Slogging Through The Scorch

Sometimes I just have to force myself to finish a book and that's all there is to it.  I had expected to get through The Scorch Trials (the second book in the Maze Runner Trilogy) fairly quickly, considering I read the first one in about a day.  I had mixed feelings about the first book, but wanted to finish up the trilogy, if nothing else to see what the heck it was all for.  I really tried to go into the second book with an open mind, but ugh, I had a really hard time with it.  To me it had all the problems of the first book with very little of it's good points.  Anyways here is a quick and probably jaded synopsis (I apologize to those of you who love these books, it is just my own personal take see this post for a fuller explanation).  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

This book starts off where the last one left off.  The boys awaken in there nice cozy beds ready for some well deserved R&R.  Of course this does not make for a good story so instead they are set upon by crazy, sick, oozy people called Cranks.  Apparently the disease called Flare takes up residence in your brain and eventually makes you cuckoo.  Luckily for our boys they are safe behind barred windows.  Shaken up, but determined to figure out what the heck is going on they go to find there rescuers from before.  As they wander into the kitchen, trying to find some answers, they come upon the horrifying sight of all there rescuers dead and hung from the ceiling...WTF!  They all gather and talk and discover that instead of Teresa in her
room it is a boy named Aris who informs the Gladers that he was the "Teresa" in another Maze situation that was completely identical except that it was full of girls instead of boys. The only other differences are that more girls made it out then boys (well duh! :-) ) and that his partner Rachel got killed in front of them, since they didn't have a Chuck to jump in front of her.  A man appears behind a force field and informs the Gladers that they have all been infected by the Flare and that they had exactly two weeks to make it 100 miles across the Scorch (an area that has been devastated by a mega sun flare ((this has a serious SyFy channel feel to it)) and is pretty brutal on its own) and make it to a safe haven where they will all be cured. So off they set and as you can probably guess all kinds of horrific, non-sensicle things happen to them (seriously a head eating ball is just one of the horrors they  deal with). Teresa also shows up randomly to add additional torture to poor Thomas (who is still our main character).  After many deaths and injuries they make it to this city type place that is over run by Cranks in various states of the disease.  They make a tentative alliance with a pair named Jorge and Brenda who have just been diagnosed and exiled.   The group gets separated, Jorge and the Gladers wander around and Brenda and Thomas get into a couple of scrapes.  Cranks are crazy and do crazy things.  Eventually they all meet up again to continue across the Scorch.  Teresa shows up again with Group B (the girls) and captures Thomas.  They are supposed to kill him, but he talks the girls out of it.  Teresa and Aris get together and kidnap Thomas and take him to this box thingy that is supposed to kill him.  It releases some gas that heals him and Teresa and Aris said it was all part of the plan that he felt betrayed...yeah.  Thomas is understandably unable to forgive Teresa, or even believe anything that anybody is saying at this point.  They all meet back up with the other groups at the supposed safe haven site.  About 30 minutes before the deadline, weird monstery humany things appear and start trying to kill the kids.  Most of them hang on long enough to get to the deadline.  A ship appears in the sky and collects the kids.  They tell them that they are safe now (we've heard that before) and that everything will be explained.  Thomas falls asleep to Teresa talking in his head, telling him that WICKED (the group behind all this crap) is good.  The book ends with a memo talking about removing the mind wipe and telling the kids which of them are immune to the Flare.
Whew done with that!  I have not been so happy to finish a book in a while...and I still have two more to go!  This book had all of my most hated pet peeves in a second book.  It felt fairly pointless and unnecessary.  The whole point of the book seemed to be to torture teenage kids...and that is about it.  We do not get a whole lot of information about the world, or WICKED that we did not get in the first book.  In fact the only thing that was really new was the fact we find out that it was Thomas, Teresa, and Aries choice to go into the
Maze.  We keep seeing the WICKED people talk about patterns, and creating patterns, and that all this pointless stuff will result in patterns...but not a single mention of what the heck it is.  I will give the author props for inventiveness when it comes to the myriad of tortures he puts his characters through.  Walks down pitch dark tunnels resulting in peoples heads being eaten by balls of metal, random boxes of fear, giant monsters men who can be taken down by popping orange bubbles.  All very terrifying.  The character development was not as complete as the last book, while the friendships between Newt, Minho, and Thomas stayed refreshingly intact and very bromance, the new characters were just kind of tossed in there to further the "plot" which is pretty sparse to begin with.  Overall not one of my favorite books, it was very frustrating to watch these kids get jerked around, tortured, hurt, killed, lied to and then tell them "it's for a reason, but we won't tell you the reason".  As a reader, I personally can only take so watching characters get relentlessly punished with out any payoff, it starts to feel icky and squirmy, like I only am reading it so I can watch them suffer.  Like I said earlier, I will finish off the series to see if there is any pay off, but I think the open mind part is starting to suffer.  Those of you who enjoyed these books, please let me know in the comments why, because I really want to know!

How does this book compare to other second books in YA dystopia series?    Have you ever made your self finish a series?  How does one come up with head eating metal sphere of doom?