The 100 - 'Coup de Grace', 'Rubicon', 'Resurrection', 'Bodyguard of Lies' and 'Blood Must Have Blood'

Clarke: Thinks she gets Grounders.

Okay, so we kind of binged on finishing this one. I don't think I'll be able to recap everything, so it's going to be quick and dirty to lead up to my final thoughts.

In 'Coup de Grace' the Alliance is gaining ground. They capture a Mount Weather scout and Clarke sends him back with a badass boast to keep President Wallace from looking for Bellamy. Bellamy is in trouble after Lincoln's relapse, but Maya helps him escape. He kills a guard and goes undercover in Mount Weather. Meanwhile, Wallace is overthrown by his son when he tries to stop the marrow treatments and the remaining 47 are locked in. By this point, Monty and Harper are in a bad way.

Octavia: Gets Grounders. Remember when I called the
character 'too stupid to live'?

In 'Rubicon', two more of the 47 are taken for their marrow and killed, but Maya and Bellamy irradiate the level, killing Dr Tsing and several guards. Bellamy learns that there are children in Mount Weather (obvious, really, but we hadn't seen them before) and insists that they need a plan that doesn't kill everyone. Raven works with Bellamy to disable the acid fog, but when Bellamy overhears a plan to destroy the Alliance conference in Tondc with a missile, Clarke allows Lexa to persuade her that she has to let it happen or risk exposing Bellamy. As a result, the missile hits, killing hundred. In the desert, another traveler offers to lead Jaha's party to the City of Light, but instead leads them into an ambush.

Despite a promising start, Murphy spectacularly fails to get
any.

In 'Resurrection', Abby is outraged by Clarke's decision, but Kane reminds her that she learned ruthlessness from her parents' generation. The missile spotter pins the survivors with sniper fire, but Lexa, Clarke and Lincoln flank him while Octavia steps up and leads the other seconds to dig people out of the rubble. In Mount Weather, Cage sends guards in to capture the surviving teens, but an ambush leads to a bloody reversal and several guards are slain. Fleeing the level, the survivors are taken in and hidden by those who oppose Cage's plans to harvest the marrow of the teens, including Maya's father.

"Didn't we have a stool for this piano? And a rug? Oh, yes, and
45 high-value prisoners!"

In 'Bodyguard of Lies', the Alliance's plans move forward and the army gathers on the edge of Mount Weather's defensive perimeter. Clarke confronts Lexa when the latter tries to have Octavia killed because she knows they knew about the missile, which ends with Lexa and Clarke kissing. Raven and Wick - remember him? - guide Bellamy to disable the acid fog undetected, but Cage and his guards have discovered the radio and trick them. At the last minute, Bellamy is able to blow up the acid tanks and the army advances unchecked. In the desert, Jaha's group becomes trapped in a minefield, picking their way through to discover that the 'City of Light' is an abandoned field of solar collectors, watched over by drones. When one of these activates and heads out across the sea, Jaha leads the others to a boat and they begin to cross.

By this point, Jaha is off the res and into full-on messianic
mode.

The two-part finale, 'Blood Must Have Blood', begins with the assault on Mount Weather. As the main force of the Alliance march on the doors, Indra leads Octavia and her other warriors into the mines, equipped with tone generators to disable the Reapers, and Wick and Raven go to blow up the Mountain's power station. Bellamy releases the Grounders from the Harvest Chamber, but Cage appeals to his people to hand over the 'terrorists' in their midst, and his guards start executing sympathisers. It is the elder Wallace, however, who ends the threat of the advancing army, advising Cage to strike a deal with the Commander - release all of the Grounders and keep the Sky People.

I can not deny, this series has some impressive crowds.

And so to part two. With the Grounders gone, Mount Weather sends teams to capture more Sky People and begin the curing of its population. Clarke, Bellamy and Monty head for the Mountain's control room, while Maya smuggles Jasper and Octavia into the sealed level where the population have gathered. Clarke tries to force Cage to stand down, while the captured Kane tries to reason with him, but Cage is possessed of the sense of destiny. Jasper decides that he has to assassinate Cage, but before he can strike, Clarke and Bellamy are forced to make a terrible choice, and opt to annihilate the people of Mount Weather, including Maya and every child in the Mountain, to save their own, the remaining members of the 47 and anyone else who has been or might ever be captured.

Mutant gorillas are for amateurs.

Meanwhile Jaha and Murphy alone reach the end of their road, in no small part because Jaha feeds another guy to a monster; literally, he chucks him in the water so he and Murphy - whom he clearly considers his disciple or something - can escape. And then he leaves Murphy bleeding on a beach. The injured Murphy finds his way into a bunker/playboy bachelor pad (led by the strains of 'Werewolves of London, which start up when he clears a solar panel,) where he finds the suicide tape of a man who claims to be responsible for letting 'her' get the launch codes and bring about the apocalypse. 'Her' turns out to be an AI called 'Allie', who greets Jaha at her palatial mansion and thanks him for his 'gift'; the warhead from the missile he rode to Earth.

The Sky People return to Camp Jaha in a bittersweet mood, but Clarke can not live with what she has done, at least not among her former people. She walks out into the wilderness to the strains of a female vocal version of 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door', carrying the guilt of her monstrous deed so that the rest of the Sky Crew can go on with their lives.

Right, so; that was Season 2. From massacre to genocide in sixteen brutal episodes. The recurring themes of the series seem to be cultural identity and loyalty, what we do to survive, and whether survival is enough.

"I'd probably be more sumpathetic if I weren't so needlessly evil."

The leaders of each group are determined to protect their people - Clarke the 48, Lexa the Grounders, Cage the Weatherites - to such an extent that they blinker themselves to the humanity of their foes. In the last few episodes there are an awful lot of characters insisting that they must look after their people, that their people come first and that they are constrained - the phrase 'I have no choice' comes up a lot - because 'they will not stop' (where 'they' are another group.) Cage flatly refuses to believe that the Sky People would donate bone marrow to help the Weatherites, and therein lies the fundamental fallacy of the season; that the conflict between Mount Weather and Camp Jaha was always unnecessary.

More than anyone else in a series full of flawed, brutal, complex characters, Cage Wallace and Dr Tsing are almost cartoonishly evil, because their insistence that the 47 have to die is so obviously down to impatience and callousness. Their deaths alone felt like pure karma, with none of that nasty moral ambiguity.

"None of us are innocent."

This being the case, Clarke and Bellamy really did have no choice. Jasper was in no real position to make good on his assassination attempt, and it's by no means certain which way another act of perceived terrorism would have tipped the remaining population. Clearly Cage wasn't secure in his power, as shown by the willingness of his guards to kill civilians, and the loss of nearly all the treated guards in capturing Abby and Kane's party confirms that his confidence in their conquest of the ground was misplaced. More than likely, however, Jasper would have been lynched and the processes continued. The only options were to allow many of their people to die, or to become the monster that war demands.

And somehow... they made it work. Somehow, slaughtering an entire population made Clarke more sympathetic, because the show ran with the consequences, and because while it gave us every reason to understand, it never tried to tell us that what she and Bellamy did was right. The core of this is in her talk with Lexa about survival. Clarke argues: "Maybe life should be about more than just surviving. Don’t we deserve better than that?" She's right, of course, but events don't allow her that luxury. She has to choose whether her people will survive, even if that means she no longer believes that she deserves anything better. It's a choice made - rightly or wrongly - by military commander the world over throughout history. Allowing the destruction of Tondc was analogous to the sacrifice of Coventry during the Blitz, and the destruction of Mount Weather parallels any bombing of civilian populations.

To sum up what the series is saying, let's look to the characters.

When Jasper sees Maya dying he screams out that she was innocent (as a note, the Alliance had previously decided that the innocent would not be harmed,) and she responds: "None of us is innocent." A case could be made for the children on all sides, but for the protagonists its the simple truth. No-one comes out of this season clean. Similarly, when Clarke tells her mother that she tried to be the good guy, Abby finally has to concede: "Maybe there are no good guys."

But if there are innocents, if there are good guys, it is because someone like Clarke does something horrid. "I bear it, so that they don't have to," Dante Wallace tells Clarke, and later she echoes the sentiment.

Not that there aren't those who look for a better way, a land of peace and prosperity. But Jaha's quest proved vain, his guiding genius the influence of a malevolent computer. To give the final word to John Murphy: "Your promised land sucks."