Hey look at this fancy new show I've discovered! O.k. fine, "new" might not be an entirely accurate description. But it's new to me, and that's what matters. It only took me 2 seasons to discover it! That ain't so bad, is it? It's not that I didn't know this show existed; I did. As a matter of fact, Matt Barber, former editor of Chuck and coincidental friend-of-a-friend, was an editor on it in season 1. It even got positive reviews from critics, from what I saw on Twitter. So why was I so skeptical? Well, it takes a LOT for me to get into a new TV show these days. There are just sooo many shows on the air right now, how the hell does a girl decide?? What finally swayed me to check out The 100 was Mo Ryan, one of my favorite critics since the Chuck days. She's always said good things about this show, and they only seemed to get better in season 2. Plus, someone I know on tumblr started posting a bunch of 100 pics and memes and gifs recently, and it must have wormed its way into my brain.
So boom, I finally checked it out. And holy shit, what a ride. It's gotten my TV bloggin' brain juices flowing again for the first time in like 7 months. It's time for some deep Plopper analysis.
I'm going to examine this show from two very specific angles. Essentially what I want to delve into is two watershed moments for me as a viewer, and key points in the series (first 2 seasons which is what has aired so far) when I realized that this show was not quite like anything else I had ever seen on TV ... or anywhere for that matter. I'll focus on analysis #1 here, and then get to analysis #2 in another blog post. I should say that analysis #1 is more than just one moment ... it's actually an evolution of a storyline with a few major turning points along the way. Let's get to it.
WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS. If you read it, especially past my second warning below, you will spoil crucial parts of the series for yourself, if you haven't seen it yet. So please, do yourself a favor and ONLY read this review if you've seen the first 2 seasons in their entirety.
The 100 Analysis #1: Spacewalker
For our first in-depth analysis of The 100, let’s look at the story of Clarke and Finn. Finn is the “cute boy” of the story here - the clear future love interest for the female lead, and the obvious romantic-tension-eventually-leading-to-romance storyline. He is the pacifist of the group; the one who is their moral center – he’s the angel on everyone’s shoulder in sticky situations, trying to talk them away from listening to that devil on the other side. Awww ... such a sweet guy and he’s a cutie patootie to boot! Tryna give Harry Styes a run for his money in the hair department. Naturally, this story becomes your classic tale of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl are torn apart by a third party, boy continues to pursue girl, boy mows down half a village of unarmed men women and children with a machine gun. Wait, what!!?? :record scratch noise:
Let's back up for a sec. Clarke & Finn’s romantic arc began quite early in season 1 – so much so that I found the storyline to be reasonably entertaining, but not entirely riveting (and this is coming from someone who has a long history of shipping various characters in many a TV show). But still, it was decent enough. Then, when we found out shortly thereafter that Finn already had a girlfriend on the Ark, I groaned heavily - uugghh. The classic love triangle is one of my most hated TV tropes, and realizing that we were about to embark on one here had me bracing for the obnoxiousness, and for the disappointment of the cliché places it would certainly go. I liked Clarke and Finn and I loved Raven’s feisty brainiac personality immediately, so it bummed me out to know that I would likely wind up hating all 3 of these peeps after this plot device had its way with them. I always do with these things.
And while I did want to punch each of them in the face at various moments as this storyline played out, I was pleasantly surprised to see all of these characters act reasonably mature throughout, especially considering that they are teenagers. Clarke and Raven weren’t exactly besties throughout this whole awkward sitch, but they still worked together for what needed to be done. It was another relief that Raven eventually did herself a favor and realized that she wasn't going to be able to keep her old boyfy just because she still wanted him, so she finally cut him loose from his tether. And then, the biggest relief was Clarke’s response in the moment when Finn, once again officially a free agent, professed his undying love for her in “We Are Grounders Part 1”. Finn: "Clarke ... I love you. I'm in love with you." Clarke: "You broke my heart. I'm sorry. I - I just can't." Wow, I honestly wasn't expecting that. I wasn't sure how long she'd stick with this stance, but you gotta respect a girl for stepping away from an unhealthy situation, at least for the time being. That's not how these love triangle plotlines usually go.
Now, of course, there's a lot of awesome stuff about season 1, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten sucked into it. But the Clarke/Finn love story is essentially just something I endured so that I could see the other stuff - the good stuff. It's a fairly typical romance tale that is sometimes sweet, sometimes annoying and luckily plays out in a way that allows you to continue liking all the characters. That in itself is quite a rarity, so let's just thank our lucky stars and thank the writers for pulling that off. Whew. Mildly interesting, cute, fairly inconsequential. That's it. But wait! There’s more. We still have to get to season 2. Season 2 is where Clarke will eventually give in and accept Finn's declarations of love, and finally they'll officially be an item. They'll be cute, they'll be romantic, there will be oohs and ahhs, and they'll work together to save their friends from Mount Weather. Because that IS how these things go. Right?
Right. Usually. But season 2 is where I realized that this was not going to be your typical romance tale. Season 2 is where this thing gets ... weird. And when I say “weird”, I mean twisted. And awesome. And awkward. And SO goddamn weird.
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One more warning: If you have not seen this series and you read past this point, you WILL spoil the show for yourself. Trust me. Turn back now and watch the series first unless you are fine with being a complete dumbass. Turn back. TURN BACK!! GO!!
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O.k., they're gone right? Good.
Finn’s descent into madness in season 2, while at times feeling a bit overly abrupt to me – still makes a good amount of sense, considering how much he loves Clarke, and considering that Clarke has disappeared into thin air at the start of S2. He becomes more and more desperate as their search for her (and the others) continues. And let's be clear - the search for her goes on for a while. It's not until the end of ep 2.05 that they're finally reunited. Over the course of these five episodes, Finn morphs from the angel on everyone’s shoulder into the devil, as his desperation starts to eat away at him. First*, he does everything in his power to try to convince Bellamy & Crew to leave an innocent girl (the only survivor from another wing of the Ark) hanging off the side of a cliff, about to fall to her death, because it'll take too long to rescue her when they could be searching for Clarke. Not cute, Finn. Not. Cute.
And then*, remember that scene in the bunker, when Finn, Bellamy & crew interrogate a Grounder for info on where his fellow Grounders are supposedly keeping Clarke and the rest of the surviving 100? As soon as they got the info they needed out of him and then started arguing about what to do with him, I started plugging my ears, because I knew exactly what they were about to startle us with next. After all, this Grounder mofo had Clarke's watch. I said to myself, “Finn’s gonna kill him.” Sure enough, boom. Oh my sweet angel Finn, where have you gone? It only made the scene more difficult to watch knowing that everything the Grounder told them was complete bullshit, and they bought it hook line and sinker.
*NOTE: I'm currently re-watching the series with my cousin (who is loving it so far) and I just realized that I got the order of these two events wrong - The bunker happens first, and the cliff happens second. I didn't bother changing the order here though because I don't think it matters. It mainly just matters that both of these things happen, and in fairly quick succession.
So we then eventually got to the Grounder village that this guy (falsely) led them to. Once Finn and Murphy snuck into the village, and Finn set their food storage hut on fire, I not only cursed him for being such as asshole, but I became extremely nervous for where this situation was going to go. Finn was a ticking time bomb at this point and we as the audience knew full well he wasn't about to find what he was looking for. He didn’t even know that the Mountain People existed. In his mind, it absolutely had to be the grounders that had Clarke, somewhere. Still, even with my frayed nerves and sense of dread, never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined a scenario in which this typical boy-meets-girl storyline would wind up with boy mowing down a village of unarmed people including civilians and children – while girl catches him in the act. What in god’s name is happening here!?
As the scene played out and Finn just kept shooting and shooting, and people kept dying and dying, I moved from a pained wince in the fetal position on my couch to actually yelling at my TV, “HA HAHAHA WHAT THE FUCK!! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!! BWAHAH THIS IS BONKERS.” In many cases, a reaction like this would mean that I am watching something preposterously stupid. Like the True Detective season 2 finale, for instance (don't even get me started). But occasionally, here included, a reaction like this from me actually signifies pure giddiness at how much a show has impressed me with its ingenuity and originality. Now THIS is something I don't think I’ve never seen before.
O.k. calm down, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it makes me giddy to watch half a village of innocent people murdered, even in a fictional scenario. What I’m saying is, well, two things: 1) It always impresses me when a showrunner has the balls to do something completely off the map with what would otherwise be a cliché storyline. And 2) the situation these characters had just been placed into was endlessly fascinating, and that is the kind of TV I love to watch. Awkward doesn’t even begin to cover where Clarke and Finn had been taken here. And once a character does something as horrific as this, there ain’t no going back. Where the hell do you go from here?
In "Fog of War", Clarke can barely look at Finn. This leads to another moment that I found quite striking – The two of them wind up hiding in their old bunker, the same one they always used to escape to in season 1, and where they made sweet starry-eyed love by the fiyah for the first (and only) time. Aww, how romantic! Only this time, they’ve got company – the rotting dead body of the Grounder that Finn interrogated and then executed in the previous ep. Last season when they were here, they were sweet, relatively innocent(ish) teeny boppers falling in love. This season, Clarke is a killer, Finn is a monster, and the dead body of Finn's victim is decomposing next to them. I've seen other shows use this "same setting contrasted between seasons" plot device before of course - one particular example from Covert Affairs is popping into my head right now with Annie and Eyal in Zurich - But this particular one is just so ... shocking. It's soooo far from where I ever expected these characters to go. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a show that airs not on HBO, not on Amazon or Netflix, but the gatdamn CW. Dafuq?? I guess things have changed over there since my beloved Gilmore Girls ended.
I need to stop here for a moment to acknowledge that when you start getting into crazy violent shit like this - machine-gunning large groups of people down and hanging out with rotting dead corpses, it's nearly impossible not to wind up in campy town. The scene with the corpse is the type of thing you'd see in a horror flick. Or probably a TV show like The Walking Dead, which I don't actually watch. But there's a key difference between horror flicks, TWD and The 100 - Nearly everything in The 100 feels like it could actually happen. Yes, the setting may be sci-fi, but beyond that, nothing that happens in this series is out of the realm of real life - many of these types of things still happen every day in various parts of the world and in real war scenarios. It feels far darker than a horror film because it feels plausible, and that is also what makes it so much more impactful. One of the main things running through my head as Finn was unloading his machine gun on those village people was, "This shit really happens in war, in real life, and this is the exact type of situation that triggers it." I mean hell, just turn on the news right now and you'll see ISIS continuously finding sadistic new ways to torture and slaughter people, you'll see refugees running (& swimming) for their lives, dead children washing up on seashores, etc. etc. Think about that and you'll start to wonder what about The 100 is even fictional, really.
Anyway. So. Here we are now, Finn has gone to psycho town and back, Clarke and the rest of the Sky People are trying to figure out what the hell to do with him besides being creeped out by him, and that's where we are when we arrive at “Spacewalker”. This episode, dudes. This. Fucking. Episode. The thing you realize after watching season 2 of The 100 is that the place in the storyline where nearly every movie and TV show and book in existence comes in with the 11th hour save, The 100 very regularly does not. This show is completely comfortable with fully playing out that nightmare scenario that all fictional characters desperately work to prevent, successfully, before the movie or the episode or the book ends. The 100 goes there, to that unthinkable place, on the reg, in its full unadulterated horrific splendor. So once I got to "Spacewalker", which is the midpoint of S2, I was coming to the realization that the Grounders calling for Finn's head might really seriously end up in our sweet little Finn getting tortured and executed by them.
Finn’s situation becomes more and more dire as the episode progresses. As I watched it, once he started essentially saying his goodbyes to everyone (in a roundabout way), I knew his next move was going to be to sneak out of the drop ship and turn himself in. The absolute best we could hope for would be that the Ark People could give him a proper trial, but at this point even that was a longshot. As the Grounders prepared for their ritual torture and execution ceremony, having set up a large pole in the center of the scene that Finn would soon be tied to, I started to prepare myself for the real possibility that we’d have to watch him slowly suffer the pain of the 18 people he had murdered in that Grounder village.
I had a ray of hope when Clarke decided to march over to the Grounder side and try for a last-minute save, because if anyone can pull off the 11th hour save on this show, it’s Clarke. When Raven handed her the knife to use against the Grounders if necessary, all I could think was, “Well that’s sweet honey but I don’t think that little knife is gonna get her very far against all these formidable and bloodthirsty Grounders.” Clarke marched right on over and tried her best, but Lexa made it clear that she was not gonna back down on this. And it was only when Clarke ran over to Finn to say her final goodbyes that I started to realize what was about to happen. Even as she started to kiss him and tell him she loved him I wasn't quite sure, but it was starting to sink in. As she hugged and comforted him, whispering "you're gonna be o.k." in his ear, the camera only focusing on them from the shoulders up, I said aloud to my TV (yes I was watching this all by myself!), “Holy shit she’s killing him right now. She's totally stabbing his GUTS!! Ahh dddaaaayyyyuuummmnnn. Jeeeeh hee heeeeesus!!”
Boy meets girl.
Boy and girl fall in love.
Boy and girl are torn apart by a third party.
Boy continues to pursue girl.
Boy mows down half a village of unarmed men women and children with a machine gun.
Girl kills boy with a knife to the gut to prevent him from a far more torturous death.
Girl is a fucking badass motherfucker.
The way this love story went down was everything I ever needed in a television show, but didn't quite realize I needed it. It's the perfect antidote to all the mindless bullshit you see in so much of our entertainment. When a TV show can give you that, you know it's a winner. Every time I see shit like The Bachelor and its spinoffs flowing through my Twitter feed, I need to remind myself that shows like The 100 exist too, lol. And that really honestly makes me feel so much better about life.
Footnote: I'm also a huge fan of Game of Thrones, and despite their vastly different time settings, The 100 is in certain ways reminiscent of GoT, in a good way. But I gotta say, it says a LOT that The 100 can impress and intrigue me in ways that the massive HBO show - with a budget that has to be a bazillion times bigger - has not.
Well, this was far longer than I thought it would be, but what else is new? I'll put a link here to my Analysis #2 once I actually post that one. Update: Here's my Analysis #2: Rubicon.
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