Previously on Midnighters: Blue Noon: Weird, ominously climactic shit is happening in the secret hour! It’s almost like we’re building up to the end of this series or something. Rex hungers for the flesh of his classmates and also middle schoolers; Melissa thinks that’s hot because she doesn’t love herself; Jessica and Jonathan are making out in rivers and ignoring the end of the world; and Dess is…doing math, I guess.
At school, Constanza announces that her grandpa is inexplicably moving to LA by the end of the month and wants her to come with. If you can cast your memory way back to book 1, Constanza is clearly an expy of Cordelia Chase desperately wants to be an actress, so she has asked zero questions about her grandfather’s sudden move — or why he wants to leave her parents behind* — and is instead just thrilled about getting the opportunity to leave Oklahoma. And then Constanza will move to LA and start working at Angel Investigations.
*I think I skipped over this for the sake of brevity, but it’s mentioned in book 2 that Constanza’s parents do not get along with her grandfather, and rebelled against him by living in Bixby instead of Broken Arrow.
Jessica immediately finds this all suspicious, as does Dess, who is blatantly eavesdropping on them. Hee. They bring this information to the rest of the midnighters at lunch, where Dess announces that she’s figured out what’s going on: “Bixby County, including the whole area of the blue time as we know it, plus definitely a big chunk of Broken Arrow and probably Tulsa, and possibly the top half of Oklahoma City—and hell, let’s just throw in everything from Wichita to Dallas to Little Rock while we’re at it—might very well get sucked into the blue time. In about three weeks.” Every eclipse is eroding the blue time further, until one day it’s going to snap entirely.
They go on to explain about Grandpa Grayfoot bailing out of town, and how clearly the rest of Middle America isn’t safe from the blue time anymore — after all, why else would he be going all the way to California? “There’s not much oil business in LA,” Jessica says. (Except…there is, actually. Jessica, I love you. Please stop embarrassing yourself in this book.) Nevertheless, Rex is still skeptical, and Dess speculates that he’s just refusing to believe that the Grayfoots know something he doesn’t. These kids so unwillingly have each other’s numbers and I love it.
Jonathan notices that “the end of the month” is Halloween, to Dess’s apparent surprise: “I hadn’t thought of that.” Excuse me? Miss All-Black Clothing and Combat Boots isn’t counting down the days to Halloween? (In fairness, I bet Rex, Dess, and Melissa either consider it the only worthwhile holiday OR they hate it because all the ~preps~ appropriate wearing black every October 31st.)
Anyway, another eclipse rolls in, but at this point the midnighters are kind of like “Whatever” about it. Dess bangs on about the possible numerological meanings of 10/31, and explains that Halloween was an anti-darkling holiday back in Ye Olden Days, because October used to be the 8th month, and 8 + 31 = 39, a multiple of 13. However, nowadays, November is the 11th month, and 11 + 1 = 12, which means that bad things will happen when October turns to November. (Jonathan immediately points out that 11/1 is All Saints’ Day, God love him.) (You know, as a teenager, I was definitely all like, “I can fix him” re: Rex, but now I’m thinking Jonathan was actual angsty Catholic 16-year-old me’s dream boy.)
No, there is no reason why the darklings arbitrarily care about one calendar system over another. As with all math and geography in this series, let’s just move on and not think about it too hard.
You’ll recall that Rex told Melissa he wasn’t interested in meeting up with Angie. Let’s disregard that, though, because he thinks it’s a great idea now. None of the other midnighters really agree, but it’s not like they have any other leads, so they grudgingly go along with whatever Rex has planned. He tells them that they’re all going to have to work together, and Dess sighs: [She wondered] if anyone else had noticed how every time all five of them did anything together, things went totally haywire.” Hee. Although their little rescue mission in Jenks went off pretty well, right? I mean, no one died or got turned into an eldritch horror that time.
We cut to Rex driving to meet Angie in Broken Arrow. Once again, the series lovingly details Broken Arrow’s status as “Bixby’s little sister”, a small town filled with oil derricks and tumbleweed and trailer parks. Based on that description alone, I’m sure you guessed that IRL Broken Arrow is actually bigger than Bixby and has more McMansions than trailer parks.
Rex meets Angie and tells her to get in his car (Melissa’s, technically) so they can talk. He smarms, “My wheels or no deal” at her, thinking that he practiced getting the dramatic inflection just right on the drive over. Hee. The series tries to make a lot of Rex’s transformation, and all the midnighters remark on how much less awkward and anxious he is now, but honestly, Rex isn’t really that different from his pre-transformation self. Every now and then the darkling half of him takes over and he’s all salivating over human flesh, but what we see of Rex’s “real” character is just as uptight and bossy as he was in past books. Also, you can’t convince me that someone who compares himself to a wolf and practiced the line “My wheels or no deal” for like half an hour isn’t still a massive dork.
Anyway. Rex snipes at Angie that it’s cold out here, which I only mention because not wearing a jacket had been Jessica’s idea. Seriously, I would have loved to see the midnighters actually plan this out. I bet Jessica was super-proud of herself for that jacket idea and I love her for it.
Angie sighs and gets in Melissa’s car, and she and Rex immediately start needling each other over who’s worse: Angie for being in a cult that kidnaps high schoolers or Rex for being a filthy midnighter in the first place. Angie tells Rex that well, actually, midnighters are the evil ones, and in fact, the Grayfoots liberated Bixby from an oligarchy of mind manipulation, time freezing, and…math, I guess. “What do you think it was really like back then? A small, unelected group of people running a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. People who could play God with time, who could ruin the brain of anyone who disagreed with them. Doesn’t that sound great, Rex, growing up in a place like that?…Everyone who abuses power says exactly the same thing: ‘We only do nasty, secret things to keep everyone safe. Without us in charge, you’re all doomed.’”
I mean, okay. I get the point — that the midnighters started off erasing people’s memories For the Greater Good and eventually started abusing their powers to turn Bixby into an oppressive hellhole — and it’s not an unfair one. That said…this is like an inverse of the whole “superpowers as a metaphor for marginalization” thing that X-Men likes so much, and much like with X-Men, the metaphor kind of falls apart once you consider that normies are genuinely outmatched by the supernatural powers that be. There’s meant to be a parallel here between the midnighters’ actions and the government hiding information from citizens (can you feel the early-2000s-WMDs-in-Iraq-Guantanamo-Patriot-Act energy radiating off this book?), but…I don’t know, I just feel like there’s a difference between “the government is doing secret evil shit that you, as a citizen, could take action about” and “people imbued with supernatural powers from birth are hiding the existence of an alternate dimension that, if revealed, might actually cause an otherworldly apocalypse.” I guess the idealistic train of thought would be that people have the right to know and do what they want with this information — and if they Darwin Award themselves to death trying to fuck around in midnight, that’s their right — but is it actually likely that this wouldn’t end with the midnighters getting run out of town with pitchforks? The town already thinks 3/5ths of them are Count Chocula-eating Satanists.
ANYWAY. Rex explains to Angie that there have been signs of change in the blue time, and they digress into arguing over which one of them knows more about midnight. Angie thinks it’s creepy that there are actual humans walking around while everyone else is frozen, and Rex is like, “Well, your darkling masters are creepier, and I know this because I’ve actually seen them” and Angie’s like, “Yeah, well, I’ve actually texted with them” and Rex is like, “Well, I once had a face-off with them over eating an 8th-grader.” It’s okay, guys, you’re both real midnight fans. That said, again, there’s an implication that Angie has one-upped Rex here and it’s weird. Like, can’t Melissa read the darklings’ minds? Communicating with them isn’t some frontier where no man has ever gone before.
A N Y W A Y. Before they can talk further, they see a car behind them and Rex internally reveals the midnighters’ plan: Jonathan and Dess are meant to drive into Broken Arrow, fool Angie into thinking the Grayfoots followed her, chase Rex and “force” him to drive them both back into Bixby, and then Melissa’s car will run out of gas so that Angie will be trapped in Bixby at midnight. Rex is like, “Huh, Jonathan and Dess are ahead of schedule” but obligingly pulls away. Angie starts freaking out that Rex is kidnapping her (how the turn tables), then she freaks out because there are now multiple cars chasing them, then Rex freaks out that the Grayfoots did in fact follow them and they’re in a real car chase. In summary: “Oops,” Rex said softly. Hee. Angie realizes that the Grayfoots discovered their meeting because Rex called her from his own house, not realizing his phone has been tapped for the past two years. (That’s actually pretty creepy, but the book just skates on over that.) Angie mutters, “Maybe you really are just a bunch of kids.” Yes, Angie, that is the point! They’re literal teenagers! They haven’t even taken the SATs!
We then take a brief detour into Jonathan’s POV. He and Dess are like, “Huh, is it just us, or is Rex in an actual car chase right now?” Heh. They quickly put together that the real Grayfoots discovered Angie and Rex’s meeting, and fret over what to do. They’re meant to be on their way to pick up Jessica and Melissa — post-chasing Rex, of course — but they’re like, “I guess we can’t leave Rex to be murdered in the desert by the Grayfoots…again.”
Back to Rex. He panics that he has no choice but to keep driving straight, but the Grayfoots are gaining on them and also he’s going to run out of gas soon (Dess, over in Jonathan’s POV: “So this afternoon, when Rex made us siphon most of the gas out of Melissa’s tank? That was kind of a waste of two hours.” HEE). He realizes he’s letting the Grayfoots dictate the terms of the chase and the darkling part of his brain is like, “Quit being such a beta, you’re embarrassing me.” He decides to swerve Melissa’s car off the road and into a patch of cactus, hoping that if both his and the Grayfoots’ tires are busted, he and Angie can escape on foot. To his surprise, though, the Grayfoots give up the chase. Angie tells him that they don’t want to risk getting stuck in Bixby at midnight, and they won’t abandon each other — “Just you,” Rex remarks. Heh. Way to rub it in.
Rex and Angie get down to talking, and Angie explains that she’s an actual historian, “not some amateur.” Angie, why are you trying to one-up a 16-year-old? Seriously, this right here is my whole issue with this section of the book: we’re supposed to think Angie is dropping truth bombs and blowing Rex’s mind, but like, she’s trying to guilt trip a high schooler — whom she previously was willing to use as a human sacrifice — for the sins of his not-even-actual-fathers who all died before he was even born. Sure, 16-year-olds aren’t children, but they’re also not adults with a full grasp of their actions. Angie even tries to needle him about Melissa accidentally vegetable-izing his father, saying that it’s proof midnighters are born monsters. Which, like…kids do fucked-up shit all the time, because they are still learning how to be functional human beings; the consequences of the midnighters’ mistakes are only so grave because they have supernatural powers (and it’s not like they can control that). Plus, the only reason Melissa caused so much damage is because there were no older midnighters to train her, so…is it a good thing that the older generation was wiped out or not? Or are we just advocating for murdering all potential midnighters from birth?
I mean, I do believe that this is meant to be nuanced, and we aren’t supposed to think that either side is totally right. That said, I do also feel like this is at least supposed to change how the audience views the midnighters vs. darklings fight, but the “midnighters bad” argument is really dancing around the whole otherworldly-alternate-dimension angle, and also the justifying-trying-to-human-sacrifice-teenagers angle. Like there are just too many holes in this analogy for it to feel like a mic drop moment.
Anyway, Angie explains further that she was doing research on Oklahoma’s early statehood for her master’s or whatever, which is how she got entwined with the Grayfoots. She found court records of a case between the Grayfoot family and the old midnighters: back in the day, some upstanding pillars of the Bixby community (read: seers) made an oil claim on Indian land, which the Grayfoots tried to contest. The case wound up in the courts in Tulsa, where the midnighters couldn’t mindcast — so instead of mindcasting the judge and jury like they normally would, they just mindcasted all the Native parties to give up the case and sell all their worldly possessions to pay for the midnighters’ legal fees. Rex: “That sounds…unfair.” Yeah, just a little, Rex.
Rex accepts that the old midnighters were corrupt and racist, and Angie admits that nevertheless, seeing the body of a dead 12-year-old did kind of make her feel bad. She was like, “Maybe we shouldn’t sacrifice children anymore?” and the Grayfoots were like, “Wow you’re actually being really unsupportive and toxic right now” and cut her out of the business. She tells Rex that the Grayfoots were looking forward to the upcoming apocalypse, but now that they’ve lost their communication link with the darklings, they’ve gotten scared and are running away. This is weird because…once we find out more details about what said apocalypse is, it seems like the Grayfoots would be in as much trouble as everyone else? I mean, I guess they were expecting better guidance on how to avoid it, and now they just have to run as far as they can and hope for the best, but…still. It reads like the Grayfoots were expecting some windfall to come along with the rise of their darkling overlords, but upon reveal of the darklings’ master plan, I don’t see how that would’ve happened. Whatever.
Rex promises Angie that their generation of midnighters is different, and to prove it, he won’t let Melissa mindcast her — instead, they’re just going to talk, and Rex will trust Angie to tell the truth. Angie agrees, although it’s not like she has a lot of choice in the matter. Then, after all the action is over, Jonathan and Dess roll up. Rex is all annoyed that they threw off his plan by trying to help him. Jeez. Excuse them for caring that you might get murdered, Rex. He realizes that Jessica and Melissa won’t get here until after midnight, which means he’ll be alone and unprotected against all the darklings in the desert. Then he thinks that maybe, deep down, he actually wanted to this happen — now he can commune with the darklings directly, just like he was thinking about earlier. (And like he promised Melissa he wouldn’t do, just like he said he wouldn’t try to meet with Angie. Melissa, this is a lesson about trusting emo boys.)
Meanwhile, Jessica and Melissa are at a rest stop somewhere, waiting for Jonathan. Jessica reflects that she was a little worried about spending a whole hour alone with Melissa, but it turned out not to be so bad: “Melissa wasn’t the bitchy snob she used to be.” She’s not? Because she spent the entire pep rally snarking on how contemptible she finds every single person in school except Rex, and she even got in a drive-by insult about how basic Jess and Jonathan are.
It’s weird how, when we’re in the other midnighters’ POVs, they often tell us outright that Melissa is cruel to cover up how sad she is, and we see moments of kindness or vulnerability from her — like later on in this scene, we get the impression that maybe she really is bothered by everyone thinking she’s a dick (“I pretty much know how you guys feel about me, got that?”). And yet, when we’re in Melissa’s actual POV, it’s just her being superior and sarcastic, without any sense that she genuinely cares what anyone thinks or wants to form a connection with anyone besides Rex. It’s hard to understand what this eternal sadness that they’re talking about is, or what prompts her to swing from “not caring if Jessica and Jonathan get eaten” to “worrying that Jonathan’s going to fall off a roof and die” every so often.
Hey, maybe if we’d gotten a breather scene showing Jessica and Melissa talking during the hour they spent alone, that might’ve helped develop their characters more, and would’ve shown some of Melissa’s motivations? Just throwing that out there.
Midnight falls, and Melissa relays that the plan got screwed up, Rex is alone in darkling territory (I mean, Dess is also there, Melissa), and Jonathan is on his way to pick the two girls up. Jessica gets emo about Melissa and Jonathan mind melding again. Melissa snipes that she’s not going to “spew [her] crippled mind” into Jonathan’s, so Jess can quit annoying Melissa with her petty insecurities now. Ah, yes, there’s the lighter, softer Melissa, who is so wildly different from her previous characterization. Jessica feels guilty and reaches out to touch Melissa, letting her feel the joy of flying as an apology. Once again, she reflects that Melissa isn’t as much of a basket case as she used to be: “there was nothing twisted and pitiable about Melissa’s mind now. Through her eyes the blue world was suffused with a stately calm. And under that an old sadness…” Seriously, how? When???
Whatever. Jonathan shows up, and the three of them race across the desert to save Rex (once again totally forgetting Dess’s existence, RIP). Upon arriving, they see Dess taking down a darkling alone, and she tells them Rex went off to commune with the elder darklings. Jessica and Jonathan immediately want to go save him, but Melissa tells them not to. Everyone’s like, “He is absolutely going to die out there,” but Jessica takes Melissa’s side. She reflects that Melissa might not give a shit if the rest of them die, but she would never do anything to hurt Rex. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to think this is romantic. Also, again, I fail to see how this jives with Melissa being nicer and less contemptuous than she used to be. Whatever, again, some more.
Out in the desert, a bunch of gigantic, ancient darklings come to meet with Rex. Rex is awed by how powerful and how many they are, and realizes that the midnighters don’t actually have much of a chance against all of them at once. The darklings start chanting “Winter is coming” like it’s 2011 and Game of Thrones is still cool, inviting Rex to join them in eating their way through Bixby. In their mind-meld, Rex gets a sense of what’s happening, aka this book starts trying to scientifically bullshit the plot: the contortion of time that made the secret hour is starting to strain under the weight of all the hours it’s missing, and the only way to stop it from breaking open is to release the pressure with a bolt of lightning…somehow. Rex is like, “We can stop this!”– and by “we”, he means the only midnighter that has the ability to use white light in the secret hour. Heh. The midnighters are really a group project where Jess and Dess are doing most of the work. The darklings snarl that Rex is the only one that can bring Jessica down, and he has to “take” her before she can stop the apocalypse. Uh…I’m pretty sure they mean “murder”, but that is not the wording I would’ve chosen.
Anyway, Rex manages to hold his ground and refuses to join them. As they leave, the darklings put a block in Rex’s head so he won’t remember what he learned about the apocalypse. He shuffles back to the rest of the gang and tells them that he’s not going to let Melissa mindcast Angie. Dess, Melissa, and Jonathan all immediately protest, leaving Rex to appeal to Jessica for help. You’ll recall Jess was not thrilled about mindwiping Cassie, so she takes Rex’s side and is endearingly worried that the others will try to undercut her opinion: The other three stared at her, and Jessica half expected one of them to shout, Who cares what you think? But as the silence stretched out, she felt something shift[…]Apparently they did care what she thought.” Aw, they don’t think she’s a useless square after all <3
After the secret hour ends, the midnighters confront Angie, who repeats what she told Rex about the old midnighters actually being dicks. Jessica muses that Madeleine must have been around when all this was happening, and yet she never mentioned it to any of them. She’s like, “Whatever, Melissa’s going to have to deal with her, not me.” Heh.
The midnighters tell Angie that they think the world is going to end on midnight on October 31 which would’ve been a great time for me to have finished these posts if I weren’t so lazy. Angie says that the Grayfoots had mentioned “Samhain” to her a couple of times and that she knows the flame-bringer is important to the event somehow — not that she knows how, or even what Samhain is. Melissa has to explain that Samhain is the ancient name for Halloween. (It’s more like some traditions of Samhain slowly merged with the Christian All Saints’ Day and over time morphed into Halloween, but I get keeping it short for the sake of YA simplicity.) (Also, Angie, a historian, hasn’t even heard of Samhain? Sure, she’s probably not very familiar with European history if her focus is the Americas, but I feel like she should’ve gotten an overview of various pre-Christian traditions in undergrad.)
Anyway, let’s not get distracted from the most important part of this scene: as soon as Melissa defines Samhain for everyone, Dess says, “Spot the goth”, to which Melissa snipes, “Like you should talk.” HEE.
(That said, I refuse to believe Dess didn’t know what Samhain was, because she is totally a Misfits girl.)
Angie gets in another dig about how Halloween monsters aren’t real, because the real monsters are midnighters, including our current generation of high schoolers. Oh. I thought maybe, after the preceding scenes, we were moving towards the understanding that the old midnighters were bad people, but a bunch of 15-year-olds aren’t to blame for their crimes. Apparently not! This pisses Rex off, and he goes darkling on Angie, somehow stretching himself out taller and hissing that if he’s a monster, it’s because she turned him into one. Then he turns and leads the midnighters away, leaving Angie to walk back into town.
The next week passes without incident, according to Jessica’s POV: Rex hasn’t eaten anyone, Melissa hasn’t managed to crack the block in his head yet, and meanwhile, [t]here hadn’t been any more eclipses—or timequakes, or whatevers of the prime whatever—since lunchtime a week ago. Heh. One night, though, Beth brings Cassie Flinders home from school. She plays it off like they became friends through band — Cassie plays the clarinet — but she keeps making sly remarks about how Cassie lives in Jenks and she’s a really good artist and in fact she did some really cool drawings of these random goth high schoolers and the preppy redhead they hang with. Cassie thinks she’s met Jessica before, although she can’t remember where. Jessica acts super sweaty and suspicious all through the dinner while Beth smirks. Jess frets that, on top of worrying that Beth is going to discover the blue time on her own, she’s also now worried that Rex is going to bend his “no mindcasting” policy and let Melissa fuck around in Beth’s brain. She quickly resolves not to tell anyone about this. Keeping secrets never backfires in works of fiction, after all.
Meanwhile, Rex and Melissa go to Madeleine’s to let her have a crack at Rex’s brain. Before they go up to her attic, Melissa begs Rex to let her try again on her own: she tells Rex that he doesn’t know what mindcasters are really capable of, and what lengths Madeleine will probably go to in order to ~purge~ the darkling from him. Rex acts all distant and lightly condescending about Melissa’s concern for him, which hurts her feelings: “She had the foul feeling in her stomach that she’d tasted so many times in Bixby High girls, that sour paranoia that their boyfriends’ interest in them was evaporating. Melissa had always written them off as dorky and contemptible; she’d never realized that rejection was so painful.”
Let’s savor this, you guys. For a single, shining moment across 3 books, Melissa has some self-awareness and empathy for other people.
Alright, moment over. Melissa shows Rex some of the memories Madeleine passed down to her of mindcasters past. Obviously the mindcasters don’t have any memories of them being like, “Are we the baddies?”, but Melissa has read between the lines and thinks that they simply never thought anything they did was wrong. She muses that mindcaster training is partly brainwashing — filling new mindcasters’ brains not just with knowledge, but also with the midnighters’ belief that they’re superior. “What they passed down was unbelievable smugness, Rex. They never questioned what they were doing. I don’t think they could question it.” I mean…not Melissa talking about “unbelievable smugness.”
Melissa says that, even though Madeleine has been trying to train her, she’s told Melissa that she’ll never be a “real” mindcaster because she started too late. Melissa tells Rex that this is a good thing, because she’s actually the first mindcaster not to be fully indoctrinated: she can excuse violating Dess’s brain and letting Jessica get eaten, but she draws the line at using her power to oppress an entire town of people! She apologizes to Rex again for what she did to his father, which…again, we’re repeatedly told that she feels bad about this, but we never really see any fallout from it in Melissa’s personality? She’s been perfectly comfortable mindcasting and manipulating people from book one; she’s a little nicer to Rex than the other midnighters, but it’s often implied that it’s simply because she finds him less annoying than other people, rather than Melissa trying to make up for what she did.
TL,DR; what bugs me about Melissa is that her character is a whole lot of telling and not much showing, and that’s what I’ve been trying to say in all of these overly long rambles. I think this is the last “Melissa is actually sad and damaged” scene of the series, though, so you won’t have to hear from me again about this.
ANYWAY. They go up to see Madeleine, who’s all annoyed that Rex almost ruined her hard work by getting himself killed. She tries to brute-force her way into Rex’s head because she’s all arrogant and convinced of her superiority; Melissa tries to stop her, but just as Madeleine cracks the block in his head, Rex’s darkling side turns on her and tears into Madeleine’s brain. He digs up her secrets and confirms what we already knew, which is that Madeleine is the one who revealed the secret hour to the Grayfoots and got Anathea kidnapped and eventually got all the midnighters killed. The mental assault knocks Madeleine out and leaves her catatonic, but Rex manages to hold his darkling side back from mentally attacking Melissa because of the Power of Love or whatever. He finally gets ahold of himself and tells Melissa that he remembers what the darklings told him. She asks if he knows how to stop the Samhainpocalypse, and he dramatically says “We can try.” That…that’s not really an answer, Rex. Yoda would be so disappointed.
Up next: The midnighters try to stop the apocalypse and discover, naturally, that there’s a big twist that renders their planning useless. Most unnerving of all, however, is the discovery that Rex is wearing cowboy boots.
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