Season Three Verdict: ‘The 100’ [The CW]

I’ve got Ninety-Nine Problems and ‘The 100’…makes it one hundred.

It was hard to write a clinical season verdict of ‘The 100’ when frankly it was a hot mess. Season three of ‘The 100’ had a lot of problems: plot-canyons, lack of consistency both in pacing and writing…but they were the tip of an iceberg. The problematic use of the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope, the execution of a minority eerily similar to a WWII concentration camp, xenophobic slaughter, prevalent colonialist themes, and child mass-murder: it attracted a lot of media attention, disgust, and triggered young viewers.

And all for what?

Alas, it was not for great story-telling, any hints of a fathomable plot, or a brilliant set-up for next season. It was basic shock value. Unfortunately, of its sparse deck of that one card, ‘The 100’ ran out of gimmicks. Characters became simple plot devices, and the controversial death of fan-favourite Commander Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in perhaps the most ostensible bit of TV plagiarism was the last straw for the majority of the fanbase.

There were positives, but unfortunately for ‘The 100’, season 3’s most groundbreaking feature was that it had ticked off all the tropes in the trope book. Its facade as a gritty show dissolved into a simple, predictable teen soap opera.

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Hey, Octavia, aren’t you…supposed to be under a floor board?

The jittery and poor pacing, along with the constant switch-up of episode writers, allowed for a shameful lack of consequence and ignorance of harmful societal messages in what should have been a tight, serialised season.

Disappointingly, the heavily-anticipated season three of ‘The 100’ choked on its own hype.

It failed to come up with a cohesive story, and often half-comprehensible characterisation. Most obvious was Bellamy’s IBob Morley) contrived 360 turn into a genocidal brute. And then later crushed Eliza Taylor’s Clarke to tears…for genocide. This frustrating example was one of many in a wayward plot that made no sense. Where season two tailed off, season three had the potential to actually be good, after its joke of a first season. Plot-holes became cantons, Brenda Strong was wasted, and the Grounders remained antagonists despite the good Arkers butchering three hundred of them in their sleep.

We were dealt with episodes that dragged and dulled into the abyss of stagnation.

As fantastic as Mike Beach was, Pike served no purpose other than to ignite a nonsensical civil war between the Grounders and Arkers. In its flimsy attempt to world-build, ‘The 100’ introduced an artificial intelligence: ALIE. Here’s a tip for Mr. Rothenberg: if you’re going to write about artificial intelligences, then please do some research into them. Also, while you’re out it, find the definition of ‘genocide’, too.

But let’s delve deeper, and try to understand how ‘The 100’s fall from grace.

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‘Game of Thrones’ taught everyone a lesson in how unappealing ‘torture porn’ was—then ‘The 100’ did it to a somehow poorer scale.

On ‘Game of Thrones‘, Ramsay Bolton’s (Iwan Rheon) sausage-fest and delight in flaying was nauseous. The show’s slow, panning shots over these bodies was not well-received by fans and critics alike, for its unwarranted nature. Yet ‘Game of Thrones’ isn’t really ‘Game of Thrones’ without such gore. This isn’t to say there aren’t gratuitous sex and torture scenes.

This isn’t to say that just because it’s ‘Game of Thrones’, it’s fine. ‘Game of Thrones’ is problematic enough. Is it enjoyable? Across the board, this season has re-hyped the majority of the community again.

That couldn’t be said for ‘The 100’. Lincoln’s (Ricky Whittle), story was particularly painful to watch. For the majority of the season, the Grounder man of colour’s three seconds of freedom was enjoyed before he was imprisoned for simply who he was, and then executed at point-blank range. Raven Reyes (Lindsey Morgan) was so consistently tortured that at a point it became a joke. Her mental torture by the AI particularly triggered viewers to the point of explicit self-harm. With no trigger warnings from the CW.

Drastic torture scenes of such gratuitous nature do not grant a show ‘gritty’ status. Dark shows aren’t automatically good shows. The Clarke and Abby scene wasn’t moving or surprising. It was depraved and sick. There were approximately five billion sensible ways to coerce the population into taking the ‘chip’. Yet ‘The 100’s’ rampage down the Road of Random Darkness propelled them to not only have crash-landing outsiders butcher hundreds of sleeping native Grounders, but mass-crucify most of them in their very own capital instead.

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Enemy or ally? Grounder or Skaikru?

The use of ‘perspective’ and the tiring phrase “there are no good guys”—except the show hypocritically paints the Arkers as the heroes of a piece that should have none.

After Lexa’s death, Ontari (Rhiannon Fish) committed an Anakin Skywalker on a bunch of sleeping Nightblood children in order to claim command. Was there anything particularly morally grey about that, or was that just the slaughter of innocents? The show certainly saw it as the latter.

So what about the Hakeldama massacre? Ontari murdered those children in their sleep. Pike, Bellamy and a cohort of Arkers murdered Grounder warriors in their sleep. One may argue: “but ah, they aren’t children!”

One could counter-argue: “Have you considered individualistic pain? Have you considered of those three hundred Grounders they killed—how many connections they had? Friends? Parents? Children? What is their pain like? Can you extend that sympathy? That alternate point of view? Or as non Sky-people, are they not worth caring for? Because the Arkers, namely Bellamy, are fan-favourites, is that level of xenophobic genocide thus okay, no matter who the perpetrator is?”

The show answered it, really, for Ontari was a petulant, naive fraud and Pike and Bellamy were ultimately redeemed for the ‘final battle’ in Polis.’The 100′ simply brushed off the genocide of these native Grounders by the Sky People who’d crash-landed in season one. One would not be blamed for jumping to the word colonialism. Perhaps if the show really wanted to re-tell the story of the USA’s fruition, it shouldn’t be masked behind an adaptation of a young adult novel.

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Once hailed as a show for ‘strong women’, season three featured such ‘strong women’…as plot devices and/or props, often for the male characters.

This point hurt, because ‘The 100’ was sold as a series where women were in positions of power and command…and they were. Clarke, Raven, Octavia, Indra, Anya, and Lexa all had moments and characteristics that made for a compelling female cast. But if one were to analyse season three, there held an eerily different story to be taken beyond face value:

Raven’s story was about half a season of torture and merging with an AI’s body (it is often better not to ask) before she did indeed save the day. Gina (Leah Gibson) was Bellamy’s short-lived girlfriend who gave him the Iliad and then climbed into the already-stacked Fridge for some well-dished man-pain. Luna (Nadia Hilker) was perhaps the most useless dead-end ever, a bizarrely cocky pacifist who was so intelligent she killed her own brother before becoming one.

Bluntly, the main shame about these storylines was that they existed as props. Lexa, despite Debnam-Carey’s scene-stealing portrayal, served only as a plot device to the farcical AI plot. Harper (Chelsey Reist) was genuinely—one would suspect—only there to sleep with Monty (Christopher Larkin). Clarke, post episode-seven, was uncharacteristically dumb and a shoulder for Bellamy’s rushed redemption arc. Gina was literally written in to die and give Bellamy some excuse to side with Pike.

Unfortunately, characters who exist only to serve the drive of others renders a character a.) useless and b.) the character she’s supporting useless too—for what is that character without the prop? That, truthfully, is Characterisation 101, and it was somewhat baffling that ‘The 100’ failed there, because their characters often bettered the wayward plot.

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Final Verdict: ‘The 100’ season three had potential, but bit off more than it could chew—and now the fanbase have besieged its plot-ridden, Swiss cheese-like holes.

This was always going to end on a positive and determinedly so. The performances this season were wonderful, especially from Eliza Taylor, Erica Cerra, Lindsey Morgan, Paige Turco, Henry Ian Cusick and Alycia Debnam-Carey (who stole the show, died, did the same to ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ and came back for the finale to do it again). For all the trials and tribulations Clarke faced this season, Eliza Taylor was always the star of the show, from seasons one to three. Taylor outright shouldered the latter half of season three alone.

But the show’s stench of colonialism and mass-murder of a certain ‘breed’ of people was outright scary.

This world has variety and individuality. Those should be celebrated for their sheer beauty, not be made to feel alone, nauseous, sick, scared, suicidal, and triggered by events they’ve seen play out on television over and over again. That is not the point of evoking emotion on television. That’s cruelly playing on vulnerable minds. Minorities should be treated as humans themselves. Flesh and blood with a beating heart. Not as a number. In a season that claimed to be about ‘humanity’, ‘The 100’ sagged—and the very human, exploited, lifesaving, pioneering audience?

I think I just saw a bit of tumbleweed go past.

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THE SHOW THAT INSPIRED.

Positive and inspiring work came from dedicated supporters of the cause, such as the creators of the website ‘LGBT Fans Deserve Better’ and its associated Twitter. Alex Ciccone, one of the creators of the movement explained:

The reason the backlash was so loud was because young fans found themselves deeply affected by this story; it meant a lot to them. The story was rare: two women in a romantic relationship that wasn’t sidelined, wasn’t fetishized, wasn’t steeped in homophobia or fear within the story; it was an excellent portrayal of a bisexual woman and a lesbian women and that resonated with young fans. It avoided the tropes and presented a quality romance within a quality story.

So the juxtaposition of something that was such excellent representation for so many, with such a terrible, cliché-ridden death and the set-up for the typical “bisexual woman ends up with a man” trope was like throwing gasoline on a fire. Add that to the well-documented direct and indirect promises from the creators, as well as the infiltration, and it simply exploded over social media because so many young fans had become so invested and so heartbroken. It wasn’t a minor occurrence that could be swept under the rug when you have this kind of social media army.

Though masses of huge publications started to harshly criticise the show, positivity did bloom from the show’s resilient fanbase. Watching social media from afar, it was remarkable to see such young, social media savvy fans create something so beautiful from something so ugly. The LGBTQ fundraiser set up by Ms. Gina Tass (with all proceeds going to the Trevor Project) will undoubtedly save young LGBTQ lives, as the show continued its rapid descent into increasingly nonsensical television. As this was written, the total of the donations stood at $133,552.

Now that, objectively, is amazing.