What's new

The 100 (Season 4) (1 Viewer)

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
I was a bit dubious of their presentation of black rain; my understanding is that the reality would be far more insidious that burning on contact.

The payoff with Emori at the end, was great though. Her and Murphy are definitely made for each other.
 

ChristopherG

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 16, 2003
Messages
3,039
Real Name
Chris
This show has never been exactly light and cheerful, but this season in particular seems to be an exercise in seeing how many times our protagonists can get kicked before they just stay down.
Yes. For me this is getting a little tedious although I agree with your last point on the reveal with Emori. Good stuff that.
 

DaveF

Moderator
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2001
Messages
28,687
Location
Catfisch Cinema
Real Name
Dave
The Black Rain is nonsense. Fine. That's the show. Its science, especially on radiation, has never been good.

But that episode was great! A season's worth of pain and loss all unspooling in a tremendously cathartic and manipulative hour.

I was hooked.
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
Clarke deciding to go in the radiation chamber instead of Emori was one of those make-or-break moments of the show for me. Every other time she's made a terrible choice, it was the least bad option. But if she'd sacrificed Emori, then she really wouldn't have been any better than Mount Weather. Of course, it all ended up being a moot point anyway.
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
Last night's episode was a really strong return for the series. Lots of great character work, and a whirlwind of plot developments that point the show in an exciting direction.

Plus, it gave us this iconic image of Octavia riding into town to save the day, like some sort of post-apocalyptic Western:
The100_S04_009.jpg
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
For the second time this season, Clarke found a moral line she just couldn't bring herself to cross.

Jasper's been ready to die since Clarke and Bellamy killed Maya. It's nice that he went out on his own terms. Less nice that Monty probably got himself killed trying to change his mind. On the plus side, he did win over Harper.

I like that it ultimately, again, comes down to 100 survivors of the Ark.

Raven would be better off holing up in the bunker that Murphy was trapped in for months than trying to make a run for Polis. I can't believe they'd kill her off now, though, after spending so much time saving her life.
 

DaveF

Moderator
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2001
Messages
28,687
Location
Catfisch Cinema
Real Name
Dave
Jasper's final episode was well done. It finally brought home how broken he was, showing how his nihilism has crystallized. I don't know that I've seen such a character so well drawn on TV before.

The show has run out of things for Clarke to do; sometime last season maybe. She's now just a tool for stronger personalities, a pretty face to whimper and scrunch up over a hard decision before she folds against another strong personality. Clarke is becoming the worst of all co-workers, the one with no opinion save for what she last heard from someone else.

The possible twist of Clarke becoming the villain, Bellamy the moral center, and Octavia the savior is a little interesting.

Overall, I miss the great sci-fi of the first season or two. The character drama was more interesting then as we were invested in those who were sacrificed. Four seasons and some poor plot choices in, The 100 is becoming a generic fantasy / action show.
 

mattCR

Reviewer
HW Reviewer
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2005
Messages
10,897
Location
Lee Summit, Missouri
Real Name
Matt
I'd agree that Clarke is now not the interesting personality to follow; however, they've done such a great job with the other characters that it doesn't kill me.

I think they are setting up a VERY interesting next season, we'll see based on the finale.
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
There have been some rough patches last season and this season, but last night's episode was among the finest the show has produced. The last fifteen minutes, in particular, were especially powerful.

Just when I thought Jaha's self-righteousness was again going to screw them, and Skaikru was going to cement its place as the villains of the story, Kane got through to him. I was pretty sure what was coming when Octavia opened that door, but seeing all of the bodies on the floor and the whole sequence where Kane identified who would wake up inside the bunker and who would wake up outside the bunker really hit me.

And the idea of them all going back up into space, to the remaining component of a dying Ark that couldn't support the 2237 inhabitants that were aboard when the decision was made to return to Earth, but might just support the eight people with access to the rocket, is incredibly exciting.

I actually think Clarke is an interesting place right now. That moment with Bellamy at the hatch was her crucible. Throughout the series, she has been placed in impossible situations where she had to make existential decisions at a terrible moral cost. And every time she's had to decide whether she's reached her limit, she kept going, made the brutal choice to save her people. But finally, at the hatch, she discovered where her limit was. Forced to choose between saving her 400+ people by shooting Bellamy, or saving Bellamy and ensuring that 1200 humans would survive, she made the moral choice even though it might mean every one of her own people dying. Every decision she made in last night's episode was about doing what is right over what is expedient. And it's to the show's credit, after four brutal seasons, that she wasn't immediately punished for it. Sometimes taking a chance on what is right pays off.
 

mattCR

Reviewer
HW Reviewer
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2005
Messages
10,897
Location
Lee Summit, Missouri
Real Name
Matt
Wow. What a conclusion. Almost like a total: who knows what happens next moment.

Where did the prisoners come from? Another continent? A deployed space entity? Or is it a prison ship at all?

Love it.
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
I thought it was a great finale. This season had its satisfying developments and its frustrating developments, but on the whole I think it was it was stronger season than Season 3. With this show, I prefer the grounded sci-fi that more or less extrapolates from existing technology and stays rooted in the human drama. A.L.I.E. felt futuristic in an Arthur C. Clarke "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" kind of a way, and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers plot robbed the show of its most compelling facet: flawed and imperfect humans grappling with flawed and imperfect humans.

Early on in this thread, Dave correctly pointed out that this season "the threat is existential, it's invisible or environmental." The anticipation was that this would prove to be a weakness, but I actually think the opposite turned out to be true. The impending threat of Praimfaya served as a whetstone for the characters and their clans; how the reacted to the threat, the decisions they made on behalf of their people, helped sharpen them and define them. When the alternative is oblivion, we got to see just how far these people would go, or not go.

Some, like Jasper and Luna, found their limit and embraced oblivion as a preferable alternative to the cycle of killing and death and loss that they'd experienced so far and considered inevitable going forward.

Everybody else kept crossing moral lines until they couldn't anymore. It didn't mean they gave up -- on the contrary, this finale may prove to have the lowest body count of onscreen characters of any of the season finales -- but it did mean that they were willing to take greater risks to preserve what's left of their humanity.

The best part of this finale for me was seeing these eight characters, many of whom have had serious beefs with each other over the course of the series, work together and prioritize the needs of the group over narrow self-interest. Monty takes off his gloves and exposes his hands to radiation to retrieve the oxygen scrubber. When Monty collapses from the exposure, Murphy leaves him to bring the oxygen scrubber back on his own. But then he and Bellamy go back for Monty, even though their timetable is already tight. And when they get to Monty, he endorses Murphy's decision to prioritize the oxygen scrubber 100 percent. Bellamy has every reason to hate Echo, including some very personal betrayal, but he talks her down from committing ritual suicide, because the group will be stronger with her than without her. The people who don't bring technical knowledge to the table make themselves useful as manual labor, doing the lifting and hauling so the engineers in the group can focus on making this rocket launch.

The biggest, and most satisfying, moment of selflessness was Clarke's: Throughout this series, she's had to made the tough calls, do whatever it takes to protect her people. But previously, that always meant living with the deaths of a lot of other people. Never before has it been her own life that's on the line. Seeing her again do what needed to be done to protect her people, with barely a thought for her own survival, was very gratifying. Given her Jaha-like ruthlessness earlier in the season, this outcome almost felt like a needed form of penance for her.

The little moments in the episode were so well rendered: Echo's startlement at the sensation of zero gravity; Emori's awed delight as Raven spun in the air in preparation for her space walk. The expression on Clarke's face when she saw the rocket take off, not of hopelessness or fear but just joyous relief that her friends were going to make it, was really stirring. And it was echoed when the lights came on in the ring of the Ark, the group's faith in Clarke affirmed.

The entire sequence on board the Ark, as they struggled to get the oxygen scrubber installed and operational as their oxygen ran out one by one, was some of the (pardon the pun) most breathless suspense I've seen all season.

Wow. What a conclusion. Almost like a total: who knows what happens next moment.
It definitely is odd to end a season with only one of your series regulars confirmed to be alive. I was very glad they showed that Clarke's nightblood resistance had kicked in and she'd survived Praimfaya. If we'd had to wait until the new season to discover she was alive, it would have felt manipulative, like a Glenn moment.

Setting that aside, though, it was just a great little scene. This show has a pretty excellent cast, and Eliza Taylor did a great job conveying the time jump in her performance. Even though Clarke has been burdened with responsibilities that most adults would blanch at basically from the moment the 100 were sent to the ground, she's been a teenager this entire time. The time jump of 6 years, 7 days puts the show into the year 2156 or 2157, which puts Clarke into her mid-twenties, closer to Eliza Taylor's real age.

They say that solitary confinement is a form of torture, and I can imagine that's just as much true with an apocalyptic hellscape to roam as it is in an eight by 10 cell. So the introduction of Maddie, a young nightblood that Clarke presumably found hidden away somewhere shortly after Praimfaya, is an important development. Maddie seems to look to Clarke as both instructor and parent, which gives Clarke new notes to play: once she's reunited with her compatriots in the Ark and/or with Onekru from the bunker, what happens if the needs of the many conflict with Maddie's needs? If she sees herself as a mother to this girl now, can she really put the group first?

I was rooting for the time jump once they introduced the five year clock in which the surface would be uninhabitable. Spending a season with our cast separated into space, the bunker and the ground just didn't seem that appealing to me. Getting them all back together is an inevitability, so let's just jump right to that and fill in the pertinent blanks via flashbacks.

My only complaint with the finale is that I would have liked to have gotten brief scenes aboard the Ark and in the bunker, to give us a quick snapshot of where things stand, and maybe set up the challenge that will be facing each group at the start of Season 5. Somehow I doubt they're all dead.

Where did the prisoners come from? Another continent? A deployed space entity? Or is it a prison ship at all?

Love it.
The great thing about that reveal is that it points out just how little we know about the wider world in this universe. Over the course of these four seasons, we've only seen things from Skaikru's point of view. So we knew what was going on in the Ark, and then we knew what was going on with the twelve grounder clans that had formed in the greater Mid-Atlantic region of the former United States. But any survivors elsewhere on the planet are a mystery.

And the only references I can recall us ever getting to life elsewhere in the solar system was the headline "Contact Lost With Asteroid Mining Penal Colony" that was on one of the monitors when Raven was explaining the reactor complex that was developed after the "second Fukushima disaster" had started to meltdown, causing the death wave that hung over the season. I believe there was also a reference early on in the season to nightblood having been originally engineered by Becca for the Eligius Company to protect against solar radiation during deep-space missions.
 

Carabimero

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jun 9, 2008
Messages
5,207
Location
Los Angeles
Real Name
Alan
This show keeps reinventing itself successfully every season. Every season has made a promise and paid it off. I'm impressed that there is never a lack of plot points in this show. And that major characters die.

Looking forward to more well-crafted seasons.
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
Some casting news:
Isaiah Washington will not be a series regular in Season 5, but it's still unclear whether Washington will return in a recurring capacity. It's possible that Jaha died at some point during the six year time jump.

In other news, Tasya Teles, who plays the exiled Azgeda guardswoman Echo, has been promoted to series regular. Teles has recurred on the show since the second season, when her character was introduced in cage deep in the bowels of the Mount Weather bunker. In the fourth season finale, she was one of the seven characters who went into space to avoid the nuclear catastrophe unfolding on the ground.
 

Adam Lenhardt

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
26,971
Location
Albany, NY
Comic-Con video:


Spoilers:
  • From TVLine: “The prison ship [from the season finale] is from Earth,” Rothenberg revealed. “They’re from before the first apocalypse. They were in hyper-sleep for 100 years. They’ve come back to this planet that they don’t recognize. All that’s left is this Garden of Eden that Clarke’s been living in with her daughter.”
  • The100_S05_001.jpg
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Latest Articles

Forum statistics

Threads
356,808
Messages
5,123,525
Members
144,184
Latest member
H-508
Recent bookmarks
0
Top