CW's The 100

[JD]

The only thing I agree with here is the killing of non-white characters.
As for the conflict with the Grounders, I think it's worth pointing out that the Grounders did attack The 100 without any giving any kind of reason or warning. They've been pretty aggressive all pretty much from the beginning. Most of the violence probably couldn't told The 100 that they were in their territory and asked them to leave.

I actually thought this was a pretty good season finale, although I do wish Jaha had stayed on the station and made it to the surface. We got some pretty good action scenes down on the surface, and I thought the end was a great twist.
I wonder if Octavia will be a full on Grounder when we see her again next season?
It'll also be interesting to see what happens when the people from the Arc make it to the remains of The 100s community. I'm assuming they'll think that the fried bodies are the kids.

 

[Mister Fandango]

It was pretty obvious that the Mountain Men were going to end up being who they were (though, admittedly, I didn't think they'd be that advanced), but I did suspect that Mount Weather had something to do with why this region is inhabitable so much earlier than anticipated. The fact that they have a quaranteen facility, and its in as good condition as it is, suggests quite a bit about the place. Especially since they have enough supplies to not only cause the Grounders to fear them, but to waste that many grenades on the 100.

Speaking of, I don't think the 100 necessarily stands for the children. You can find the number in a few places, least of which being how many years (roughly) it's been since the war.

It's also pretty obvious that the Grounders are comprised of the descendents of some special forces types. Their tactics and training aren't something a bunch of random survivors would have developed, especially the tree repelling stuff they were doing earlier in the season.

If I had to guess, the Mountain Men are comprised of some loyalists who had something to do with the war, the Grounders were originally soldiers working for them who broke off after discovering whatever it is they did, and the Reapers are... I dunno what the fuck to make of them. Maybe tests subjects of some kind? They're just way too feral for only four generations of cannibals.

 

[dansigal]

The ending really reminded me of the ending of the first season of Jeremiah, the two season show that JMS had on Showtime which made me actually really like Luke Perry as an actor.

 

[Christopher]

As for the conflict with the Grounders, I think it's worth pointing out that the Grounders did attack The 100 without any giving any kind of reason or warning. They've been pretty aggressive all pretty much from the beginning. Most of the violence probably couldn't told The 100 that they were in their territory and asked them to leave.

Again: I'm not talking about whether the actions can be justified in-story. I'm talking about what the dramatic and thematic value is of telling a story about characters committing such extreme acts of violence. Violence as a plot device should have a purpose -- not just a purpose to the characters, but a purpose for being included as an element of the story. If it's just there for mindless action and shock value, then that's not enough to justify it. Then it becomes just war porn or torture porn. The show has failed to convince me that this violence means something on a thematic or character level. If it's just there to be constant war and killing and awfulness for its own sake, that's not something I want to watch.

 

[Guy Gardener]

"Thelonious" (Seriously? I don't remember anyone using his christian name before this. Wow.) Jaha does not need gravity. His magnetic personality keeps his feet firmly stuck to what remains of the Ark.

This guy might be an ass, but Preston Burke was ten times worse... And I remember him being quite the pompous shit on the Bionic Woman too. How the hell did Bionic woman suck so hard when it should have mostly been endless fights to the death between Michelle Ryan and Starbuck?

But the story did mention the Mountain Men an episode earlier, so we were not completely unprepared... Although I did believe that it was going to be a Duck Dynasty cross over possibly...

Christopher, the Grounders that we have not seen are a large and diverse people living in what looks like 10th century conditions, who have villages broad enough and frequently plotted across the landscape that flares sent into the Van Allen Belt can burn one of them to the ground on their way back down from space... The Grounders that we have seen up till the appearance of the mountain men were the soldiers of the greater society... or are we to believe like in Rome, everyone is a citizen soldier and these brutish apes live in houses and farm when they do not have to protect their borders from foreign scum?

I suspect that who we have seen are Tree dwelling Psychos aimed at stopping alien intervention by any means necessary who are only tree dwelling psychos and always tree dwelling psychos, how even at the officer level are probably not the best at fitting in with the regular public either... Remember the first Rambo movie?

I'm guessing if someone is not protecting the borders of this zone the villages are in, that some other bastards from 50 miles away will march in, sack their villages and then march out with as many slaves as they can chain together.

Imagine if that's what Canada and Mexico wanted to do to the American border cities?

I believe that the division between Texas and Mexico would look like the wall from Game of Thrones.

It's sad that the 100 encountered "the military" first when probably the deputy mayor of somewhere unimportant should have been on his way to make diplomatic decisions rather than the soldiers who's only palate of choices were "kill" or "do not kill".

Okay.

Mount Weather takes children from the nearby villages out there.

Actually, they'd be better off taking pregnant women (briefly), or forcing husbandry with briefly captured (regular?) Grounders and their own women to ensure genetic diversity. But catch and release, y'know? They need young children, the younger the better, babies preferably who can be trained to be Mountain Men from scratch before they learn to be proud of being savages. That loin cloth/bone through you nose #### is almost impossible to unlearn.

That ward for intaking Outsider Grounders, which is now holding the Hundred is massive and frequently used, or at least it's cleaned regularly, and why would they clean something they have no use for? It would have been repurposed or sealed off and dusty.

Unless the Hundred have been kept unconscious for a week while it was cleaned, then that intake quarantine facility is in use always.

If the Mountain Men do come down every couple years rounding up the pregnant women and strong looking men as breeding stock (Even genetic harvesting, taking eggs and sperm to make babies the difficult way with technology, but it would allow them to make perfect children rather than rolling the dice.), it is a stark reality that the mobile tree dwelling army of psychopaths that has been trying to destroy the 100 might have a valued and necessary existence out there standing between the Mountain Men and their civilians in their villages worried about masked men taking their ovaries and sperms.

I just remembered that this show is books, and all this that I am pulling out of my ass should be confirmable or nonconfirmable.

Oh.

The drinking game is, every time that they say "Survivable" is when you take a shot.

Further, if the Mountain Men are just stealing babies to keep up their numbers at Mount Weather, then they are assholes, but if they are actually stealing more babies then they need and are rebuilding up other facilities and staffing those "compounds" with the babies they have educated to become fully actualized 23rd century human beings capable of pulling America (the World?) up by tit's boot straps, then it is a good plan despite being morally ambiguous and devised by utter jerks.

Um, has anyone read the books?

 

[Timewalker]

Um, has anyone read the books?

Isn't there just the one? That's all that was listed on amazon.ca. I downloaded it and will read it this weekend.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Thank you, you are a shining light in this house of horrors.

 

[Taylirious]

I think someone on The Ark had communications with the people at Mount Weather because they thought it was abandoned and that is why The 100 was suppose to go there.

 

[Christopher]

I think someone on The Ark had communications with the people at Mount Weather because they thought it was abandoned and that is why The 100 was suppose to go there.

I don't follow. If they thought Mt. Weather was abandoned, doesn't that suggest they didn't have any communications with its occupants? Indeed, the people on the Ark didn't think there were any survivors left on Earth. They didn't even know if the surface was habitable, which was why they sent the 100 -- to find out.

(Although, come to think of it, that makes no sense. Didn't they have telescopes or sensors? They should've been able to see animals or people moving around on the surface, and taken atmospheric scans and radiation readings from orbit.)

 

[Taylirious]

I think someone on The Ark had communications with the people at Mount Weather because they thought it was abandoned and that is why The 100 was suppose to go there.

I don't follow. If they thought Mt. Weather was abandoned, doesn't that suggest they didn't have any communications with its occupants? Indeed, the people on the Ark didn't think there were any survivors left on Earth. They didn't even know if the surface was habitable, which was why they sent the 100 -- to find out.

(Although, come to think of it, that makes no sense. Didn't they have telescopes or sensors? They should've been able to see animals or people moving around on the surface, and taken atmospheric scans and radiation readings from orbit.)

They knew Clarke's name as written by her door. I mean someone on The Ark could have been communicating to people at Mount Weather. I believe it was less than 30 days between the drop of The 100 and the finale.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

^Couldn't the Mountain Men have "eavesdropped" on the transmissions between the Ark and the 100 on the surface? Clarke and her mother spoke enough via audio communications to have sussed out her name if a third party listening in would be interested.

 

[Guy Gardener]

This is what an army does after it's country has been defeated, but they're mostly intact.

They hide for a few years, maybe 5.

Then they come out of hiding and murder as many foreign civilians as possible, and destroy as much infrastructure as possible, and then go back into hiding again, to repeat the process until the colonizing invaders stop rebuilding/breeding and go home.

The problem however is that no colonizing invaders showed up.

Mount Weather was waiting to commit a second strike, but there was nothing to strike at, so they continued waiting.

150 years of radio silence.

They must have known the Ark was up there, but since the Ark was not completely American it was just barely enough of a Foreign threat to be worth hiding from.

The Mountain Men were also probably waiting for the radiation levels to fall or the acid fog to stop rolling around too, before they actually got around to claiming the Earth.

Considerations: Intelligence and counterintelligence.

The Mountain Men must have spies living within the (savage) Grounders society as civilians and soldiers. Hell, after a hundred and 50 years it would be pretty fucking impossible for the Mountain Men not to have infiltrated the highest levels of (savage) Grounder society.

Meanwhile just because Clark thinks that she just woke up, it doesn't mean that she actually just woke up, because the drugs used to pacify the 100 could have left them out of it and compliant to suggestions and questions. She could have been stoned for a week being interrogated, or another one of the 100 could have been interrogated in a drugged or lucid state giving them all they needed to identify the 100 for Quarantine protocols.

(Oh no. They got Murphy tied to a tree to explain the landscape of this fuck up.)

What was in the IV drip in Clark's arm?

That's surely a tell tale sign that she'd been there longer than she thought if it was even just saline.

 

[Taylirious]

I am too lazy to look it up but I am sure Blondie from The Ark had contact with Mount Weather. She was too eager to go down.

 

[JD]

Um, has anyone read the books?

Isn't there just the one? That's all that was listed on amazon.ca. I downloaded it and will read it this weekend.

The second book, Day 21, comes out Sept. 16 of this year.
I also have the first book downloaded to my tablet, but I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet. I was planning on doing a bit of a commentary comparing the book and show when I do read it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Kate Vernon played Diana Sidney, and formerly a Cylon on BSG and still formerly an 8472 on Voyager.

Despite that somehow everyone had an American Accent, 12 Nations combined their satellites into the Ark, and if Australia was one of them, then it's more than likely that the Australian Astronauts changed their surnames to reflect their lost nationality after the destruction of the Earth.

All this horrible shit... Blame Oz.

It's possible that she was in touch withmount weather, but that would preclude that Mount Weather wouldn't shoot her and her followers for the mass slaughter of the other 2000 people on the Ark they murdered when they left.

It also meant that Earth was survivable unless Mount Weather was cagey with the information that they were supplying her.

I suppose if the radio transmitter hadn't been burnt off in reentry, then the ark would have known half way into the first episode that Earth was survivable and when the council were in the know and when the were ignorant was completely part of her plan.

Although clearly she did not have a plan or a good plan considering how quickly it all went to shit that it was just her thugs with guns bullying people around as she ran.

As stated above, it would be more likely that she would contact life pockets of civilization in Australia, rather than America if her family had been selftrained to have a strong national leaning to harbour towards.

Last week on Continuum on of the terrorists from the future was trying to explain to the other terrorists form the future who meta Roadrunner was. See!

 

[Taylirious]

I actually wish there weren't people still on Earth and it was all about The Ark, drop kids...etc.

 

[Timewalker]

I've read the first few chapters of the novel and it's actually rather good. Mind you, I don't know if I'd say that if I hadn't already seen the first season.

Huge character differences, though: Both Clarke's parents were executed, not just her dad, and death is by lethal injection, not spacing. Clarke's medical apprenticeship was with another doctor. I've gotten to the part where Clarke is about to find out what her parents are up to in a secret lab (told in flashback).

One character, a girl named Glass, escaped the dropship just as Bellamy got on; she's not in the TV series.

It's interesting so far to see the stuff that made it into the show and what didn't.

 

[JD]

So Glass doesn't exist at all on the show then. I saw the name in the table of contents and I was wondering if they changed her name for the show, or if she just didn't exist at all.

 

[Timewalker]

Nope. Her story doesn't fit any of the TV characters.

 

[Guy Gardener]

So, she's hiding in the floors trying not to be captured by the guard, watching and figuring stuff out?

That would be an interesting fly on the wall perspective to view from sometimes.

It would also be necessary, otherwise a hundred and one kids would have gone to the surface.

I always wondered about how there were exactly 100 little smurfs in Smurf village, and if that included Pappa Smurf? I saw him counting during a natural disasters once or twice, and he might have been the first Smurf he counted.