Catching Fire Recap: What the Third Quarter Quell Revealed About Haymitch

Spoilers for Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire and for the outcome of Haymitch’s Games. This recap follows the novel.

In Catching Fire, the Third Quarter Quell reveals that Haymitch Abernathy was helping the rebels break Katniss out of the arena. He never competes in the 75th Hunger Games. Peeta volunteers in his place, and Haymitch stays outside as their mentor. From there, he helps carry out a plan that gets Katniss onto a hovercraft bound for District 13 and leaves Peeta in Capitol custody.

The clue to Haymitch’s role comes earlier, on a train. Katniss and Peeta watch footage of the Games he won and see him use the arena’s force field to survive. By the end of the Third Quarter Quell, Katniss has used another force field to bring the arena down. Only after the rescue does she learn how much Haymitch knew about the plan and how little he chose to tell her.

Why Haymitch Doesn’t Compete in the Third Quarter Quell

After Katniss and Peeta survive the 74th Hunger Games by threatening to eat poisonous berries, President Snow pressures Katniss to sell their love story on the Victory Tour. He wants Panem to see the berries as an act of desperation by two people in love. The districts have already seen what happens when tributes force the Capitol to back down.

Then comes the twist for the 75th Hunger Games. The Capitol will reap tributes from each district’s pool of living victors. Katniss is District 12’s only living female victor, so her return is guaranteed. Haymitch’s name is drawn for the men, and Peeta volunteers to take his place.

Before the reaping, Katniss asks Haymitch to help her keep Peeta alive. That promise gives the ending its sting. Katniss goes into the arena believing that she and Haymitch share a priority. Haymitch is also working with people whose plan depends on getting her out.

What Katniss and Peeta Learn From Haymitch’s Games

On the train to the Capitol, Katniss and Peeta watch the recording of the Second Quarter Quell, the 50th Hunger Games. That year, the Capitol doubled the number of tributes. The footage shows Haymitch teaming up with Maysilee Donner, another District 12 tribute and a friend of Katniss’s mother. Katniss also learns that her mockingjay pin once belonged to Maysilee, who dies in the arena.

Near the edge of the arena, Haymitch discovers that a force field sends objects hurtling back. When the last surviving tribute throws an axe at him, he drops out of its path. The field sends the axe back at her, killing her and making Haymitch the victor.

Katniss and Peeta recognize something familiar in that victory. At the end of their own Games, the berries forced the Gamemakers to choose between crowning two victors and getting none. Haymitch found a different weakness. The force field existed to keep tributes inside, and he made it decide who lived. That makes the tape more than a scouting exercise. For the first time, Katniss gets to see her mentor as a tribute faced with a version of the same problem she had.

How Katniss Turns the Third Quell’s Arena Against the Capitol

In the 75th Games, Finnick Odair wears Haymitch’s gold bracelet, giving Katniss a reason to trust him. Finnick later revives Peeta after Peeta strikes the force field. As the alliance grows, Wiress helps Katniss recognize that the arena works like a clock, with each section unleashing its danger at a set time.

Late in the Games, Katniss finds Beetee injured near the force field with wire wrapped around a knife. She’s ready to shoot Enobaria when she remembers Haymitch’s advice about who the enemy is. She attaches the wire to an arrow and fires at a weak spot in the force field as lightning strikes the tree. The surge brings the arena down.

The two Quells end with the same piece of Capitol technology doing something its designers never intended. Haymitch uses the boundary to survive the final fight. Katniss has a shot at another tribute and chooses to take down the boundary itself. The tape on the train gives that choice a history. The man who tells her where to direct her anger once stood at the edge of an arena and found a way to make its design work against the people who built it.

What Haymitch Knew About the Rebel Rescue

Katniss wakes aboard a hovercraft and finds Haymitch with Finnick and Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee. She learns that Plutarch was working with the rebels and that several victors knew about the plan to break out. Beetee was supposed to destroy the force field. The rebels kept Katniss and Peeta in the dark to protect the plan from the Capitol, and the group worked to keep Peeta alive because they knew Katniss would have little reason to cooperate if he died.

The rebels extract Katniss, Finnick and Beetee. The Capitol gets Peeta, Johanna and Enobaria. Then Gale tells Katniss that the Capitol bombed District 12. Prim and her mother escaped, but the place Katniss thought she might go home to is gone.

The rescue changes how we read Haymitch’s mentorship. His bracelet helps Katniss trust the right ally, and his advice helps her take the shot that breaks the arena. Yet the secrecy that makes the rescue possible also makes it feel like a betrayal. Katniss asked Haymitch to help her save Peeta. She wakes up alive and has to learn from Haymitch himself that Peeta was left in the Capitol’s hands.

What to Remember Before Reading Sunrise on the Reaping

The simplest way to keep the two Games straight is to remember who’s inside the arena. Haymitch competes in and wins the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell. Katniss and Peeta compete in the 75th, the Third Quarter Quell, while Haymitch helps organize the rescue from outside.

Sunrise on the Reaping tells the earlier story from Haymitch’s perspective. In Catching Fire, we first see that story through a Capitol recording that Katniss and Peeta are watching years later. The difference matters. The tape shows how Haymitch won. The prequel gives him room to tell us what it was like to live through those Games.

For more on the sequel, read our review of Catching Fire. If you’ve finished the prequel, see our Sunrise on the Reaping ending explained.

Read the Books

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• Revisit the train scene and the arena breakout in Catching Fire on Amazon.
• Read Haymitch’s account of the 50th Hunger Games in Sunrise on the Reaping on Amazon.

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