last 30 or 40 pages of this book and it's it's uh so surrounded by so much other stuff happening that well we don't even get a chance to really experience this like this is a neat idea like someone having all these other people inside their head or the memories of all these other people inside their head and no longer being sure what your personality is and what came from others that's a neat idea and have they done it like at the end of book two maybe if it somehow put that in and then we'd spent the entirety of the third book learning about that and seeing how it changes cassie then that could have been really cool as it stands it means nothing so ringer fights evan and evan defeats her but the thing is that ringer and evan have basically no relationship with one another so this uh this doesn't really mean much you know you're not sitting there thinking oh i hope that neither of them really gets hurt that it's so sad to see these people who are once friends fighting like they have no relationship so it doesn't okay and then evan manages to break ringer's back which doesn't kill her and he doesn't stop to finish her off for some reason again whatever not a it's a problem but not something i want to focus on anymore and then he goes off to find cassie who manages to electrocute him uh it doesn't kill him but it does take him out of commission vosh shows up at ringer and he like gloats over her for a little bit and then cassie comes up and shoots him and he dies because he's a very pathetic villain at the end of the day and then uh cassie drags ringer away and then are out of the immediate threat zone and she manages to get something from vosh that uh or his kill switch excuse me i forgot the word for a second i'm not rerecording that but she manages to get the kill switch from vosh and uh while she's running away she thinks about sammy and apparently his full name is samuel jackson sullivan who this nigga on that night you're on this council but we do not grant you the rank of master the oppression of the fifth will never return enough is enough i have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane there are so many just dumb little moments in this my god like don't get me wrong the plot as a whole is nonsensical and goes all over the place and doesn't amount to much but like if you just pulled out those dumb little moments like that and stopped making everything happen at once then this would be so much better yeah ben and company escaped by jumping out of the helicopter and landing in a river and then uh cassie uses vosh's kill switch to kill all the soldiers at the base and then she manages to find his pod because even though most of the silencers weren't going to get one he had his own and then she grabs a bomb goes up to the mothership and then while she's up there the pod just automatically goes into like the docking bay where all the bombs are there getting ready to drop and then she blows up the bomb that she has killing herself but also setting off all the others and destroying the mothership and freeing humanity from the aliens and it happens all at once is the thing like this should be a cool moment this should be triumphant but it's just too easy you know like the things that were difficult were getting into the base like actually destroying the ship was just it was too easy like they didn't have to sneak around on board they didn't have to like infiltrate it they didn't have to find a specific spot on the ship while they were being chased or anything like when i uh was reading the beginning of this and i and evan mentions that the bombs are going to destroy every major city i was thinking like oh okay maybe something cool like that will happen but no we got nothing we got absolutely jack shit nothing and the thing is cassie has never really expressed a desire to save the world is the thing like if she had been thinking about it before like what would i do to save humanity and prevent people from dying then sure that would that would make sense that she'd be willing to sacrifice herself but it just comes out of nowhere because she's like the super special chosen one who must tragically give her life and then everyone will love her forever after that like i i i'm not gonna call her a marysuit because she's really not hey guys so something happened to the footage of this bit it is now like six hours later and i'm just i'm just gonna re-record this little part real quick but like i was saying cassie is not a marysuit but she does have a couple of marysuit elements because she's she does screw up sometimes and not everybody likes her and honestly she's kind of a jerk at a few points which is reasonable given you know the situation that she's in um but she does have sue elements to her and the fact that she saved the world and is basically the chosen one that must tragically give her life and everyone will love her forever after that is well that feels like something that a marysuit character would do so then it cuts to a year later uh all the other survivors are in marble falls texas which is a an actual town and ben and ringer are just in love now you know we don't we didn't need to see their relationship get built up at all and it really wasn't like i mean before this i could buy that they were friends or allies comrades whatever you want to call them that but there was never any sort of romantic spark there i mean she seemed to like him but that was about it and uh she also has a baby cool whatever that's not uncommon in epilogues and evan apparently not only survived when cassie electrocuted him but somehow that gave him his memories back i don't think that's explained in any way um whatever so yeah ben and them are all uh hanging out in texas now and they're starting to rebuild things like they have a little base where they're actually gardening and stuff they're not just scavenging for food anymore and evan decides that he's gonna go off to kill other silencers like he's gonna because even without the ship there there's still a whole bunch of those guys running around killing folks and evan decides you know what i'm gonna protect people i'm gonna go out and try and stop as many of those as i can and so he leaves in the middle of the night which would be fine but it just ends on such a sappy note and uh yeah i think that's about it so back to james with normal clothes on yeah ben or not ben uh evan just goes off to try and help people which is fine but it ends on such a sappy note you know not even just him but the series as a whole the book is a whole i'm just gonna read the last couple lines to give you an idea of what i mean but her throne's tilted down sam said looking at the constellation won't she fall out zombie uh that's ben's nickname by the way zombie cleared his throat she won't fall her throne is turned that way so that she can keep watch over her realm what's a realm zombie pressed his hand against sam's chest this is zombie's hand to sam's heart here and that is the last line that is such a fucking sappy just saccharine sugary sweet line which really just like the beginning of the first book where it tries to be all quippy and quirky and lighthearted this is just too sappy too nice it doesn't fit with such a dark story because that's what this is okay most of humanity is dead that's a dark story and the fact that it can't just stick with that and embrace it just that is a pretty big failing that's a pretty big part of how and why i was never able to get into this so that was it a thousand and ninety five pages all three books like you'd stop a bullet with this oh yeah nice but yeah like i said at the beginning best example of good ideas with bad execution that i can think of because just the idea of aliens coming killing folks and then people trying to survive that that's a pretty cool idea and some of the individual ideas like the aliens not wanting to kill all of humanity you could do something with that you know you'd have to do something different than what the book did but you could do something with that and even at the beginning uh it starts off okay like that first part of the first book where Cassie is just uh she shoots the dude and then she's hiding under the car from the sniper which turned out to be evan and then she's flashing back and forth a bunch and it's just showing how the world got destroyed that's okay but then it lost focus because at the beginning of the first book it's here's the world getting destroyed and then after that it's cassie wants to go find her brother that's pretty focused pretty simple and you can do a lot with that but after she finds her brother what's it about then like it's not about saving the world they don't specifically go out to plan that it just kind of pops up in the third book like evan says oh yeah by the way i have this plan to save the world and then they don't follow that plan but then at the very end cassie is just like oh i have an opportunity then then she goes and blows herself up so it lost focus and for that matter it lost its protagonist after the first book because the first one uh you could argue that there were two protagonists and that's ben and cassie i would really just say it was cassie uh it's even more so in the movie one we see all the destruction everything through her eyes you know we see her experience with that uh two we start off with her and we end with her and three most of the important stuff she is there for so i would argue she was the protagonist but then the second and third ones it's like the author didn't know what protagonist or what character he wanted to be the focus so okay now cassie is nothing special and she doesn't really do anything special but she still winds up saving the day which is just really lame you know like i'm not saying she had to be some sort of ultra mega badass that could kill a million aliens without even breaking a sweat but she would have to have something about her i'm sorry it's like 90 fucking degrees in here um excuse me she would have to have something about her that allowed her to do extraordinary things otherwise well what's the point of having her as the protagonist you know protagonists should be extraordinary in at least one way and cassie doesn't do that now the villains which are mostly just uh the others and particularly vosh are some of the lamest villains ever like at the beginning you know they destroy everything but then after that their plans are just nonsensical and they're never properly explained i don't think like i was able to pick up that uh what they were doing was trying to scatter humans into small little bands so they never build up a civilization again but it's never put in that many words i don't think it might have been i i don't know i i don't feel like checking but anyways and we never get a reason why they want to do this like why do they want to do this do that is it protecting the environment i think it's protecting the environment but why do they care so much is is our life-bearing planets just really rare i i don't know they're it's nonsensical their plans are stupid and so they never really feel that threatening uh the characters other than kassie have very little personality now kassie i will grant her she has multiple facets to her she's not a great character but you know we really do feel that uh after she kills that innocent dude at the beginning that she really wants to protect innocent life we know that she really loved her mom and dad and she misses them we know that uh she really loves her brother and would do anything to protect him and uh she is kind of a jerk at the beginning but again that's totally reasonable given all the she gone through by that point uh the other characters i mean ben has one real character trait which is something i guess evan is kind of a creepy stalker so even though he's not an awful person for the most part like he's not super controlling of kassie or anything but i could never get into him because of that and then like ringer and vosh in them they just there's very little to even talk about with them there's just there's just nothing there uh the structure as i've said several times is awful the twists are giving away hundreds of pages before they should happen and uh even though you had all these pieces for a great story you didn't put them together properly so it just falls apart uh there's no escalation and there's no really big moments yeah you ever noticed that like there's no uh points where it's like okay here we're fighting aliens in this battle and then not long after that oh there's a bigger battle and then a bigger and bigger and then you know it builds up until you get to this point where you're uh about to go destroy the mothership to save the world and i'm not saying it had to be a traditional just uh go out and kill the bad guys story like you could have done more with it and frankly you should you shouldn't just have nothing but fighting throughout but like there's no escalation at all it's just we fight some bad guys we escape maybe we lose some people we fight some bad guys escapes maybe some people die we fight bad guys escape we go after bad guys we fight bad guys we escape like there's no sense of escalation at all and because of that there's no really big moments uh there's no big shocking twists because i've already mentioned that plenty of times you don't need me talking about more but even beyond that there's just there's just no big story beats that really grabs me uh the villain pathetic just talks around exposition like i said this could have been one book which was just focused on cassie because like i said if it was just third person we wouldn't have that issue with switching back and forth all the time and if it was just focused on cassie we'd be focused on the best character and if it was just one decently long book it would cut out most of the fat and the filler and we could still do something uh interesting with it like imagine if cassie rescued uh sam and met up with ben at like the halfway point you know and then from there on it's like okay the aliens are gonna drop bombs let's find a way to stop that you know that that could have been something that could have been something really cool and plus if uh just like i mentioned before if just the audience and cassie knew that the soldiers were aliens and we knew that ben was with them we could show like little uh quick clips from them and we and they would just be going along with everything thinking yeah let's we'll fight for these guys but we would know oh shit something's gonna go bad soon and so that would have some tension and uh like i said keep it in one pov and if you fix all of these issues i think it would have been okay or good i don't think it would have been great because there's just so much nonsense here and so many plot uh elements that make no sense and there's so many wasted opportunities that i don't think you could make this great without doing some pretty serious rewrites all of that said i can see how someone else would enjoy these books like i can totally see how you can look at the issues and just shrug it off say yeah i i get it that's kind of stupid but not a big deal to me i i totally get that and i never i'm never putting down anyone's tastes uh when i'm reviewing in this kind of detail you know even if i'm saying something's really bad like that's my opinion you know you're allowed to have your own you're allowed to like stuff even if i don't uh but yeah i can see why someone would like the fifth wave trilogy i i totally can unlike something like thrown up glass where there's just this story has been done a million times and it's been done better a million times and this doesn't really add anything new to the formula so i'm not sure how that one got popular and it's not like house of night where there's just nothing redeemable there at all and i'm not sure why people were even into it this one i totally get why people enjoyed it and at the end of the day i'm not angry i'm just disappointed so where would this fit in my top 10 worst books honestly i would need to think about it a lot more because i've been thinking about it for several days ever since i finished these but i just uh for the life of me i cannot come up with a concrete answer that i stick with for more than a few minutes so maybe it would not be on the list at all like it would be close to being on the list but it wouldn't be on there and maybe it would just be low on the list like it might be in 10th or ninth place i i don't know but what i will say is it's nowhere near as bad as some of the other stuff i've talked about in this segment where i just review terrible shitty young adult books like it's not pure unbridled insanity like house of night it's not a semi-bridled insanity with a bunch of cringey lines the way elixir was it doesn't turn into porn halfway through like thrown up glass was there's really nothing offensive in here there's nothing that made me angry it's just yeah it's it's really bad and nonsensical so yeah i'm i'm not angry i'm just disappointed now at the end of my house of night review i already told you what my next big review would be my next really shitty young adult series would be and much like the fifth wave this one also had a terrible movie adaptation which came out in 2016 it's not as well known though fallen yeah i don't know if you can see but this is fallen thanks a bunch for watching especially to my patrons without whom i couldn't do these long long videos uh my ten dollar and up guys are oppo savillainan ashley watson avatumor brother santotes cavity sanity christopher quintan emily miller joel johnny st clare madison lewis bennett taylor briggs tobacco crow and vei victus and all the other names here you guys are you guys are awesome please stay tuned for my next one and i'll see you then bye