The 100 Season 2
Apr. 17th, 2015 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiOk, so I skipped ahead one week. I had to know how Clarke was going to rescue everyone!
And holy shit, that was the best kind of terrible in the world. Holy shit! She actually did kill all the Mountain Men, guilty and innocent together!
And the thing is, I was spoiled about this fact, but my response was still "Holy shit!" I really liked the how of it -- how she was driven to this point, first by Lexa's betrayal, because if the Mountain Men have the Ark people, they no longer need to prey on the Grounders, but also by Cage's refusal to back down and negotiate, even in the face of Kane's offer of voluntary donations, which any sane person would have at least thought about. Although in her own way she drove Cage to his own precipice by shooting Dante, but Cage was so convinced of his own superiority that he couldn't imagine losing. I'm not sure that's true of Clarke. I had to watch the marrow harvesting scenes through my fingers, but the staging -- no anaesthesia, taking place in a dungeon -- was an excellent way of showing how in Cage's mind, and those of his allies, there was no difference between the Ark people and the Grounders, although at first they had thought of the Ark people as more like themselves -- the fact that they had become used to seeing one group of people as subhuman meant that they could so easily apply that label to any other group. That's what Monty at least must also have seen, even though they could not hear Cage's rejection of Kane's offer. I would really like to see something more of Monty after this.
Clarke really takes everything on herself, doesn't she? The missile strike on TonDC was not only her decision: Lexa insisted that they allow it to go ahead. And at the end, it's Monty who makes the destruction of the Mountain Men possible, and Bellamy who agrees to it (for more selfish reasons than Clarke, as well), but Clarke insists on taking it all on herself -- the scapegoat exiled from the community to bear away their communal guilt. But I thought her rejection of Bellamy's attempt to forgive her rang true -- how could he be the one to forgive her?
I like the way the show examines the way the characters are shaped by their societies -- Clarke learned to sacrifice individuals to save the group in the Ark, Cage to treat humans as tools in Mount Weather. Lexa is used to being responsible for the wellbeing of the group, I guess, which is why she would walk away from the alliance, but I wonder what she thought Clarke would do.
What is she going to do, out there in the wilderness? (My hope is: search for Lexa, culminating in hatesex.) Does she have any way of feeding herself? Maybe she will end up rescuing Murphy and Jaha from the AI which presumably is still bent on destroying all human life? I am worried about how this will play out. So far the show has done a great job following through on the questions it poses, especially about "good" and "bad" actions, and holding everyone responsible for their choices -- I want to see more about humans making terrible decisions which are nonetheless the best choices open to them, and nothing about humans being manipulated by some kind of nihilistic AI. It seems to me at this point that no one actually "deserves" to live, and yet treating others as if they do is still valuable and even necessary. I am not sure how the AI will affect this calculus, but somehow I am disappointed to find that nuclear holocaust was not the result of bad human decision-making, or at least not its direct result. I liked the idea that these were people doing the best they could with the terrible decisions their ancestors had made, and I worry about the imposition of some external, inhuman enemy whose fault this all somehow is.
(I did, however, really like the scenes of Murphy in the den of luxury! Murphy may be a shit, but he's an entertaining shit.)
I am still somewhat confused about the worldbuilding, which would probably be helped by watching Season 1 -- at some point presumably they find out what the people of TonDC eat, other than meat, and something about the rest of the Grounder society. What is it like, where people haven't been manipulated by people in a bunker? How many other bunkers survived? What about the rest of the world -- how much is habitable? I guess that if the bombs were set off by an AI they would be distributed to do maximum damage, rather than according to the geopolitical situation at the time. But I am doing my best not to think about these things too much because right now the show reminds me so much of everything I loved about the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and that show became so terrible so fast that I actually hate to think about it at all.
One other thing they have in common is that they are exile stories, ascoffeeandink says here, although I'm reading it through the Aeneid, Aeneas bringing his gods to Latium only to disappear there, him and his people both, and be reborn into something new and better.
So if I were going to write a story in this fandom, what would I write about?
And holy shit, that was the best kind of terrible in the world. Holy shit! She actually did kill all the Mountain Men, guilty and innocent together!
And the thing is, I was spoiled about this fact, but my response was still "Holy shit!" I really liked the how of it -- how she was driven to this point, first by Lexa's betrayal, because if the Mountain Men have the Ark people, they no longer need to prey on the Grounders, but also by Cage's refusal to back down and negotiate, even in the face of Kane's offer of voluntary donations, which any sane person would have at least thought about. Although in her own way she drove Cage to his own precipice by shooting Dante, but Cage was so convinced of his own superiority that he couldn't imagine losing. I'm not sure that's true of Clarke. I had to watch the marrow harvesting scenes through my fingers, but the staging -- no anaesthesia, taking place in a dungeon -- was an excellent way of showing how in Cage's mind, and those of his allies, there was no difference between the Ark people and the Grounders, although at first they had thought of the Ark people as more like themselves -- the fact that they had become used to seeing one group of people as subhuman meant that they could so easily apply that label to any other group. That's what Monty at least must also have seen, even though they could not hear Cage's rejection of Kane's offer. I would really like to see something more of Monty after this.
Clarke really takes everything on herself, doesn't she? The missile strike on TonDC was not only her decision: Lexa insisted that they allow it to go ahead. And at the end, it's Monty who makes the destruction of the Mountain Men possible, and Bellamy who agrees to it (for more selfish reasons than Clarke, as well), but Clarke insists on taking it all on herself -- the scapegoat exiled from the community to bear away their communal guilt. But I thought her rejection of Bellamy's attempt to forgive her rang true -- how could he be the one to forgive her?
I like the way the show examines the way the characters are shaped by their societies -- Clarke learned to sacrifice individuals to save the group in the Ark, Cage to treat humans as tools in Mount Weather. Lexa is used to being responsible for the wellbeing of the group, I guess, which is why she would walk away from the alliance, but I wonder what she thought Clarke would do.
What is she going to do, out there in the wilderness? (My hope is: search for Lexa, culminating in hatesex.) Does she have any way of feeding herself? Maybe she will end up rescuing Murphy and Jaha from the AI which presumably is still bent on destroying all human life? I am worried about how this will play out. So far the show has done a great job following through on the questions it poses, especially about "good" and "bad" actions, and holding everyone responsible for their choices -- I want to see more about humans making terrible decisions which are nonetheless the best choices open to them, and nothing about humans being manipulated by some kind of nihilistic AI. It seems to me at this point that no one actually "deserves" to live, and yet treating others as if they do is still valuable and even necessary. I am not sure how the AI will affect this calculus, but somehow I am disappointed to find that nuclear holocaust was not the result of bad human decision-making, or at least not its direct result. I liked the idea that these were people doing the best they could with the terrible decisions their ancestors had made, and I worry about the imposition of some external, inhuman enemy whose fault this all somehow is.
(I did, however, really like the scenes of Murphy in the den of luxury! Murphy may be a shit, but he's an entertaining shit.)
I am still somewhat confused about the worldbuilding, which would probably be helped by watching Season 1 -- at some point presumably they find out what the people of TonDC eat, other than meat, and something about the rest of the Grounder society. What is it like, where people haven't been manipulated by people in a bunker? How many other bunkers survived? What about the rest of the world -- how much is habitable? I guess that if the bombs were set off by an AI they would be distributed to do maximum damage, rather than according to the geopolitical situation at the time. But I am doing my best not to think about these things too much because right now the show reminds me so much of everything I loved about the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and that show became so terrible so fast that I actually hate to think about it at all.
One other thing they have in common is that they are exile stories, as
coffeeandink says here, although I'm reading it through the Aeneid, Aeneas bringing his gods to Latium only to disappear there, him and his people both, and be reborn into something new and better.So if I were going to write a story in this fandom, what would I write about?
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Date: 2015-04-17 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 10:55 pm (UTC)...why don't I have an icon yet?
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Date: 2015-04-18 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 04:41 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's an excellent point. I've basically been hand-waving a lot of the nuclear war background story because I think even the writers haven't nailed it down yet. I PM'd one of them (Kim Shumway) on Tumblr to ask why there had apparently never been any radio contact or attempt at radio contact between the Ark and Earth, looking for survivors, during all the intervening years. And I basically got a (tautological? didactic? one of those words?) reply: "They didn't have radio contact because then they would have known there were survivors." Uhhh, okay.
Anyway, I think you bring up very good questions about the world building which haven't really been answered in past episodes, but I suspect could be in future episodes. In this show there seems to be a pattern of "let's drop small hints" which then get expanded on many episodes later, and in the meantime a shit ton of plot will happen which hopefully distracts you from your questions. :D
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Date: 2015-04-17 08:44 pm (UTC)I kind of like the answer you got, really -- it's so shameless! "They didn't try to use the radio because if they had we wouldn't have this story."
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Date: 2015-04-17 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 08:45 pm (UTC)Is there a kinkmeme or something somewhere?
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Date: 2015-04-17 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-18 05:49 am (UTC)Already whined about all the damn kids abovethread, but I can't even shake my stick at them to get them off my lawn -- I'm totes on THEIR lawn. ;)
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Date: 2015-04-18 04:39 pm (UTC)(She looks fabulous, though.)
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Date: 2015-04-18 09:19 pm (UTC)/is old right alongside you
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Date: 2015-04-18 09:14 pm (UTC)This. It's probably the strongest statement The 100 makes: that classifying -- or de-classing? -- other human beings is a state of mind and culture, and unless a society works actively on all levels to overcome it, it will inform everything they do...and doom them, depending on how the story plays out. The Mountain Men overall may not have planned out to go as far as killing the Ark kids, but they ultimately they decided to do so when push came to shove: The MM leadership and presumably a majority of them remained locked into their destructive mindset. It's perhaps a less overt point, because The 100 is not as good about background worldbuilding as it is about spotlighting leaders, but -- we do not see a civil war at Cage's announcement; we do see the few who helped being rounded up, the rest of the Mountain silent.
The Ark in particular fascinates me; it's such dysfunctional society, these humans who believe they are the last of their kind lost in space with dwindling resources. The decisions Jaha and Kane make are understandable, though they are terrible, and of course Clarke emulates them when she sends Bellamy into Mount Weather. She loves him*; she does not spare him -- neither did Jaha when it came to Wells (and I guess you could also look at Abby and her husband, whose name I have conveniently forgotten).
* I am fine with any and all kinds of love re: Clarke and Bellamy.
Me too -- but I generally want to know more about Lexa. I read some fanfic last night that stressed Lexa did not technically break the alliance of Arkers and Grounders (though of course she did break the spirit of it, and the trust and faith Clarke had in her).
Lexa, as undoubtedly so often before, was facing a dilemma: There was not a single good solution in sight for her and her people, so she went with what seemed to her like the lesser evil:
Losing a few of the benevolent Others -- many Ark kids and a few of their adults -- was the price to pay for getting hundreds of Her People home, with the malevolent Others still locked in another battle: Even if the Arkers had failed, here, if Clarke and Monty and Bellamy had *not* killed hundreds and hundreds of Mountain Men, the Grounders would probably have been fine for the foreseeable future: The struggle of the Arkers vs. Mountain Men would have continued, especially with Clarke at the helm, and a Clarke who in the likely scenario had just lost her mother in addition to many of her friends.
Now, what she thought Clarke would personally think -- and feel! -- is pretty clear: She was willing to give up Clarke's love for her people's life.
God, I want these two crazy kids to work it out so badly. I wish there were more epic fanfic featuring Clarke and Lexa, and there is some indeed! Maybe I too will have to contribute at some point...
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Date: 2015-04-18 09:37 pm (UTC)I think the Ark is fascinating, too -- because on the one hand, they treat the 100 as disposable because they have become used to treating their own people as disposable, but on the other they are making the only gamble they have left. One hing I liked about the episodes leading up to this was the sense I got of Jaha as a leader, walking his people step by step through that mine field to an unknown goal, but also chucking them overboard to save the ones he thinks are most useful to him.
One thing I really like is how small-scale everything is: there were only a few hundred people in the mountain, and only a few hundred Arkers left. And I do get the sense of both of these as small-scale societies, where everyone knows everyone else and most business is done face-to-face. Lots of Grounders, presumably, but they also are organized into small-scale societies.
I have enjoyed some of the Clarke/Lexa fic I've been reading, actually! I just wish people were better about tagging their AUs. But it's almost all from Clarke's perspective. I actually think Clarke's perspective is more opaque to me than Lexa's at this point. (Maybe that's how I should write it. Poor Lexa, winning and losing all at once, which is what happened to Clarke as well, in a very different way.)
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Date: 2015-04-19 03:06 am (UTC)The Ark is a study in contradictions, because what we've seen of its society shows a sense of acknowledgement of the individual -- clearly a lot of their leaders' decisions about life and death of others are taken not in ignorance or hatred of who the targets are but with regret and full knowledge of their personality and value both, though the party line may be a different one.
Kane is probably the best example of that: It's not that he refuses to see his fellow individuals' humanity. But he is ruthless about their fates weighed against the collective.
I think this holds somewhat more true with old!Jaha. But our friend Thelonius has, ever since his epiphany, his moment of grace, considered himself not just a humble servant of his people but the prophet to lead them to the Promised Land.
That's one hell of a claim, and just so happens to make him judge, jury, and executioner.
Good call about the small scale. I often feel this is not intentional but may be wrong there. It sure makes for good character-driven television.
God, me too. I tried to run exclusionary searches on AO3, but like you say -- the algorithm requires tags in the summary/profile.
Please write it! I'll bring the pom-poms and beta capabilities. :)