The 100: Blood Must Have Blood, Part II
March 12, 2015 11:32 AM - Season 2, Episode 16 - Subscribe

In the season two finale of The 100, abandoned by the Grounders, Clarke and Octavia enter Mount Weather courtesy of Bellamy, while the Mountain Men relentless proceed with the harvesting of blood marrow from their captives and disposing of their bodies. Jaha and Murphy find land and more than they bargained for, while Clarke is forced to confront the morality of the only choices left to her to save her people.

That just happened.
posted by Atreides (17 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I watched the episode this morning before work. I'm still reeling. No happy win, win all is good ending in this show. Cripes.
Clarke's decision to pull the lever was agonizing to watch.
There was no good choice. A real them or us situation.

"I tried to be the good guy". That punched me right in gut.
posted by Jalliah at 11:43 AM on March 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


Just some random thoughts, I haven't processed this 100% yet. That was really rough, in all the best ways. Poor Clarke, she has so much blood on her hands now, its no wonder she couldn't go back with everyone else. And even though I didn't care a ton about Maya, watching Jasper watch her die was hard. Octavia kicking ass was awesome though, and Lincoln killing Cage was one of the highlights of the entire season, "The first dose is the toughest" indeed.

Not sure what I think about the setup for next season, although I'm looking forward to Erica Cerra, she was great on Eureka. And watching Murphy in that bunker was hilarious.
posted by hobgadling at 11:56 AM on March 12, 2015


I've been waiting for someone to post this! I don't know why I didn't do it...

Anyways. So many thoughts.

The Mount Weather storyline was predictable, but I'm glad they took the realistic way out and killed everyone. There is no way they could have saved Maya, even though it was very very sad. Poor Jasper.

I appreciate that more and more the show not "good" verses "bad" but everybody just trying to survive. This is something that Abby and Clarke appear to be coming to terms with, what with Clarke allowing the destruction to go on as planned at Ton DC and having to pull the trigger this time.

Cage is nuts and I don't understand why they didn't reach out to the Arkers (Sky People? Arkers, I'm going to call them Arkers) to begin with. By this episode it was clear that, even if Cage wanted to, a marrow donation wasn't going to work because everything was too far gone. Still, I'd love some perspective on why the folks from Mount Weather acted the way they did from the beginning. The Arkers obviously had an advantageous position, what with being able to survive outside AND having technology. I don't understand why Mount Weather didn't want to reach out to them and have them as allies? Maybe they thought that the Grounders would kill them out? I don't know, maybe other folks have insight.

Okay moving on to the City of Light thing. SO MANY MORE QUESTIONS AND THOUGHTS.

Is this the real city of light or just a detour? If it's the real city of light, where have all the folks they met that were headed there actually end up?

Who put that boat there?

Is this an island or just somewhere down a sound/river? If it is somewhere still landlocked, why the hell hasn't anyone else found this place?

Who was that guy? How long has he been dead? If it's a while, why is everything so nice and clean in that house and why is the music still on? If it hasn't been a while, where is his body since he took the video where he was standing?

All and all I thought the Mount Weather storyline was emotional, but predictable. I didn't know what to expect from the Jaha/City of Lights storyline, but I'm curious to see what will come next. They've done such a good job with the show and I hope this continues this in the third season, because I think it will be very, very easy for them to start playing into the cliches now that we have a new storyline. I feel that seasons one and two did a great job with plot and character development and so I hope/think season three will give us more world building. Who else is left? How did the nuclear war start? What the hell is going on guys?

Also Clarke, have fun on your walkabout. Hope you meet a therapist on the way because you've been through some hard times, girl. It'll be interesting to see what they do with this. I hope they don't take the easy way out and I hope we get some of the world building through this.

Anyways, I'm eagerly awaiting everyone else's thoughts. I'm also looking forward to a rewatch of the entire two seasons this summer and I would love it if some of you joined me and maybe we can fill in the episodes on fanfare that haven't been posted and then add some new reactions/thoughts to the old threads.
posted by lucy.jakobs at 11:58 AM on March 12, 2015


Back when season 1 was wrapping up, the writing staff was talking about how The CW wanted The 100 to be, basically, a broadcast TV Game of Thrones. Hence the big season-ending battle between the 100 and the Grounders. Given that, for the show to spend the entire second season building up to a second epic battle, whetting the audience's appetite for it, and then pulling it away at last minute — well, that takes some seriously confident storytelling and I have a lot of respect for that.

What we got instead was more interesting than a big battle, and much harder to watch. The 100 is great when it chooses to emphasize the aftermath of violence, and it sure pulled out all the stops. After Clarke and Bellamy's massacre, even the death of Cage — the Mountain Man who most "deserved" to die, by action movie logic — felt oddly unsatisfying. Tense and exciting, but unsatisfying.

The writers also deserve credit for not doing a problematic thing that I was so sure that the show was headed for. Back in Long Into an Abyss, Clarke threw a Hail Mary pass by promising to cure Lincoln of being a reaper. It was an arrogant move, rooted in a belief in the inherent superiority of Ark culture over Grounder culture. Even though Clarke had previously needed Grounder medicine to heal her people, even though Grounder medicine was sophisticated enough to wield biological warfare, and even though the Grounders had endured the Reapers for years and would have had plenty of opportunities to try cures of their own — despite all that, Clarke was sure that Ark medicine could succeed where Grounder medicine hadn't. And of course Clarke's cure worked, partly because the show's writing held the viewpoint of Ark superiority. So I thought the Reaper cure would be a model for the rest of the alliance: the Arkers using their inherent superiority to civilize the savage Grounders. Instead, we got a reciprocal relationship where both Grounders and Arkers supported and learned from each other. It was far more equitable than I'd expected, and kudos for that.

The Jaha/Murphy storyline left me... not pumped to see where it leads next season. The boat scene was great, and the stuff on land was okay (although Warren Zevon's music will always bug me). But it feels like we're headed towards a mythology storyline, the siren that led other SF shows into the rocks. Even if the mythology is done well, it's poised to take away one of the subtle things I've liked about the show: the characters' growing realization that they're not that important. They grew up believing themselves to be the only hope for the survival of the human race, only to find that humanity is getting by without them. But if Jaha and Murphy do uncover Big Secrets about the nuclear incident, then our characters really are special, really do have a destiny, which is a more cliched story to tell.

I am, however, pretty interested to see how Camp Jaha functions without Clarke, and how Clarke pays her penance.

Cage is nuts and I don't understand why they didn't reach out to the Arkers ... to begin with

Yeah. I was actually bummed when Kane pointed out that bone marrow can be non-fatally donated. Without that, the rules of the show were consistent, if unscientific: harvesting marrow is fatal. But now Cage's plan makes even less sense.

There was no good choice. A real them or us situation.

By the end, yeah. But I'm curious to see if the show acknowledges Clarke's role in creating the no-win situation. By killing Dante, she put Cage into a fury where he wouldn't listen to Kane's offer to donate or to Clarke's threat to kill everyone. If Clarke hadn't pulled the trigger on one man, maybe she wouldn't have had to pull it on hundreds.

A few other thoughts:
  • Devon Bostik did a great job this week. Jasper's desperation and simmering rage was palpable. And when Jasper came back to Camp Jaha holding a machine gun, I was half convinced he was about to snap and go on a shooting spree.
  • It was good to see Clarke and Bellamy working through tough situations together again. As fun as it's been watching Bellamy play John McClane, I've missed the deeper parts of his character.
And if there was a rewatch this summer, I'd pop in from time to time. If not, see you all in the fall. It's been fun.
posted by Banknote of the year at 12:53 PM on March 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was pretty stunned by how the situation revolved itself, though I had, prior to last episode, prepared for a Grounder-wide blood bath of the inhabitants of Mt. Weather versus Clarke enacted radiation death.

Clarke has to be in the midst of severe traumatic break down given everything she's gone through in what amounts to just a few weeks, be it personally killing Finn to accepting Lexa's plan to not notify anyone of the on coming missile to pulling the lever to wipe out children, allies and so on with the radiation.

Clarke's arc at the end also made her appear to me as a Moses figure, beginning with her arrival at Mount Weather, the apparent land of plenty. Yet, her people are basically slaves, chattel in the end concerning the designs of the Mountain Men, and she escapes and ends up engaging with the outsiders (nomads of the desert vs the grounders), and returns to the kingdom mountain to free her people. When the pharaoh refuses, she unleashes a plague upon them. Then when her people are safe, free of the mountain, she can't enter the promise land that is the Ark community.

Another observation is her own appearance, which has melded into something of a mix between Grounder and Ark style, but being neither solely one or the other. She's caught between two worlds, which have forced her to partly leave one and partly become another. She doesn't belong anywhere, hence she's forced to wander (without supplies - what?). Ultimately, we also have to look at Clarke as a child raised on the Ark, something that Abby and Kane talked while trapped under rubble. Anything is necessary to save the people of the Ark, and one can kind of contrast the death of Mount Weather's community to the inevitable suffocation of approximately 900 Ark denizens last season - done entirely to save the other Ark inhabitants. The difference here being it's a bit more easy to rationalize the death of the "few" to save the many. The Mount Weather people out numbered those Clarke wanted to save, so Clarke essentially had to decide that the lives of her people were more valuable.

Also, the cold blooded execution of the President. DANG.

Octavia must be a martial art prodigy cause she has officially been elevated to awesome.

Bellamy is coming out as an incredible character. He's bold, he's brave, and he's not afraid to accept what amounts to partial blame for genocide entirely to take some of that weight off of the shoulders of another. If anyone should be a future leader of the Ark, it's him.

Poor Jaha. The dude has wandered out of the world of The 100 and into the weird wacko realm that regurgitated the crazy plot twists on Lost. This isn't necessarily a criticism, okay, it's a little bit of a criticism, but while the twists of the other storylines have flowed somewhat naturally, Jaha has had someone perpetually walking ahead of him and dropping one odd shoe after another.

So apparently a super rich computer nerd failed to keep the launch codes from an AI, who blew the whole damn thing up. But. Wait. It could not have just happened or there never would have been time to gather everything, art work, cultural legacies, etc, in 2052 to put it in the Ark if it happened out of no where. So is 2052 the year the world exploded, putting this show in approximately 2149 or so? Or is this another event?

lucy.jakobs also raises the point, what happened to that guy's body? Was there someone else around who buried it? (I believe the power had gone out and was restored, turning the music on and everything, when Murphy wiped of the solar panel).

Jaha, meanwhile, one must ask, as the man seeking the promise land, did he find hell instead of heaven? Jaha can naturally be setup as another Moses figure, trying to find a safe place for his people to live without fear of grounders or Mountain men, but did he forsake his chance of doing so by figuratively splitting the rock for water, when he cast the guy into the water to save himself and Murphy? Or even by abandoning Murphy? Jaha definitely represents what happens as you carry the philosophy of the greater good with you in our new world, because it allows you to shed the guilt and burden of having to do things that would otherwise be considered immoral.

This show is just wild stuff. The creator promises we will meet a new community next season!
posted by Atreides at 1:13 PM on March 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I had, prior to last episode, prepared for a Grounder-wide blood bath of the inhabitants of Mt. Weather versus Clarke enacted radiation death.

This was a great twist on expectations. Given how often the Grounders were played for savages, we were set up for a conflict between Grounders wanting to slaughter everyone and the Sky People wanting targeted killings. Instead, the Grounders only killed a few people, all soldiers, and the supposedly-civilized Sky People did the massacre.

Your Moses parallels are astute, too.
posted by Banknote of the year at 1:24 PM on March 12, 2015


I think 2149 has explictly been confirmed as the year the show is taking place in, actually.

I think the reason that Cage didn't push for voluntary, non-fatal marrow donations in the first place comes down to a couple factors: they're already comfortable with killing other people in the service of their own goals, Cage is arrogant, greedy, and doesn't really trust anyone but his own people. Voluntary marrow transplants would be much slower. You'd get a smaller amount of marrow per person at a time, requiring a long term truce and alliance in order to get enough marrow for their whole population. I don't think Cage was really interested in that. He doesn't trust them, and he wants to be on the ground *now*, without waiting. Easier just to kill the Ark kids and trust in the mountain's own obvious superiority to protect them from repercussions.

The father could have gone for that alliance, but he was taking things much more slowly, and was outmaneuvered by his son before anything could have happened there. By the time he got back into play, it was too late to walk that back.

As for Jaha and Murphy, I assume the body was cleaned up the AI. It's not just the body removed; that place was pristine with packages of food neatly arranged on the table, no damage, stains, wear, or disarray anywhere. It's been maintained. I'm not sure I'd credit it getting power to Murphy clearing that one panel off; there were active solar panels at the top of the lighthouse, and he's in the base of that same building. I think it just turned on via motion activation when he entered.

They're definitely not the first people to reach that island either, given the large number of boats on the shoreline. Those other people were probably not as welcomed as Jaha was. The collection of remote controls and other electronics on the beach was interesting, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Octavia being amazing:
"She's not an outsider!"
"Yes, she is."
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:30 PM on March 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


The boats reminded me of one of the John Carter novels, where it's revealed the Therns had propagated a religion that encouraged people to take boats down a river, entirely so they can be captured at its end for slavery and potentially, even more nefarious purposes. Perhaps the AI has spread the legend of the City of Lights entirely for the purpose of drawing people to it for its own nefarious purposes.
posted by Atreides at 5:22 PM on March 12, 2015


After reading this interview, especially this: Clarke is f**king legendary. Clarke is Paul Bunyan. Everyone is going to know about Clarke of the Sky People. it occurred to me that a good parallel for Clarke in season 3 is going to be John Crichton from Farscape. All she wanted was to live a quiet, peaceful life, but she'll do anything it takes to protect her people, and it makes everyone else terrified of her.
posted by hobgadling at 5:43 PM on March 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


[Bellamy isn't] afraid to accept what amounts to partial blame for genocide entirely to take some of that weight off of the shoulders of another

I really appreciate you calling this out as a genocide. I think it's worth emphasizing that irradiating the compound does fit the UN definition of genocide: "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ... group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group..." The Mountain Men were a nation — in the sense of having a common culture, territory, government, etc. — and Clarke and Bellamy killed them all.
posted by Banknote of the year at 7:23 PM on March 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I can't decide how Lexa will feel when she finds out what Clarke did: Proud, Impressed, or Afraid.

Also, Jaha re-arming Sky-Net‽ he should have stayed on the Arc.
posted by zinon at 2:32 AM on March 13, 2015


One would think the Grounders would be pretty freaked out that the Sky People did in a few weeks what they couldn't do over fifty years.
posted by Atreides at 6:54 AM on March 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


^Yeah I'm thinking a little of all free. Proud that she did everything she could to take care of her people (even though it was a hard choice emotionally, not that Lexa would talk about her emotions). Impressed that she actually pulled it all off single handedly. And of course, as Atreides said, very afraid.
posted by lucy.jakobs at 10:54 AM on March 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


free = three. It's Friday and I can't type/talk.
posted by lucy.jakobs at 12:19 PM on March 13, 2015


Well, finally got around to watching this and that was fucked up. I figured the Mountain Men were doomed and yup, they were. Thanks for trying to make it a little better by saying it was your fault, Maya! But yeah, if I were her I wouldn't have been on the side of the people who will inevitably get me killed because I have no way to escape, unfortunately.

I would leave if I were Clarke too.

Damn, this whole "City of Light" thing has been quite fucked up.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:08 AM on February 21, 2016


I don't think it was completely unreasonable to think that there was another possible resolution - there almost was before the betrayal by Trikru. Add a bit of idealism or naiveté and you're basically there.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:42 AM on February 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I would leave if I were Clarke too.

Yeah, and when Bellamy asked where she would go, I thought, "Well, I'd say go hang out with Murphy, but I like him too much to subject him to her."

I guess I don't really like Clarke all that much.
posted by naturesgreatestmiracle at 11:49 PM on March 26, 2016


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