The 100: Sleeping Giants

May 13, 2018 12:05 AM - Season 5, Episode 3

Bellamy leads the charge investigating a potential way home. Meanwhile, Clarke and Madi deal with the new, uncertain threat to their home.
posted by vibratory manner of working (5 comments total)

In space, our arc survivors are preparing to board the Eligius IV. Murphy is feeling sassy. No one else appreciates it. After a rough docking, we start exploring. Prisoners, signs of forced entry, ship schematics. They find the fuel they need, plus some cryochambers full of scary people as a bonus. This one has eyes!

The scary man with eyes isn't too bothered by a sword through him, but is dispatched a bit after that. Raven and Bellamy hatch a plan: hold the remaining sleeping prisoners hostage. Raven has to stay behind to make it work, and Murphy's social skills have degraded enough that he misses that the escape pod is an agreed-upon fiction. He makes a bad choice and regrets it soon afterwards. They'll be on the ground by next season, if not sooner, but we didn't get that whole new spaceship set for a single episode.

On the ground, Clarke is feeling ruthless. She has no ruths left to give. Madi is unnerved, despite having been a little murder child herself. Clarke's plan works up until it doesn't, after which she's wounded and quickly captured. Madi gets a better roll on her stealth check than last time, so that's nice.

Clarke tries to pretend she doesn't speak english, but somehow doesn't think to maybe use her trigedasleng knowledge to make that a little more convincing. There's one dude in the landing party who doesn't want to be mean, but he's outvoted.

Clarke breaks to save Madi. She seems to be still answering the first question they asked when Bellamy and Co. land. The prisoners are mad Clarke didn't tell them about Bellamy, but I'm not sure she really had a chance to get around to "oh yeah, and maybe there's some survivors in space still".

They should have put the triggered alarm on their spaceship together with the fact that they just watched Bellamy land in a spaceship, and maybe believed Clarke when she said she didn't know anyone else hanging around, but okay. Madi saves Bellamy et al and brings Bellamy to Clarke to try and negotiate an exchange of hostages.

It's too bad literally everyone wants to murder everyone, because this is probably a good time to start thinking about population bottlenecks. I guess there's plenty of people underground still. For that matter, I'm wondering about the viability of a small patch of dense forest on a destroyed planet like that. Weather patterns plus global oxygen concentrations, depends a lot on stuff like the rainforests and ocean biota and other large scale bio-features, so we're probably stretching plausibility here.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:37 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

They should have put the triggered alarm on their spaceship together with the fact that they just watched Bellamy land in a spaceship, and maybe believed Clarke when she said she didn't know anyone else hanging around, but okay.

Diyoza didn't know a spaceship had landed, the two guys only reported finding 5 people and were killed by Madi shortly after. Why didn't they report a spaceship landing ? I don't know.
posted by Pendragon at 9:00 AM on May 13, 2018

It's too bad literally everyone wants to murder everyone, because this is probably a good time to start thinking about population bottlenecks. I guess there's plenty of people underground still. For that matter, I'm wondering about the viability of a small patch of dense forest on a destroyed planet like that. Weather patterns plus global oxygen concentrations, depends a lot on stuff like the rainforests and ocean biota and other large scale bio-features, so we're probably stretching plausibility here.

Part of my viewing process for The 100 is to replace any science-ish sounding term with 'magic.'
posted by mordax at 12:30 AM on May 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was also surprised they didn't seem to know about the spaceship landing--wouldn't they have seen it entering from the atmosphere?
posted by lucy.jakobs at 7:58 AM on May 17, 2018

I knew Raven was lying about the escape pods, but I wasn't really sure, and then I really thought they wouldn't write it that way if they'd let Murphy stay with her, and then the twist was so great, and Richard Harmon's expression was just perfect, along with Lyndsey Morgan's delivery of "You know what? You're right. Dying alone would have sucked." was hilarious.

Part of my viewing process for The 100 is to replace any science-ish sounding term with 'magic.'

It's "the future", and Raven also said that same thing about sufficiently advanced science being magic to Echo.
posted by numaner at 11:42 PM on May 17, 2018