“I
know who Oppenheimer is.”
As
any serious student of history is well aware, the most important weapon in the
European conquest of North America was the smallest—germs, of course. Colonization
is a central theme to The 100, and
germs play a central role in this episode, but the show isn’t a strict allegory
of the colonization of North America, and further as we’ve briefly mentioned,
as much as it’s about colonization, it’s also about refugees. Besides, it
wouldn’t make much sense of the Ark people, who’ve lived for three generations in
a controlled environment that gets locked down at the slightest hint of a cold,
and so it’s the Grounders, the natives who know the land better than the 100 do
or will, who use germs to their advantage, in a way that evokes the Golden
Horde’s use of the plague (come to think of it, the Grounders have a whole hell
of a lot more in common with the Mongols of the Khans than Native Americans),
among many others. It’s, to be sure, a horrifying tactic, widely regarded as
unethical, which is admittedly, a fairly laughable thing to say about war. But
it also speaks, in my view anyway, to how harsh and cruel the world the
Grounders have been occupying must be for them to respond in kind. Though I bet
they didn’t expect the 100 to nearly wind up shooting each other in a panic.
One element in that world would be
the Mountain Men, who Lincoln mentions here, fearfully, for the first time. All
we truly know about them right now is that they exist, and Lincoln is afraid of
them—and if Lincoln’s afraid of them, we should probably be terrified.
As we see how Tree-crew makes war,
we also get a study in how the 100 do so—obviously, they do so like immature
teens who’ve never actually lived through one. Bellamy exhibits he sort of blustery
bravado that seems very sensible, impressive, and compelling to macho youths.
Jasper rides a modicum of fame (the narrative “Jasper’s bold action saved the
day!” takes root much better than “Jasper’s lack of restraint may have killed
us all!”) to maximum jack-assery. Clarke basically throws herself wholly into
medical duties which is fair enough, actually, considering she’s both the only
medic and one of the afflicted, though the planning meetings do clearly suffer
for the lack of her decisiveness. Finn doesn’t necessarily reveal himself to be
a master strategist, but he does exhibit the sort of cunning and tactical
acuity that would have made him a clutch player around the D&D table. And
Raven’s nearly felled by overestimating her capabilities, and more than a
little spite and jealousy.
Returning to the mix is Murphy, who
came bearing the plague and an ethical conundrum. Do they hold Murphy to their
initial sentence, or has their circumstance and his own changed enough for everyone
to reconsider? Clarke argues that ultimately the need to bolster their numbers
trump everything else. But while Murphy puts on a good show of having changes
his ways, torture tends not to result in good behavior under any circumstance,
and his good show is exactly that—a good show that ends the second no one is
watching, to Conner’s dismay. But we can come back to the faulty notion of “He’s
our psychopath” later.
Maybe I looked like a crazy person
gushing about bullets, unreliably, and scarcity, but I think those elements
start really paying off in this episode. One thing about this show that helped
endear it to me so strongly is that when it gets exciting, it gets really
fucking exciting in a way that certain big budget contemporaries don’t match,
and the scarcity is a huge component of that. I mean, the big climax of this
episode is that Jasper has to shoot a tin can. Granted it’s full of rocket fuel,
and the onrushing Tree-crew Horde is on the other side of it, but still, dude
has to shoot a tin can and that’s it. But, in addition to the pressure of that
charging army, and Raven being at death’s door because she tried to set off the
bomb herself, a clip of duds leaves him with only three chances to do it. It’s intense
as hell. And the rareness of bullets only makes them that much more potent—Jasper’s
first shot misses, but the sound still freezes the charging Grounders in their
tracks.
When the bomb does go off, Clarke
remarks from a distance on the similarity the explosion bears to a mushroom
cloud—a subtle reminder that even though these kids look like kids and cope
like kids and fight like kids, but they were touched and traumatized by war
before they were even born.
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