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?
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. ;)