There
are 2 villains in The Death Cure: WICKED
or more specifically Janson, a worker for wicked. He’s an older man and Thomas
and his friends call him “Rat Man” due to his rat-like features. The second
villain in this book is the Flare which is a disease created from the sun
flares on earth. The sickness messes with your brain and makes you go crazy. It’s
very easy to catch and deadly if you have it. There is a temporary cure called The
Bliss which slows down the process of it taking over your brain.
Janson
started acted like a villain when he catches the Flare (you don’t find this out
until almost the end of the book). He feels like he is wronged and shouldn’t have
caught the Flare because he’d been careful to avoid it. Janson then becomes
obsessed with finding a cure for the disease so others don’t catch it. Once his
mind has gone crazy and he’s considered a Crank, he really goes crazy and is
willing to kill people, especially people who are immune to the Flare. He’d
kill them by taking out their brain so they could do more experiments on it. In
reality WICKED hasn’t been able to find a cure since they started, but Janson
is too focused on finding a cure that he’s oblivious to his co-workers who are
giving up hope on ever finding a cure. Due to everyone else’s hopelessness,
Janson is pretty much on his own if he wants to keep killing people to find
a cure. While reading you get the feeling that everyone at WICKED is scared of
Janson and aren’t used to seeing him interacting with other people. Because he’s
used to being isolated all the time he becomes detached and doesn’t really
value anyone’s life. Even when he’s telling Thomas that he has to die the way
he says it is so nonchalant. All he says is: “Thomas, we need your brain”. I
think this also shows his cruelty and how awful he can be. Janson’s very
manipulative as he tries to tell Thomas that the world will thank him if he
dies and how he’ll help others with the disease. In reality Janson just wants
the cure so he can cure himself. They don’t directly state everything he does,
you have to infer based on past actions. I really like that they do this
because I think mysterious is a perfect way to describe a villain.
Janson
in a way reminds me of Hitler because they both thought they had good
intentions but then they got greedy and wanted the most power they could get which
made them seem evil.
To me I
think the Flare is a villain because it has such a big impact on Thomas, the
hero, and it made people who seemed liked heroes into villains. The Flare kind
of opposed to everything Thomas did. For example: Thomas wanted to keep his
friends safe, but Newt had the Flare and went crazy, which kind of made him a
villain. Thomas told him “If you’re cool with slowly going crazy and wanting to
eat small children, then I guess I won’t cry for you”. The sad thing is that
Newt did start acting like this. In the end Thomas beat the Flare, like in most
books, by killing Newt and ending his suffering. Cranks aka people who’ve had
the Flare for a while also proved to be a ton of problems for Thomas, Brenda,
Minho, and George. One time they were driving in a car trying to get to the
edge of Denver. Their goal was to escape out of Denver and board George’s burg and
fly away. Unfortunately that never happened because a bunch of Cranks came and
attacked the car. Luckily the Right Hand, a group out against WICKED saved
them.
The
Flare is almost comparable to cancer because they’re both deadly illnesses and
there sort of cures: chemotherapy and The Bliss. While cancer doesn’t make
people go crazy, it can still depress people and make them seem like a
different person.
Both the characters in The
Death Cure are unique compared to other villains but I think the intents
are similar to almost all villains.
.