The Girl with All the Gifts

Rosie, the mobile laboratory/armored assault vehicle, appears as a saving grace to both Caldwell and Parks, though for distinctly different reasons. For Caldwell, Rosie’s state-of-the-art lab equipment is a golden opportunity to continue her research, but it also represents vindication. When she was passed over for participation in early research regarding the Breakdown, the slight left her with a wounded ego and a chip on her shoulder. Determined to prove the naysayers wrong, Caldwell goes to any lengths to develop a vaccine, including beheading a hungry child crushed in the jaws of Rosie’s hydraulic hatch.

For Parks, Rosie’s armory represents protection and the ability to defend the band of survivors against hungries and junkers. Rosie is a mobile contradiction—a temple of science and a military juggernaut, uniting two disciplines that are often at odds with each other. Science, in theory, is pure: the pursuit of knowledge for its own ontological sake, or at least for human welfare. Military force is brutish and destructive. Science seeks to understand life, while the military destroys it. Of course, real life is not so simple, and science has often served military ends (the A-bomb is a perfect example). Melanie sees both as a threat. Science takes children like Liam and Marcia to Caldwell’s lab for dissection, while powerful weaponry kills anyone or anything Parks distrusts—even a seemingly harmless hungry singing in his bed. The fact that Rosie never delivers its passengers to Beacon is significant; cruel science and brute force, humanity’s old approaches to solving problems, don’t work anymore. Like all outdated ideas, they must fade into obsolescence while the revolution surges forward. 

Burn shadows, the charred remnants of a failed governmental policy to eradicate the hungries, are stains of death on the land. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and burn shadows embody that, devastating the civilian population along with some hungries in the process. They symbolize a slash-and-burn environmental ethic that has doomed humanity to its current dire situation—a grim reminder of a failed past that can never be reclaimed or corrected.

However, fire not only destroys but also cleanses, and Melanie sees the scorched remains of humans in terms of her own potential future. What if I could be part of a family like the ones that died in this house, she wonders. This desire for community that the shadows on the wall trigger gains momentum with the sight of the other feral children. The burn shadow is also the catalyst for Melanie’s first seeds of critical thought when she realizes that life is not good or bad but, like the “gifts” in Pandora’s box, a complex amalgam of the two.

The fungal parasite that turns humans into hungries has a devastating life cycle. As the parasite matures, it bursts from its host, growing into a massive tendrilled organism and sprouting seed pods filled with the deadly pathogen. Given humanity’s history of abusing nature, it is fitting that nature takes its revenge by using human beings as the hosts of their own destruction. The Gaia hypothesis argues that the planet Earth is a single, self-regulating organism fully capable of taking care of itself. If that self-care means occasionally eradicating a virus—in this case, people—from its body, it has a variety of means to do so: natural disasters, plagues, etc. When Melanie releases the deadly spores into the air with a burst of fire, she burns away all human civilization’s established norms, creating space for something new: a second-generation of humanity that is wiser, more empathetic, and better stewards of their world. The seed pods, along with the fire that activates them, represent rebirth—a shedding of metaphorical skin from which Melanie and her kind emerge as the next step in human evolution.