Maximum Ride/Headscratchers

Maximum Ride Headscratchers Page

Please keep in mind that Headscratchers is for discussing questions about the work. Please avoid Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.

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• I would have liked to see more with that language the flock developed. Seriously. It came when it was needed with no buildup, and was never mentioned again. When did they make it? How long have they been using it?

• This sort of spans the first three books, but what was the deal with the Flock's parents?
  • In The Angel Experiment, Angel reads the minds of some scientists and finds out that Fang's mother was a teenager who thought he died, Nudge's mother also thought she died (and she may or may not be the woman they saw in Arizona), Iggy's mom died in childbirth, and Angel and the Gasman's parents sold them to the School. Angel also says that the Flock were created during amniocentesis, with the implication being that the parents had no idea what was going on.
  • In School's Out - Forever, the documents show that the Flock's family members all seem to be in the Maryland/Washington D.C. area and Iggy's dad's dead but his mom's alive. They later seem to find Iggy's birth parents (who claim that their baby was kidnapped in the hospital and that he had the same birthmark Iggy has). Nudge finds documents seemingly forged by Jeb which allowed the School to take her for experimentation, along with a video of her parents asking for her to be returned, along with the implication that said parents were now dead. The implication is still that the parents were all unwitting.
  • In Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports, the Director tells Max that the Flock's birth parents were all various unimportant workers around the School. Jeb later seems to confirm this, when it's revealed that he and Dr. Martinez are Max's parents. But then what was up with all of the above stuff? Jeb says that he thinks it's all red herrings, but did James Patterson really just fill up two or so books with deliberate dead ends? If so, talk about Padding!

• In MAX, Max said that she once drove a TANK and the only other thing she said about it is that it "Smells like old socks". Where, when, why or how did she get her hands on this MILITARY vehicle?

• Am I the only one that finds it weird that Angel couldn't figure out what Gazzy was when they were playing a game? I mean.. she reads minds.
  • She could have purposefully not done it so the game wasn't ruined.

• In the first part of ANGEL, Max states how she never thought of how the Flock could have come from different bird genes. However, in a previous book she says what species DNA each member had.

• Is she a blond or a brunette? Seriously. Is it too much to ask for a little consistency with that? Especially considering that all the other characters have consistent hair colors when mentioned?
  • It's dirty blonde. It's stated several times in the books. And she gets highlights in New York. So by the fourth it had probably gone back to normal.

• I'm aware that living on there own for years and years has given the flock quite a few survival skills that most people don't possess, but Iggy is getting to be seriously impossible. Over the course of the books it's become harder and harder for me, a totally blind person, to suspend my disbelief in regards to Iggy's abilities. He walks alone without a cane or a guide dog, and often without verbile direction, effortlessly threading his way around things in his path. He can fly in pitch battle against Erasers or what have you, when everyone else is too busy to help him, and still has never, as I recall, been seriously injured by someone he may not have heard coming in the commotion. Occasionally people will give him directions on where to go in battle, but that only sparingly. Also, he comments in "Max" that his echolocation works better under water, which makes no sense: If he echolocates as some blind people do, he uses his ears to tell where the sound is blocked by a wall or other obsticle; this would be completely screwed over when he's under water. If he echolocates like dolphins do, it would be different, but it's never stated one way or the other.
  • For the echolocation thing, sound actually travels better under water. Underwater echolocation is pretty much the same as above water, they both rely on sound waves bouncing off objects.

• What happened to Celeste, anyway? The bear just... disappeared.
  • Max mentions at one point in FANG that Angel no longer plays with Celeste as much as she used to. So I guess we assume she's still got it, just not as interested.

• What's up with Total knowing more about pop culture and the like than the Flock (who, one would think, spent more time in the outside world). Was he a normal dog with a human's brain put in? What?
  • I believe he is a 98% Dog 1% Human 1% Bird mixture, as he is a dog that can talk and has little tiny wings. He knows a lot about pop culture because, I believe, he actually cares about it.
    • But he was seemingly kept in a lab for most of his life and just seems to understand culture more than the Flock do. Maybe he just has a know-it-all personality, but it just seems...off.

• What's with the wings? They are not long enough to support the flock's body weight. And the whole 'hollow bones' excuse doesn't work, since wouldn't that make the bones more brittle and more breakable?
  • Well, I don't know much about wingspan to body length ratio, so I won't say anything about that. However, contrary to popular belief, hollow bones are just as strong (maybe even stronger, according to some scientists) and as heavy as solid bones. Even though they're hollow, they're actually very dense.
  • For that matter, what's with the hovering? They seem to have wings similar to a hawk's, and I'm pretty sure hawks can't hover.
• Why do they even have wings at 2% bird.
  • I've always thought of it like ourselves compared to chimpanzees. We're only a few % different from them in terms of DNA and we have the capability of speech and other things.

• What happened to Anne Walker and Marian Janssen? I'm biased since they're two of my favorite characters, but seriously, where are they? Anne disappears halfway through book 3 and we don't see what happens to Marian after Max and Nudge save her.

• What happened to Itex?
  • The implication at the end of the third book was that the German police stopped the riot and arrested everyone. If so, that just raises even more questions, like how a company is apparently powerful enough to sponsor massive numbers of unethical and illegal tests, organize killings and kidnappings, and arrange to eliminate one half of the world's population, and can't wiggle out of charges by the cops.

• The kids are 2% bird, 98% human, so where the heck are all these powers coming from?!
  • I think Jeb said that the scientists "programmed" a lot of powers into them (but that many powers were spontanouesly appearing) but how they were able to do that is beyond me.

• So what happened to those other expiriments that the Flock freed in the first book? There are a few issues with it. First, why didn't the Flock go with them? These are other people just like them, and they aren't even going to interact or try to make plans? After they leave, the Flock never even THINKS about the expiriments they rescued again, not even so much as a "Hey, where do you think those expiriments we rescued in New York went?". Second, why didn't they make sure they got to safety first? A lot of them were obviously very weak and sick, it just makes me assume that nearly all of them were recaptured almost immediately after they escaped. Three... What was the point? It never led up to anything, and after all these books have gone by I kind of doubt it will.
• What is with the flock and stealing? They seem to bounce from being ok with it to being uncomfortable with it in the first book. First they break into a cabin and take a lot of food plus a backpack, then they take from a campsite, and later they wonder if taking a car is the right thing to do and Max says stealing is their last resort when theyre in New York.
  • I always thought that stealing is a lot easier when no one is around, the cabin had obviously been uninhabited for awhile and what they took was mostly little desperately needed things, like food. In New York with the car however, there was people there, and they would actually be consequences, such as getting pulled over and being found out by the law for the stolen car/reckless driving, and then the fact that they have wings. So, I don't thinks it's about their morals so much as how risky would it be for them to take such and such.
  • There's a scene in the first book where they steal a guy's credit card or something (I don't remember exactly, sorry) and justify it by saying he was a jerk. But he didn't actually do anything to them, he was just being rude to someone he was speaking with on his phone. That bit always puzzled me, not because of the stealing but because of how they justified it.
  • It seems to be a "steal to survive" thing. Taking food from an empty cabin, stealing money/credit cards from people to buy food, stealing cars, of course no one would do those things under normal circumstances. But these are bird kids who are constantly on the run, there's no telling when they'd be able to get their next meal so they eat when they can. They wouldn't steal a car unless they had to get somewhere fast and they couldn't fly there for whatever reason.

• About Iggy's parent's, it's stated multiple times that he was kidnapped in the hospital, but once the father says that he was taken from their home. That's probably a error in the continuity, this is a more headscratchers question: If they were able to look him over enough to realize he had a birthmark in a specific place (near his hip or some other place where it wouldn't really be obvious if I remember right), how did they not notice wings coming out of his back? Max even stated that when Angel was a baby she had "Weird little chicken wings", so they have them when they're young.
  • You're right that this is extremely weird, even given the premise of the story. For instance, in The Angel Experiment, Max is convinced that she is a test-tube baby. While it's true that she can still have parents who donated an egg and sperm, the likelihood of the bird kids having been live babies carried to term by their human mothers is slim in this respect--because they were born with wings. Either at least the mother would have to be compliant to the plan--Jeb stated that he and Dr. Martinez agreed to donate their genetic material to create Max--with full knowledge of the results, or Itex would have to be doing some seriously wonky stuff to pregnant ladies. (In what is generally considered to be the beta idea for the Maximum Ride series, When the Wind Blows/The Lake House, pregnant women have their fetuses modified in utero without their knowledge, and then the doctors in control tell them they have miscarried when they deliver the baby.) This troper cannot realistically see a bird baby being born non-bird and then later having their DNA modified while they are fully-formed.