Adventures in Streaming: The 100
I like to hate-watch TV shows. I'm currently hate-watching The Tudors and gleefully complaining about it on Facebook. But I'm nearing the end of that and I need some new pop culture heroin for my veins. I have mad love of teen dramas, so I started watching The 100. It's lousy but I keep tuning in, like I've got streaming Stockholm Syndrome.
The 100 is a particularly maddening show because the premise is so good. The Earth done got nuked and a bunch of survivors escape in a ship called the ARK. Eggheads said Earth wouldn't be livable again for two hundred years. So the survivors live on the ship, dress like they're in the real world of The Matrix, and have a murky political system with a Chancellor and a council. The problem is, it's only been ninety-seven years and the council knows the ship can't sustain the number of peeps on board for another hundred plus years. They gonna die when the oxygen runs out. Oh noes! Now here's where it gets cool. This is an unusual show because they don't give a shit about kids. They don't value them, they see them as a burden on their already burdened ship. So kids get jailed for breathing wrong. So they have 100 kids in jail for various petty—and a few not-so-petty—crimes. They decide the kids are expendable and shove 'em all on a pod and drop that thang to Earth. But not before equipping the kids with wrist band telcoms and telling them how important it is to keep them on. I'm sure the disenfranchised youth can be trusted with that, right?
Anyhow, the kids are basically told, if you peeps die, it'll suck to be you. But if you manage to live, that means Earth is sustainable. So we'll all hop pods back to the motherland and ya'll will get pardoned. We good, homies? Then it turns out, Earth is sustainable, but oh-so-effed up. Murderous radiation fog, snake monsters, nuts that make you hallucinate. It's a Brave New World except that the idiots took off their wrist bands. Spoiler?
The premise is spoiled by terrible actors, a main character so inconsistent and hypocritical that she might as well be a Fox News anchor, and a bunch of romance BS no one cares about because everyone is an asshole who deserves to die. Except the one character I liked, who died for no reason—unless acting-while-black (AWB) is punishable by death, now.
So here's my review of The 100 as I watch the latest episode on Hulu.
Shut up, Clarke. The end.
You want more? I don't have much more. I don't know where the CW went awry. Sometimes they do such a good job. Elena on Vampire Diaries is one of my favorite teen drama heroines. She's so tough and smart and honorable. But Clarke is the very worst kind of person. She's humorless, self-righteous, and thinks she needs to be everyone's moral compass. Which, they really do need one, but she has self-serving morality that goes out the window every damn episode. The last four episodes have pretty much gone like this:
Clarke: Hey Bellamy, I think we should [insert whatever stupid idea Clarke has that will make things worse].
Bellamy: That's stupid. Don't do that.
Clarke: I'mma do it anyway. [A few moments later] Oops, that was a bad idea. Bellamy fix it!
Bellamy: I hate you so much.
Clarke : I know. We're so gonna bone some day.
It's all murder, mayhem, bullies who pee on people, love triangles that can suck a two-headed deer dick, and some seriously uncomfortable racial overtones. Like, who approved a scene where a room full of Caucasian kids gathered around a chained up brown man and cheered as someone whipped him with a seat-belt buckle? Hey guys, that may have been a touch distasteful. Especially coming off of the murder of the only black character, who was immediately replaced by a black extra who suddenly had lines. Hey, quotas gotta be met, I guess.
It's a mess. I hesitate to even call it a hot mess. It ain't hot. It's room temp, baby. Well, mostly. Because Bellamy? He's freakin' hot.
