I love giving new shows a chance but sometimes seasons will lose me and often I don’t come back. This happened with CW’s The 100, but something about the promo for this current season snapped me up. Will it reward that return?
If you’re not familiar with The 100, I don’t want you to get spoiled – so I’m going to put a trailer here for the first season and then let you know you can find it on Netflix. Sound good? You had a decent warning with a tease to the show so you can try it out.
Alright, so now that the spoiler warnings are out of the way and I’ve shown you the trailer for the first season – we’re all good, right? Now, one of the things I loved about The 100’s first season is that it touched on what I originally liked about Lost. Remember that show that tragically just destroyed its own narrative somewhere and we were meant to just get it? Congrats if you’re one of those people that did, but really, it was nonsense. Anyhow, The 100 showed a group of 100 young space folks who were sent to Earth in order to make sure it was habitable since things went rough down there. Up in space, the Ark had been filled with people but the problem was that losing oxygen and food sources was becoming an issue so landing on Earth was a last ditch effort to save what seemed to be left of humanity.
This is Bellamy and Clarke and the biggest Will-They-Won’t-They of any show on The CW right now. We love them. (The CW)
It appeared that nobody wanted to be the one to do it and the ‘adults’ were busy with their very important yet not greatly defined jobs up on the Ark, so they sent the bad kids. Yup. The bad kids. Are you thinking this is a Space Lord of the Flies, because that’s what essentially went down. Earth turns out to be pretty alright and yet communications are broken. Chaos ensues. Now, that’s just the first season and within that they already let on that other people are already living on Earth. Huh. Did nobody research this beforehand? Why were they up in space so long if obviously other people were down there, huh? Well, regardless, trying to co-habitat with the other individuals on Earth was proving difficult because these Space Kids were acting like they were super more deserving than the already-living-there kids.
Seeing as how Bellamy and Clarke weren’t a thing yet, they gave Clarke a baller girlfriend and promptly killed her. Yes, I’m still irritated about that. (The CW)
This didn’t go great. In fact, they just kept traveling around through the seasons and pissing off more Earth people until Earth was no longer a concern. Who did it? Would you be shocked that it was one of the Space Kids? No? Me either. I have to be honest, I caught bits and pieces of those seasons after the 1st because I just couldn’t understand why the show wasn’t about them building a new life on an empty planet. None of these Space Kids had ever seen ground, oceans, flora in abundance, etc. You’d think there would be so much show in that concept, but much like Lost, they thought there wasn’t enough intrigue and so they included more people and more weird chaos that was hard to follow. Survival, at a certain point, isn’t worth it if you’re constantly murdering innocent people but what do I know? This show really should’ve been called “Are We the Bad Guys?” and it would’ve tracked.
This brings me to the current season of The 100. The trailer for it had me very interested and I’ll give you a peek and you can judge for yourself, alright?
This is for Season Six. Yeah, that’s how many seasons I kind of wavered in and out of while subsequently reading synopsis online. This trailer, however, reminded me of the very first season’s feel. Once again, the remaining Space Kids are few and far between and now they’re just a handful of ding-a-lings who keep asking the same questions. This time, they’re not all from the same Ark but also a couple of folks they picked up and befriended on their non-stop death march of Earth. With fewer numbers, they are issued a new planet after a cryo-sleep that they were woken up from once they got in to the atmosphere of a breathable and livable planet. Great! Now they can start over and do the thing that they were supposed to do, right?
Nope.
Don’t worry though, Clarke’s girlfriend wasn’t the only one who got murdered to push a plot forward. We miss you, Lincoln. (The CW)
This time, however, it’s not even all the way their fault! That’s what actually pleases me because I was getting really tired of them causing their own problems and this time someone else is. Isn’t that nice? Now they’ve landed smack down in the middle of a weird cult on a planet with eclipses that turn the planet red and make everyone viciously angry. That’s still not the fault of Space Kids & Co. though and so it’s just about watching what may happen when Space Kids are grouped with Cult-y Fams.
This is Octavia. I promise that you will never like her and you will always wonder why she’s still around. (The CW)
What I will say for this current season of The 100 is that they’re starting to recognize their patterns and how problematic they were becoming. The 100 was a show that didn’t know what to become or morph into but it was always, I feel, meant to be a story about starting life anew. The 100 felt like it was going to show the pains of growing into adulthood and away from your parents, aka Space Parents, and move out for the first time. It didn’t really become that and I can’t tell if it’s the writing staff or the cast taking a bit too much privilege in developing their own characters, but it lost its way. This season feels like its trying to actually get back to that point of it all but this time with the Space Kids becoming adults all on their own. Heck, I dare say, I even look forward to the air dates now and I can’t wait to find out how these wacky folks are doing. Maybe it’s all going to be okay after all.
And last, but not least, is Murphy. Everyone hates him but I don’t. I’ll be the only person in the fan club, no problem. (The CW)
