If you missed my 100 analysis #1, you can catch that here. By the way, I'm still in the phase where I call it "the one-hundred" instead of "the hundred" and I just can't seem to get out of it. I need to convince some of my real-life people to watch so I can say it out loud more often, lol. Anyway.
Just to re-iterate what I'm doing here, I'm examining this show from two very specific angles. I'm delving into two key points in the series (or what has aired so far which is the first 2 seasons) when I realized that this show was not quite like anything else I had ever seen on TV ... or anywhere for that matter. My first analysis was on "Spacewalker", and also on the entire Clarke/Finn relationship, and how it progressed from the pilot through Spacewalker. For my second analysis, I'm going to focus on "Rubicon".
WARNING: Like my last review of The 100, this review contains SPOILERS. LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS. TURN BACK HERE if you have NOT seen the first 2 seasons of this series in its entirety. Seriously. If you haven't seen the entire show and you continue past this jump, you're an asshole.
Now, I want to preface this by saying that I’m writing this in the context of having watched all the way up through “Rubicon,” but NOT past it yet. I wrote a lot of the notes for this post at that time, before I watched the rest of season 2. Once you watch the rest of S2, you realize that the decision Clarke made in Rubicon was a precursor to another similar decision she makes in the finale. But prior to Rubicon, she had never done anything even close to this morally dubious (even despicable?) before. It's a momentous stepping stone in the series, as it's a line she had never crossed, a line that no decent human would ever want to encounter. And as we see in the definition above, once you take a step like this, there is NO going back. What happened here is what put Clarke in the effed up head-space that one would need to be in to make that other horrific decision she made in the finale. And the fact that she took this step, in Rubicon, had me perplexed as shit the whole day after I watched it.
I didn't pay attention to how long it took me to scarf down the first 2 seasons of The 100, but I think it was a week and a half, 2 weeks tops. On weeknights I'd watch about 1-2 eps per night, and then more on weekend nights. I watched "Rubicon" on a Sunday night, with my whole work week ahead of me bright and early the next morning. And the fact that it was a work night meant that I couldn't sit there all night and devour the rest of S2, which is of course what I was dying to do after finishing Rubicon. I was like Lincoln jonesing for a shot of that creepy reaper drug. But unlike Lincoln, I stopped myself. When I went to work on Monday, I had a lot I needed to get done, so I plugged away at it. But the entire day as I worked, I just had this constant nagging worry in the back of my head about how and why Clarke could have made the decision to let that missile hit the Ton DC meeting, and how the hell she can possibly ever come back from what felt like such a colossal fuck-up. When a TV show starts to eff you in the head to the point where it distracts you from your daily life tasks and you have to keep reminding yourself it's only fiction, you know it’s a good one.
But I mean how the hell could she do this!? The decisions she had made up until that point had all felt so right to me. I was with her every single time, including the time from a few episodes earlier in which she had killed her own love interest with a knife to the gut to prevent him from suffering a far worse death. During this stretch of season 2, she was also working diligently to get an alliance with the Grounders up and running, and then to keep it that way, as people with conflicting interests tried to sabotage it. She went out on a limb several times during this time frame, making risky decisions, but again, they all felt like the best decisions to make in these moments, even when they went a bit sideways. She was doing the best she could under the circumstances.
But this Ton DC thing?? This was just insane. I had to work through it in my head, what the writers would be thinking and planning with this turn of events. The obvious comparisons that kept popping into my head were the decisions of Jaha & Kane on the Ark. It was clear that the writers were putting Clarke in the same position as these adult leaders who she had despised for so long ... she hated them for having made decisions that were essentially the same as what she had now just done.
Now, let's keep it real here - post-Rubicon, Jaha goes pretty far off the rails. Hell, even IN Rubicon he's already well on his way to cuckoo town. But at this point, he has not yet gone so insane as to throw someone off a boat to be eaten by a sea monster, in order to save himself. So I was still looking at him as a fairly respectable and non-loony figure on the show at the point when I watched Rubicon, despite the morally questionable decisions he had made on the Ark. Likewise with Kane, whose leadership style is generally less emotionally-driven than Jaha's, and who thus occasionally has done some pretty awful things. Each of them has, in the past, sacrificed the lives of certain groups of people for the good of other (usually larger) groups. Just like Clarke (although the numbers game in Clarke's case may not add up so well, but still, you get the idea). So how is it that I was so much more upset at Clarke in this moment than I ever was at Jaha or Kane?
A large part of it is about expectation, of course. Clarke was supposed to be the good guy here, and now she's resorting to the same tactics she always despised. And part of it is circumstance - I mean, sheesh, that sneaking out of the meeting site bit just felt so ... well, sneaky. So slimy. So selfish. It was cold hard strategy minus any hint of humanity. Abby’s disgusted reaction towards her own daughter in that moment was the same way I was feeling. Jaha had always been very willing to sacrifice himself in many situations similar to this one, which made him seem more noble. Clarke, by comparison, had snuck right out the back door and left everyone else to get blown to bits. Fuckin' weaksauce.
But an essential part of this equation is that Clarke is just a kid, after all. What is she supposed to be at this point, 17? 18? Something like that. If we felt like she was making the right decision every time - especially considering that the complexity and colossal risk of the decisions she’s making is way more intense than anything most of us adults will ever have to encounter in our lifetimes – this story wouldn’t be believable. I myself as an adult with 20 years more life experience than Clarke would certainly make the wrong decision plenty often if I were in Clarke's shoes. And decisions of this magnitude this will always have major consequences.
And then again, was this even the wrong decision?? It’s funny that I’m watching this show very shortly after watching The Imitation Game for the first time. What Clarke and Lexa did here was almost exactly the same moral decision that Alan Turing and his cohorts had to make* in The Imitation Game – Once they had finally cracked the code to decrypt the German’s secret messages, they quickly realized two things: 1) an attack on a British convoy was imminent, and 2) stopping that attack would ruin their entire strategy, because it would tip off the Germans that they had gained access to their super-secret encrypted comms. They then faced the awful moral decision of whether they should save the people on this one ship, or let these people die in order to win the larger war. In The Imitation Game, the answer seemed obvious to me, despite what a horrible decision it was.
*Disclaimer: While The Imitation Game is based on a true story, it takes liberties with the facts to ratchet up the drama, as Hollywood does. The movie gives Turing's Hut 8 team a lot more power over which of their intelligence intercepts were acted upon than they actually had in real life. In actuality, it was Stewart Menzies, head of MI6 (who was also in the movie) who made these decisions. According to the Telegraph, Menzies "introduced a system that meant only a certain percentage of the intelligence gleaned from decoding would be passed on to the British Army, Navy and RAF," to avoid arousing too much suspicion from the Germans. The particular convoy scenario shown in the movie was written for the movie itself, and it's unknown (at least from my googling) what types of situations actually arose from this. I can't imagine that type of info would be made public. But I can only figure that there had to be at least some similar sticky situations that occurred here, not to mention in many other war/conflict/espionage scenarios throughout history, present day, and future.
But why did I so readily accept this decision in Imitation Game, while Clarke's same decision seemed so much more horrible? The key difference between The Imitation Game and the Ton DC sitch is that Clarke was THERE onsite. We could actually see the people who were about to die with our own eyeballs; in many cases we even “knew” them. Octavia and Lincoln were there, for Christ's sake! It’s a whole lot easier to make a horrific decision like this when you’re talking about nameless faceless people vs. 3-dimensional people who you actually know and who are standing right in front of you. Which is quite disturbing and extremely relevant to how wars are actually fought, especially these days, in the age of drones. The way we "fight" half the time now is to just sit back and send a drone, like someone playing a video game. Now that is twisted.
The other key difference between Imitation and The 100 is that Clarke saved herself in the Ton DC sitch, which felt selfish and gross. But it was also the logical decision, because without their leaders, the armies could have easily fallen into disarray. Clarke allowed Lexa to talk her into keeping her eye on the prize (rescuing the prisoners from The Mountain) at the cost of a smaller (scratch that - upon rewatching the ep, I realize that Ton DC may have been a larger) group of people. What would I have done in that sitch? I really don’t know. I’d like to think I would have found a way to sneak as many people out of the village as possible before the missile hit, but they didn't have a lot of time to figure this all out, which made it a nearly impossible situation.
But let's look at this from one last angle: Was this decision cold hard logic with no emotion, really? Think about this - if Clarke and Lexa had chosen to simply yell "MISSILE INBOUND EVERYBODY RUN!!" and saved everyone's lives at Ton DC, then Clarke's people would have been far more likely to die in Mount Weather. And the person who would have been at the most immediate risk would have been ... drumroll please ... Bellamy. Sweet, sexy Bellamy. No but really though, Bellamy has become, over the course of these two seasons, Clarke's closest confidante and friend. And we all know both of them kinda love each other a li'l bit, whether either of them are willing to admit it or not. So I think it was her heart that stopped her from simply yelling "FIRE!!" and saving everyone in Ton DC. Here's my theory: Her heart stopped her from saving the Ton DC peeps from the missile, and cold hard strategy is what convinced her to sneak out the back door to avoid dying along with them.
And in the end, given the relatively small amount of time Clarke was given to deal with this earth-shattering (literally) dilemma* and given how easy it would be for 99.9% of the planet to fuck it up in her shoes, we pretty much had to just accept that what was done was done. It all blew up in their faces (literally), and there wasn't nothin' we could do to change it at that point. All we could do was just watch closely to see how Clarke felt about her decision in the aftermath. And how she felt about Lexa's leadership. As it turns out, the answer was - not great. On either front. And that was a relief. The last thing any of us want is for this stuff to turn Clarke into a sociopath. She makes a great protagonist because she cares, and because doing awful things like this make her feel appropriately awful. And guilty. And thus she does everything in her power to avoid doing them in the first place.
Lexa is a great character and I know there are a bazillion people out there shipping these two. But given who she is, and given how badly she fucked over Clarke & the Sky People in the last few eps of the season, I think it's most definitely in Clarke's best interest to stay pissed at Lexa rather than letting herself get sucked back in again. She was starting to get a bit intoxicated with the power leading into Rubicon and even in the few eps beyond it, and that is a dangerous place to be in, as we saw from Rubicon onwards. We'll see though. Given what a fan-favorite Lexa is, I have no doubt she'll play a prominent role in S3. Who knows, maybe she'll have some sort of epiphany and grow a heart or something. Heh. I suppose if even Murphy can turn halfway decent, then anything is possible. The character is certainly a great foil and challenger for Clarke; I just continue to hope that Clarke won't lose herself through any of this. Especially after all that happened in season 2.
*p.s. How much time actually does pass between Clarke telling Lexa about the missile and the missile actually striking the village? I ask this question because on my second watch of the ep, I realized that it's still light outside (but looks like early evening) when Clarke first arrives at Ton DC, and then by the time the missile hits, it's fully dark outside. When I watched this ep the first time, I thought only 15 or 30 minutes had passed by the time the missile hit. But now I'm thinking it may have been over an hour, maybe two? Hmm Clarke, Hmmmm. Perplexing.
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