Friday, November 7, 2014

The 100, Season 2, Episode 3: Reapercussions



Clarke has found the big storage room full of people in cages, including Anya – she uses a bar to pry open the lock (because Anya is so trustworthy). After a tense moment of near discovery, she helps Anya out (leaving the rest behind. Sorry guys, only people who have repeatedly threatened Clarke’s life get rescued) through a door that has a big warning sign about protective clothing on the front. There’s then a trap door, a chute – and Anya and Clarke end up in a mine cart full of bodies.

There’s a convenient stash of clothes by the skip. Anya doesn’t want to come and also reminds Clarke they are actually enemies – but then Reapers can be heard moving in – and cannibals trump all other concerns. Clarke and Anya pretend to be bodies in the mine cart to hide from them… wait, pretending to be dead people to hide from the cannibals? Is that a great idea?

Rather not shockingly, the Reapers take the mine cart full of snack food.

She and Anya manage to escape while the Reapers have a nice cook out – though Anya needs to be dragged away from fondling the bodies. They run and as they do Clarke explains that the Mountain Men are using Grounder blood for super-duper wolverine healing. Then Anya runs off going her own way because, as she keeps having to remind Clarke, they’re not actually friends.

Clarke gets cornered by Reapers – but is rescued by Mountain Men with a strange noise device that attacks the Reapers but not her. They take her with them. But she manages to escape when Anya arrives and takes off their masks – exposing their vulnerability to the irradiated planet. Others chase them but decide they need to take them alive for… reasons? They escape by jumping off a giant waterfall.

Once their free, Anya again reminds Clarke they’re not actually friends and takes her prisoner – since she lose 300 warriors trying to attack Clarke & co she now needs to have SOMETHING when she returns to camp.

Elsewhere in the Mountain Base, Jasper and Maya continue to establish their romance (in case anyone in the audience cares). Monty tries to bring up his worries about Clarke disappearing but Jasper is more focused on Maya but the longer Clarke is missing the more worried he gets. He also insists they can trust Maya so they definitely can’t (that’s how this works)

They ask Maya about Clarke and she says Clarke had a breakdown and pulled out her own stitches (true on the latter point, it was her escape plan). And now she has been locked in the psych ward without being able to see anyone.
  
Outside, Marcus has discovered the little team has disappeared from last episode, including the prisoners, but still won’t authorise a search team because there are scary people out there. He’s far more concerned with finding the people who defied his authority – enter Abbie. She doesn’t even try to lie and is less than impressed with him waving his Chancellor title when no-one voted for him (though the line “you got the job because Thelonious beat you to redemption” is kind of awesome since it remembers all the evil shit he pulled in season 1. About time someone remembered).

He orders Major Bryne to watch Abbie and confine her to quarters but the major isn’t happy because the crimes Abbie committed (giving guns to prisoners) should face a much harsher, draconian punishment. He points out he’d rather move away from the draconian, extreme government necessary on the Arc while she’s more concerned with losing control of the camp. They’re interrupted by the guards bringing in a Grounder prisoner which causes a mob, in which one man is shot. Abbie takes over getting the shot man to medical and Byrne gives Marcus angry eyes about the doctor taking over in a medical situation.

Worried about his control and with Byrne pushing, Marcus has Abbie electro-tased (which is kind of like a high tech flogging). The crowd doesn’t look best pleased by this.

They question the prisoner and Byrne is all gun happy, even for Marcus. Marcus has a big angsty moment about the kind of society they’re creating. His attempt to make up for this is to go to Abbie and tell her he intends to lead a mission to bring the kids back – a diplomatic mission to the Grounders, using the prisoner as a guide. And he wants Abbie to stay behind as leader while he does. After he’s just undermined her in front of everyone? Leadership skills!

Over to those escaped prisoners, with Finn untying Murphy which is such a bad idea even Bellamy disagrees. With Murphy guiding them they make their way to the Grounder’s camp/village. Of course, they don’t find Clarke (and whoever else they’re looking for) but they do find Grounders who have looted some of their stuff – including one guy with Clarke’s watch.

They capture him and take him to a hidden location to question. When he claims ignorance, Finn decides to beat the answer out of him while Bellamy has suddenly become squeamish about torture. Under threat of death the Grounder gives them a location where he says their friends are.

Of course when they set out they have an inconvenient Grounder prisoner – Bellamy wants to leave him, Murphy wants to kill him. While they argue, Finn kills the Grounder.

And over to Octavia – after giving Lincoln’s village every reason to hate her, she decides to go see Indra and her army to ask to join in their Reaper attacking so she can free Lincoln. Indra is, unshockingly, not exactly thrilled to see Octavia and tells her people to kill her. They chase her, I cheer them on.

Alas, she manages to escape and goes back to following Indra’s group. They accept her into the group when Indra has a battle plan that involves using someone as bait – hey there Octavia!

Ambush happens, Octavia doesn’t die and she manages to save Indra’s life (of course she does, with all that extensive melee combat training she hasn’t had). They free the captives, but Lincoln isn’t among them. They do all decide to spare Octavia, alas.

Back quickly to the Mountain People, a woman goes through a line of captured Reapers, saying they’re to be “harvested” except one who is marked for the “Cereberus Program”. It’s Lincoln.






The cast is now split into a ridiculous number of separate groups – this is utterly unsupportable and really needs condensing very very quickly.

Also, is it just me or are the escaped prisoners almost comically beat up and filthy? C’mon guys find a stream, sluice off or something.

There’s some interesting conflict among the Arc camp – their government system was extreme, dictatorial, brutal, secretive and generally revolting. The argument has been made that that’s necessary to maintain control in a situation when resources, space and just about everything else are in such extreme short supply… arguments that don’t apply now. So the question remains what society do they want to build? There’s also the interesting fact that, unlike on the Arc, there’s nothing actually keeping people in the camp – if it is too draconian, people can leave. On top of all that, Abbie raised a very real point that Marcus has very little legitimacy to rule AND is guilty of a lot of crimes under the old regime as well, giving him very shaky ground on which to play dictator. Which is added complexity when Byrne is saying “you’re going to lose control” and the question is just how much right does Marcus have to it? There’s a lot of potential conflict there.


I think we’re all kind of supposed to forget the characters from the last season? Because so many of them seem to have had rather a huge character shift and/or we’re expected to forget what they did.

I also think I'm kind of supposed to be super-duper shocked about Finn's moral degradation - but it's only Bellamy's rapid change that prevents his level of ruthlessness being rather standard


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