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TheCenturion posted:I think the idea is that a lot of the linguistic and cultural drift is forced, to stymie the Mountain Men. I'd expect that quite a bit of the Becca/Alie lore is specifically hidden or obfuscated by religion as a safety measure. That might work if the religion was presented as a kind of Scientology thing, with one version of the story being told to the lay followers while the full details about
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Jul 24, 2016 17:15
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Watched Episode 8. This episode is one of the most watchable of the season so far. If the setup for the Pike plot hadn't been so botched earlier in the season, I might even call it "pretty good." Positive: It is nice to see the background characters like Harper, Nathan, and Miller get some significant screentime for once. Their caper plot is enjoyable and reminds of some of the better parts of Season 2. Also, Nathan and Miller's relationship was done well, and I like how it was presented without comment. Kane and Pike are both played by talented actors, enough that despite the lackluster material the scenes where they play off each other are fairly tense and compelling. I still don't like Jasper's direction this season, but he is a lot more tolerable now that he is actually doing something other than getting drunk and moping. Raven and Jaha were also good. In particular, the scene where Raven realizes that she doesn't remember Finn while ALIE keeps telling her that it isn't important was very well done. Though it is a little weird how Pike confiscated the chip maker but let Jaha keep the rest of the backpack (how did he even know which specific part was the chip maker, anyway?). Negative: So we've gone from Arkadia starving in a year to starving in a week because "we can't send out hunting parties"? Like I've said before, if you base your plot around food supply issues, you invite scrutiny on the subject. I only know a little bit about this sort of thing, but even I know that farming provides way more food than hunting. Heck, gathering provides significantly more food than hunting in most environments. The only way you can support a population of any size primarily on hunting is if you hunt something like the vast buffalo herds that used to roam the Great Plains of North America, and obviously the show has never depicted anything like that. And of course, hunting is even less lucrative if you share the hunting grounds with other people, which they presumably do since a Grounder village was close by until a few days ago. Bellamy is okay with massacring an allied army, okay with ethnically cleansing a village, okay with imprisoning Lincoln who helped him save his friends from the Mountain Men, and okay with shooting messengers for basically no reason. But executing Kane, who engineered a prison riot that could have seriously injured or even killed him, is a step too far. There is really no plausible explanation for these actions other than outright racism, so trying to use this to redeem Bellamy is a terrible idea. "Like you all did the right thing when you turned in that boy Finn?" Um, no. 1) That's not how it happened at all. Finn turned himself in over the strenuous objections of pretty much everyone else with a name. 2) Thanks for reminding me about the worst part of Season 2. I was just fine with forgetting that it happened as long as you didn't bring it up. INH5 fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jul 24, 2016 |
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Jul 24, 2016 18:28
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The biggest problem I had with the season was definitely all the Pike stuff. It was a huge misstep to offload all this stuff on a character that had never appeared or even been mentioned before. Like they would have been better off putting it all on a minor/side character who had already been on the show like Jackson or Sinclair. Characters who were around but could be modified to fit in to a new position by revealing/retconning more of their backstory. Or hell, bring back the lady who crashed the escape ship from season 1, that would have been a better villain.
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Jul 24, 2016 19:38
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TheCenturion posted:I think the idea is that a lot of the linguistic and cultural drift is forced, to stymie the Mountain Men. I'd expect that quite a bit of the Becca/Alie lore is specifically hidden or obfuscated by religion as a safety measure. That would have been a good plan. Once Becca realized the US Govt was still in play and probably understandably salty about the end of the world (and would blame her) she probably wanted to keep a pretty low profile.
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Jul 25, 2016 02:48
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Watched episode 9. Positive: The Arkadia caper plot is still good for the most part. It's cool to see Kane and Abby doing stuff for a change. Murphy is awesome as ever. "You know I plan to wipe out your people." "Sucks for them." Ontari is looking like she might make a good villain. Personally, I think that it would have been better if the early episodes had been spent setting her up as the Big Bad, instead of setting up the Ice Queen as the Big Bad and then almost immediately killing her off. They could have done something similar to Diana Sydney and Commander Shumway in the first season, where Ontari frames one of her minions as being solely responsible for the destruction of Mount Weather and the rest, so it wouldn't feel like an entire plotline just went nowhere. Certainly Ontari has a much more coherent motivation than the Ice Queen, since she has a chance at personally taking Lexa's place if she can get rid of her. Negative: The attempts to redeem Bellamy and Monty are not working at all. Like I said before, having them do all sorts of poo poo to Grounders for basically no reason with no remorse at all but then suddenly get cold feet when Pike goes after Kane and Sinclair just makes them look like bigots. Clarke is absolutely right: having the nightbloods kill each other is the dumbest succession plan ever. The most obvious problem: what if the Commander gets killed before any new nightbloods come of age? It also doesn't really fit with the backstory that we've seen so far. Are we supposed to believe that Becca would set this up? This seems obviously contrived to make Luna a McGuffin. Like with Lexa, I knew Lincoln's death was coming because I had heard about the BTS controversy before I started watching the show. This was better written than Lexa's death, but still seemed contrived. Pike is okay with only executing Lincoln? Didn't they say a few episodes ago that Pike was dedicated to upholding the rule of law? I think a better end for Lincoln would have been going down fighting the guards so that the other people could escape. Regardless, it didn't have much impact on me largely because Lincoln has done almost nothing this season. I heard about what happened with Rothenburg not giving Lincoln screentime, and honestly I'm just baffled by it. If not for the nonsensical "kill order" plotline, Lincoln could easily have tagged along on missions outside Arkadia and shared screentime with Bellamy, Kane, and the rest without requring any significant changes to the story. But the really scummy part is contracting Ricky Whittle as a regular, which prevented him from seeking work on other shows until Whittle talked to Rothenburg's bosses, while giving him less screen time than many recurring characters. If that part is true, then Rothenburg is a jerk. I hope that American Gods works out well for Mr. Whittle. A side note: If I have been keeping score correctly, by this point there have been 10 romantic relationships involving regular characters, not including casual hookups and crushes that didn't go anywhere. 7 of these relationships ended with one of the characters dying (Octavia/Atom, Clarke/Finn, Raven/Finn, Jasper/Maya, Bellamy/Gina, Clarke/Lexa, Octavia/Lincoln), 1 ended with an offscreen breakup due to an actor getting fired between seasons (Raven/Wick), and 2 are still ongoing (Murphy/Emori and Kane/Abby). I've read jokes about how everyone who sleeps with Clarke dies, but it looks to me like the entire regular cast is afflicted by the Curse of Sam Winchester. Kane, Abby, and Emori better watch out.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:44
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We interrupt your S3 rewatch to bring you a gag reel. https://vimeo.com/175440623 "You're my brother, we shouldn't-- gently caress! I messed--" "You're right, we shouldn't gently caress." "We should never do that."
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Jul 26, 2016 20:52
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Watched episode 10. There is a lot of stuff that I liked about this episode. Positive: Very glad that the Pike as Dictator of the Sky People plot is over and done with. Pacing is very good. The show seems to have fully recovered from the first few episodes in this area. Murphy is the best villain sidekick ever. Jaha, Emori, and now Ontari all benefit tremendously from having him around to point out their bullshit. The ALIE plot is becoming like a pretty good horror movie. Linsdey Morgan is doing a tremendous job, and has a fantastic ALIE impression. The scene where she cuts herself with a totally blank expression on her face is incredibly unsettling. I also really like how it is presenting Jaha as pretty much the real bad guy. If he hadn't pushed ALIE to hide information from Raven, to find ways around free will, and so on, this would never have gotten as far as it has. It's a neat twist on the usual Evil AI plot. Like I've said before, Jasper is so much better when he does stuff other than getting drunk and moping. The scene where he reunites with Clarke and for once she is the one who has no clue what is going on is amazing. Negative: While I mostly like the way that the ALIE plot is developing, I wish that the writers had come up with a better reason for Raven being more able than other people to resist ALIE than "she's just so speshul." Personally, I got nothing out of Octavia beating up Bellamy. Every time anyone brings up the poo poo he's done this season, all I can think of is how little sense it made and continues to make. Also, the editing was really choppy and hard to watch. The final scene with Ontari and Murphy is all kinds of uncomfortable. Ontari flat out rapes Murphy, and he seems almost happy about it? And what is with the music? I'm not sure if it was meant to be weird and uncomfortable, or they just didn't realize that they had written a rape scene. INH5 fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jul 27, 2016 |
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Jul 27, 2016 04:39
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INH5 posted:The final scene with Ontari and Murphy is all kinds of uncomfortable. Ontari flat out rapes Murphy, and he seems almost happy about it? And what is with the music? I'm not sure if it was meant to be weird and uncomfortable, or they just didn't realize that they had written a rape scene. He likes the one woman so he feels an obligation to be monogamous but he doesn't find Ontari unattractive. I don't think I'm reaching when I say most guys wouldn't mind being "forced" to have sex with a hot, dominant woman. There's a difference between getting jumped in an alley and forced to have sex with someone you don't know and having someone seductively pull you into their bed because they saw you checking them out naked. Please don't derail this into rape discussion, tia
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Jul 27, 2016 16:35
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I Own Soulz posted:He likes the one woman so he feels an obligation to be monogamous but he doesn't find Ontari unattractive. I don't think I'm reaching when I say most guys wouldn't mind being "forced" to have sex with a hot, dominant woman. Ontari made a sexual advance, Murphy turned her down, she explicitly threatened him with death, he gave in. She's not just a "hot, dominant" woman "forcing" him to have sex. This is a brutal warrior society, she's in charge of it, and she herself has killed many people. She threatened him with death. She didn't just "seductively pull him into her bed." The fact that she's hot and did it in a sexy voice doesn't change the nature of what it was. INH5 posted:The final scene with Ontari and Murphy is all kinds of uncomfortable. Ontari flat out rapes Murphy, and he seems almost happy about it? And what is with the music? I'm not sure if it was meant to be weird and uncomfortable, or they just didn't realize that they had written a rape scene. that one guy fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jul 27, 2016 |
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Jul 27, 2016 17:16
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Every time I read Bob Morley's name I'm convinced it's fake.
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Jul 27, 2016 17:54
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that one guy posted:You just made it a rape discussion. 
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Jul 27, 2016 18:16
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that one guy posted:You just made it a rape discussion. He's basically a concubine at that point, just that usually the genders are reversed. That doesn't make it any less rapey, but it's probably what they were going for.
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Jul 27, 2016 18:25
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My favourite argument judo move is to start laying down opinions and declarative statements about a sensitive topic and then finishing with "don't make this a discussion" so that nobody else can disagree with you
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Jul 27, 2016 19:06
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Watched episode 11. Positive: Lindsay Morgan is just killing it. Her ALIE impression is incredible, and watching Raven call everyone out on their bullshit was a real treat. She knocked all of her scenes during this episode out of the park. I liked seeing Niylah again. I liked Monty's conversation with Octavia, as well as the scene where he confronted his chipped mother. Negative: "What more do I have to do to prove that I'm on your side?" Shut up, Bellamy. Clarke telling Niylah, "It's hard to explain." How hard is it to say, "If she finds out where she is, a horde of techno-zombies will descend on your trading post and kill us/torture us until we eat something that turns us into techno-zombies." That isn't really that much stranger than anything else that has happened in the last 5 months. ALIE gave Monty's mom zero backup despite having dozens if not hundreds of thralls by now? Jasper was fine in the last few episodes, but now that the focus is back on him grieving over Maya all of the problems have come back to the forefront. The elephant in the room with his storyline this season is that Season 2 didn't take cover all that much time. According to the fan-wiki, it covered 23 days, which means that Jasper knew Maya for three-and-a-half weeks at most. Now, in real life different people react differently to trauma, and I have no doubt that real people have reacted just as badly as Jasper has to similar circumstances. But the problem is that this isn't real life, this is a TV show, and on the show Jasper is surrounded by people who have experienced things that are at least as bad as what happened to him, and none of them fell apart like he did. Clarke had her father get executed, her best friend murdered, was forced to kill a boyfriend of a few weeks, and watched a girlfriend of a few days die in an accident. Bellamy had his mom get executed and a girlfriend of (presumably) a few months get murdered. Raven received a crippling injury and saw a boyfriend that she had been with for years get killed. Octavia was raised under the floorboards and imprisoned for the crime of being born, had her mother (who made up 50% of everyone she had ever known at that time) executed, had a boyfriend of a few days die in an accident, and watched a boyfriend of ~5 months get murdered. In this very episode, Monty was forced to kill his own mother. So when Jasper complains about how much his life sucks because his girlfriend that he knew for less than a month died to people with lives that are just as if not more sucky but who have not turned into depressed alcoholics, it falls totally flat. As good as it felt to have Raven/ALIE lampshade this during the episode, all that did was call attention to the problem. The worst part is that Jasper's development this season pretty much overrides everything about him that came before. Jasper started out as a dorky comic relief character and by the later part of Season 2 he had developed into a brave and capable leader. But in Season 3, none of that matters. The only things that matter about Jasper now are that he had a girlfriend, she died, and he's sad about it. Oh, and also he and Monty used to be friends. Here's what the first post of this thread, written before the first episode of this season aired, had to say about Jasper: hollylolly posted:
Now that might as well have never happened. I think that S3 Jasper is a symptom of the same thing that caused Bellamy's S3 plot as well as Finn last season and a lot of the stuff that I didn't like about the S2 finale: the writers wanting the show to be as "dark" and "serious" as possible without stopping to ask, "does this make any sense?" and "is this something that anyone would want to watch?" It really feels like this show is trying too hard to be Game of Thrones, or to be more specific the popular image of GoT. Ontari presenting the severed head of a child just offscreen was only the most obvious moment.
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Jul 27, 2016 20:28
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INH5 posted:Jasper was fine in the last few episodes, but now that the focus is back on him grieving over Maya all of the problems have come back to the forefront. The elephant in the room with his storyline this season is that Season 2 didn't take cover all that much time. According to the fan-wiki, it covered 23 days, which means that Jasper knew Maya for three-and-a-half weeks at most. Now, in real life different people react differently to trauma, and I have no doubt that real people have reacted just as badly as Jasper has to similar circumstances. But the problem is that this isn't real life, this is a TV show, and on the show Jasper is surrounded by people who have experienced things that are at least as bad as what happened to him, and none of them fell apart like he did. The real jarring thing is that Jasper is a kid that held it together being exiled to the ground (and taking a spear to the chest in the pilot episode) and didn't crack. All of the other poo poo that happens up until Maya dies, he doesn't crack. But this girl he knew for three weeks dies, and he totally falls apart. It's not really that it comes out of left field or anything, everybody gets the poo poo end of the stick in this show, but then they pick themselves up and go on. Jasper just falls apart and decides 'gently caress it, I'm just gonna be a sad sack forever over this'.
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Jul 27, 2016 20:46
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Raven ALIE dropping the truth bombs was definitely a season highlight. ALIE had ton of thralls, but I guess she sent them out everywhere to search for them. Still doesn't make sense that she would send Monty's mom alone(to the landing site?) and not in pairs or small groups.
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Jul 27, 2016 20:50
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:My favourite argument judo move is to start laying down opinions and declarative statements about a sensitive topic and then finishing with "don't make this a discussion" so that nobody else can disagree with you I didn't want the thread to derail into that lovely territory. I gave my view on why I didn't think it was what was claimed. If they don't agree, fine. I'm not about to discuss it any further because that's a can of worms I don't care enough about to open. Plus I find most people here, myself included, have a set idea on a particular subject and no amount of arguing ever changes their mind. So, what's the point?
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Jul 27, 2016 21:52
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The thing you have to remember with Murphy is he's basically the Gaius Baltar of this show. No matter how bad he screws the pooch, he always ends up falling up. Getting "raped" by a hot woman would be something where he'd look at the 4th wall, shrug, and say "Oh well!" 
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Jul 28, 2016 00:07
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I Own Soulz posted:If they don't agree, fine. I'm not about to discuss it any further because that's a can of worms I don't care enough about to open. I basically agree, which is why I think it's weird to even start detailing your opinions down in the first place. If you don't want to open the can of worms, don't. But anyway, this is a separate thing altogether. Re: guy burning through season 3 I agree that Jaspers arc wasn't too great, but at least it gave Monty a bit more space to grow as a character, which I appreciated.
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Jul 28, 2016 00:09
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Watched episode 12. Half of this episode felt like filler and the other half felt like the pacing problems of the season's early episodes are starting to come back. Positive: The cinematography and direction on this episode was very good. I was not very surprised to learn that the director of this episode (P.J. Pesce) also directed S2E11 Coup de Grace, one of my favorite episodes of Season 2 in significant part because of the excellent cinematography. Toby Levins did a very good job with the material that he had to work with. I like the campfire story at the beginning. I like little bits like this that add some flavor to the world. Very glad to see Emori back, even if she was chipped offscreen. I also love Murphy-as-Cassandra. As someone who took Latin in high school, I got a real kick out of the scene where Sinclair tries to figure out how to properly translate the activation phrase. Negative: Whereas the last 2 episodes felt like a pretty good horror movie, this episode feels like a stupid horror movie, the kind where characters make incredibly dump decisions so that they get caught by the monster, even when someone with more sense is right there telling them not to do the stupid thing. The standout moments are Raven leaving the rover despite Sinclair telling her a thousand times not to and Clarke and Monty following the creepy music right after Monty said that it was a dumb idea to follow the creepy music. How the heck did Emerson know where Harper, Nathan, and Miller were? I guess he just has slasher superpowers now. Why would ALIE completely abandon Arkadia? Again, she has hundreds of thralls. Surely she could afford to leave two or three behind just in case Clarke and co. come back for any number of reasons. Speaking of which, isn't it convenient how Emerson attacked the group just after ALIE abandoned Arkadia? Because if he had showed up earlier and met the techno-zombies, who knows what could have happened. Though that does raise the interesing question of what exactly would have happened to Emerson if he had taken the chip? Would he have forgotten his entire life except maybe a few bits of the last 3 months and ended up like a techno-zombie Jason Bourne? Did the show seriously have Clarke not get knocked out by the knockout gas for absolutely no reason? Why is Lincoln's body still there? Wouldn't they have tossed it in an unmarked grave immediately after shooting him, if for no other reason that they wouldn't want the dead body stinking up Arkadia? I thought that Ontari had some potential as a villain, but then the writers went and made her a complete idiot solely for the sake of plot advancement. She's now a political leader, the role that she has trained for for her entire life, and she surely knows that she will be the constant target of attempts to influence her in all sorts of ways. Not to mention assassination attempts, one of the most popular methods of which is poison. Yet when two complete strangers walk up to her and tell her, "hey, your trusted flamekeeper/concubine is a liar and you should totally swallow this weird glass wafer," she believes them completely and swallows the weird glass wafer? This is like that joke among DnD players that a Bard could use the Glibness spell to walk into a throme room, announce that he is the real king and the guy sitting on the throne is an impostor, and have everyone believe him, except that no in-universe magic is involved and it is supposed to be taken seriously. The way that Ontari ended up chipped felt really forced and contrived, not to mention rushed. It is reminiscent of the pacing problems that plagued the first few episodes of the season. The biggest disappointment, though, is that Emerson was a huge wasted opportunity this season. The last Mountain Man teams up with a faction of Grounders that is bloodthirsty and warlike even by Grounder standards and has someone that could potentially take Lexa's place as Commander. You could do all sorts of cool stuff with that premise. Here are just a few ideas off of the top of my head: 1) Emerson gives the Ice Nation technology, for example by teaching them how to make black powder, primitive firearms, and cannons. 2) Emerson leads the Ice Nation to secret US government bunkers containing caches of who-knows-what, which the Mountain Men knew about all along but could never get to because radiation. 3) Emerson uses his Spec Ops training to help the Ice Nation plan assassinations, terrorist attacks, and other CIA-esque operations in an attempt to undermine Lexa and bring the Sky People and the Grounders into war with each other. (Yes, blowing up Mount Weather was pretty much this, but it was the only time, and they didn't even bother trying to false flag it.) Instead he helps the Ice Nation blow up Mount Weather, becomes a prisoner for Clarke to angst about whether she should execute or banish for an episode, and then comes back for a third episode as a second-rate knockoff of Jigsaw from the Saw movies and dies. Lame.
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Jul 28, 2016 16:44
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Watched Episode 13. Positive: I like the pre-landfall flashbacks. Michael Beach does a great job, and I think that this is a sign Pike could have turned out as a very good character if he had been given better material. It is also cool to see the characters in their Season 1 versions again. I like the first scene with Kane and Abby. In particular, Henry Ian Cusack's acting when Kane realizes that Abby has been chipped is great. Murphy, as always. "Told you I'd survive." Negative: In the past episode, I was worried that the pacing issues of the early episodes were coming back, but this episode feels like it has different pacing issues. Here's what happened this episode: The adventure squad got to Luna's oil rig, Kane got chipped, and Pike was put in a jail cell with Indra and Murphy. At the end the heroes were no closer to reaching their goals, because Luna refused to become the next Commander. It feels like the writers are dragging their feet with the Clarke vs. ALIE plot, especially after the pure filler with Emerson last episode. And this is the part of the season where things should be ramping up. By comparison, at the end of episode 13 of Season 2, Bellamy had infiltrated Mount Weather, (temporarily) freed the 47, and secured the cooperation of several Mount Weather defectors while elsewhere Clarke and Lexa had survived the missile attack and were ready to lead the Grounder army in marching on Mount Weather. By the end of episode 10 of the 13 episode Season 1, The Grounder attack on the dropship had been delayed but not stopped by destroying the bridge while Murphy had started his revenge killing spree. As much as I like the flashbacks, they only make the problem worse. I think the flashbacks would have been better if they had been put earlier in the season to help establish Pike's character, or even spread over multiple episodes. I'm getting even more "wannabe baby Game of Thrones" vibes this episode than usual. Was a drawn out crucifixion scene, complete with close ups of bloody nails being driven through the wood, really necessary? Bellamy's storyline continues to be terrible. No, forgiving yourself is not the most important thing. Way more important is showing even a little bit of remorse for the people that you hurt, above all your sister, who you supposedly dedicated your life to protecting. After your actions got her boyfriend killed and nearly got her killed multiple times, it might help to say something to her other than "If you had just trusted me..." If I hear that this bullshit continues into Season 4, I might not watch it even for Murphy.
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Jul 30, 2016 00:18
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Watched Episode 14 Positive: Murphy. Emori is cool even as a techno-zombie. Indra being badass. The Polis storyline was generally done well. The scene with Monty and CoL!Monty's Mom was pretty cool and original. How many shows have had a character be forced to kill his own mother twice? The oil rig society was kinda interesting from the little that we go to see of it. Negative: So the Luna oil rig plot turns out to be totally pointless filler, just like Emerson two episodes ago. The last episodes of the season are turning out to be just as badly paced as the early episodes of the season, except for opposite reasons. "How did ALIE even know we were here?" "There was a drone at Niylah's. She must have followed us." Um, Bellamy, you shot that drone down. We all saw you do it. And if ALIE was following you, why didn't she attack earlier, say when you were all waiting around on the beach? Once again, we're in the zone where things happen only because the script say so. Harper and Monty? Where did that come from? A week ago, Monty was helping Pike do things like spy on everyone and commit ethnic cleansing while Harper was actively working to overthrow Pike. Yes, Monty eventually turned against Pike, but you'd think that it would take a little more than that before anyone who was on the anti-Pike side from the beginning would want to literally hop into bed with him. Tip to writers: you don't have to flesh out every side character, but you should at least be consistent with the information that you do establish about them. ALIE knows that Sinclair is dead? How is that possible? Emerson remembered his children, so we know he wasn't chipped. Please tell me that this isn't because Jasper got chipped, because that would be 14 different kinds of awful storytelling. ALIE uploading herself to the piece of the Ark that is still in space (called the Gosci ring according to the fan-wiki) would have been a pretty cool twist if it had been set up at all. As is, it just feels like a Diabolus Ex Machina to prevent the good guys from winning at the last minute. Also, the explanation for why ALIE only now has the ability to do this makes very little sense. Why would the Polaris escape pod be able to communicate with the Ark's Gosci ring while Arkadia cannot, when the former was never part of the Ark but the latter was? Finally, doesn't ALIE already have another mainframe back at the mansion across the dead zone? Is she can't connect to it from Polis, how is she able to connect to a severely damaged space station from Polis? Though it's a shame that Mount Weather isn't around anymore. If it was, they'd easily be able to take out Allie's island base and maybe even the Gosci ring using the missile silo.
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Jul 31, 2016 03:35
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INH5 posted:Though it's a shame that Mount Weather isn't around anymore. If it was, they'd easily be able to take out Allie's island base and maybe even the Gosci ring using the missile silo. Losing Mt Weather was the biggest  of the season
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Jul 31, 2016 06:11
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Watched Episode 15. Positive: Murphy. "Clarke's always in trouble." The action scenes were generally well done. Murphy and Bellamy in the elevator in particular was badass. I like the heroes using Mount Weather's gas grenades. You'd think that the first thing that they would have done upon learning that they are fighting against an enemy that they want to avoid killing would have been to stock up on non-lethal weaponry. But it's better late than never. I like seeing King Roan again. I like the scene where ALIE and Jasper try to break Clarke by killing her mother. Eliza did a great job with the acting, and I like that Clarke refused to break after everything that she has been through. I like Nathan and Miller's conversation about building a house on a lake. In fact, I'll say that in general the Polis storyline was good. If the Arkadia stuff had been on par, I would legitimately say that this was the best episode so far this season. The problem is... Negative: The one gripe I have about the Polis storyline is the multiple instances of people that are all linked into a hive mind telling each other stuff that they should all already know, such as, "They're over there, by the wheel!" In my review of episode 5, I said that Bellamy joining Pike in killing the Grounder army was the biggest screw up that the writers had ever done. Now that spot is seriously challenged by Jasper taking the chip. This plot point is so broken on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start. 1). This makes Jasper absolutely irredeemable as a character. Most other characters who chipped themselves weren't aware of all of the effects of it. Those who were aware of the effects generally took the chip in response to ALIE threatening to kill a loved one. Jasper doesn't have these excuses. ALIE wasn't threatening anyone that he cared about. He's seen first hand what the chips do to people over and over again. He knows that if he takes the chip, not only will he lose his cherished memories (more on that later), but that his body and mind will also be used by an insane AI to torture and/or kill his friends. That's not the kind of thing that you can ever walk back. The writers made Finn stupidly aggressive and Bellamy stupidly short-sighted, but they made Jasper either a monster or an insanely selfish dick. If the 100 universe has an afterlife and the people there can see what's going on in the land of the living, I bet that right now Maya is very grateful that she died before she ended up dating this rear end in a top hat. 2). His stated motivation is not torture, but the death of Shay. So Jasper has gone from becoming a depressed alcoholic over a girl he knew for 3 weeks to handing himself over to the Body Snatchers over a girl he knew for less than a day who he was already about to leave forever anyway. I think the term "Fridging" is way overused in fandom circles, but if Shay and Gina don't qualify, then nothing does. 3) How the heck does chipped!Jasper remember Maya and Shay? You could maybe explain the first conversation with Monty by saying that ALIE was feeding him information to keep up appearances, like she did with Jaha when he was asked about Wells. But that excuse only holds up so far. Take the scene where Jasper describes why he took the chip to Monty and Raven. The speech is way too personal to have come from ALIE. Raven could presumably do this kind of thing due to a combination of her "speshulness" and ALIE giving her back her memories in order to torture her into compliance. With Jasper, there isn't even an attempt at an explanation. The writers clearly just wanted this scene to happen, so they broke their established rules in order to bring it about. 4) To the extent that Jasper had a character arc at all this season (the fact that most of the characters seem to just run in circles rather than having a proper arc is a problem with the season in general), it was supposedly in coming to terms with what happened at Mount Weather. He never quite got over it, but there's a clear difference between him in Wanheda parts 1 + 2 and at the end of Nevermore. Taking the chip renders that all totally pointless. 5) This happens offscreen and we're only told about it after the fact. I can understand why the writers would want to do that in order to get the "shocking" moment of revealing that Jasper can see ALIE, but from a characterization standpoint this is pretty much the wosrt possible way to do it. The only way that this could possibly turn out to be less bad than Bellamy joining forces with Pike would be if Jasper dies next episode so we can start pretending that it never happened. Another point on the whole Jasper thing: leaving Jasper to deal with Arkadia by himself is, what, the 3rd or 4th time that ALIE sent a single thrall on an important mission with zero backup despite by this point commanding probably thousands of thralls? Even if more thralls show up next episode, with as much forewarning as ALIE had there is no excuse to not have at least a few dozen thralls waiting outside Arkadia when Clarke and co. arrived there. ALIE really sucks at commanding a zombie hoard. The Arkadia plot is starting to get the same "stupid horror movie" feel that the Emerson episode had. It takes just as much effort to say, "Harper, Jasper's been chipped," as "Harper, do you see Jasper?" so why didn't Monty say the former instead of the latter? Also, why don't they have walkie-talkies? INH5 fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jul 31, 2016 |
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Jul 31, 2016 22:15
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You know, "Death by Clarke" might not be the worst way to go.
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Jul 31, 2016 22:18
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As yes I was hoping to hear your thoughts on Jasper this season. Basically a textbook case of character assassination. At least with Finn in S2 they at least something decent out of it and it made more sense. This season felt was way worse about it with most everyone. Jasper is just icing on the cake.
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Jul 31, 2016 22:27
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Bellamy doing what he did made sense to me, but it needed at least another episode or so building up to breathe and make better sense to the audience and from what I understand even the actor. Show Pike as a man that Bellamy (a tried and true follower ever since his own failed attempt at leadership) would be willing to fall in behind. Jasper, though? No amount of episodes would make him taking the chip make any sense. Not so drat late into the game when he knows what ALIE and Jaha are willing to do. Not after Monty's mum.
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Aug 1, 2016 14:32
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Watched Episode 16. I'm going to post my thoughts on the Season as a whole after I have a bit more time to reflect, but here are my thoughts on the finale as a single episode. Positive: We finally get some proper zombie horde action with all of the chipped people climbing the tower by hand. It reminds me a lot of those Call of Duty Zombie multiplayer modes, especially with the barricades and zombies climbing in through windows. The electricity + water zombie trap was pretty cool, and reminds me of my time playing Bioshock. The Ontari-Clarke nightblood blood transfusion thing. It's silly, but in a fun way. How can you not love Murphy and Abby cutting open a woman's chest to manually pump her heart so a different woman can enter the Matrix and defeat Skynet? I like Octavia killing Pike. Apparently this was forced due to the actor being unavailable for the next season, but I think that for once this made the story better. Negative: Clarke entering the Matrix to save the world could have been good if they had bothered to establish the rules beforehand. A particularly important one would be: if Flame!Lexa stabs someone's CoL avatar to death, what happens to them, and does it matter if their physical body is still alive or not? As is, things pretty much just happen because the script says so, culminating in Clarke just walking into a room with a Kill ALIE switch because Raven. Also, when Becca says that Clarke has "one minute" and "twenty seconds" to pull the kill switch, way more than that time passes before the switch gets pulled. Would it kill someone to just once have a countdown in a movie or TV show match up to the actual onscreen time? Because this really shouldn't be that hard. All you have to do is tell the editor, "make sure that you don't put more than 20 seconds of footage in between Becca saying that Clarke has 20 seconds left and Clarke pulling the lever." So we get to see Jasper taking the chip in the Previously On, but not the actual episode when it happens? Lame. Wait, didn't Raven have to get the back of her neck cut open to fully remove the chip? Why is that not necessary for Abby? "ALIE can hear us." So why, exactly, are you keeping Jasper in the same room where Raven is working on the code, when you have an entire town that you could stash him anywhere in? "Human beings are the only species that act against their own self-interest. We torture each other, we fight, hurt each other, break each other's hearts." Um, Jasper, have you ever watched any nature documentaries? Plenty of non-human animals do all of that and much more to members of their own species. Black widow spiders come to mind in the "break each other's hearts" category. The heroes made a big deal out of not wanting to kill the zombies, but when ALIE was shut down, shouldn't everyone climbing the tower at the time have almost certainly fallen to their death anyway? Also, they said that they prevented the zombies from accessing most of the balconies by greasing them, and I have a hard time imagining any way that could work that would not involve zombies falling to their death. And if they were willing to make the zombies fall to their death, then I don't see why they didn't try things like dropping things on the zombies as they climbed up. On the other hand, if they really did want to not kill the zombies, then was the gas grenade that Murphy and Bellamy used in the elevator the only one that they brought? Because those things would have been really, really useful during the final battle. Jasper gets dechipped and all of his friends act like he was tortured or threatened into taking it instead of taking it voluntarily knowing full well that ALIE would almost certainly make him do things like stab Monty with a screwdriver. I've also heard that Jasper was going to kill himself at the end of the episode (this was recently officially confirmed by the cast and JRoth himself at a convention), but that got edited out before the episode aired. If that had happened, I honestly wouldn't have cared, because like I said I have no sympathy for Jasper after the whole chip thing. Now that it hasn't happened, I honestly have no idea what the writers are going to do with the character next season and all I can really say about it is that the way the scene just cuts away from Jasper feels weird. Speaking of weird scene endings, the end of the episode felt really abrupt. Octavia kills Pike and walks away, we get a shot of Clarke and Bellamy, then back to Octavia walking away, and then credits. This is probably a result of the above mentioned changes in editing. I bet that the original plan was for the episode to end with Jasper killing himself, probably with something like Jasper picking up a gun, then a cut to Monty and friends hearing a gunshot, then credits. But now that the episode's intended ending got cut, it just kind of stops. Again, I'm not sure what they should have done, but all I can say now is that the final moments of the episode feel weird. And then there's the big one, the nuclear plant thing. There are so many problems with this. 1) This is very poorly done. No setup, no foreshadowing, it's just thrown in 10 minutes from the end of the season. Whereas both the Mountain Men and the City of Light were mentioned well before the Season 1 and Season 2 finales. Heck, IIRC the City of Light was first mentioned in episode 4 of Season 2. Some people have tried to claim that the sick grounders from earlier in the Season count as foreshadowing, but sorry, that isn't good enough. 2) ALIE claims that the threat is from a dozen "at risk" nuclear plants. I'm pretty sure there are more than 12 nuclear plants in the world right now (Google says that there are 444 electricity generating nuclear reactors operating right now, but some plants have multiple reactors), let alone 40 years from now. So way more plants than that must have been destroyed when the bombs fell 97 years ago. The fallout from all of those destroyed plants plus the fallout from the bombs didn't wipe out all life on Earth, so why would 12 burning plants do that now, after all surviving humans (unless there's another Mount Weather style bunker somewhere that we don't know about) have gained high levels of radiation resistance from evolution or genetic engineering? I'm not asking for realism here, just for internal consistency, and this doesn't fit at all with what has been previously established. 3) On top of that, we're supposed to believe that these nuclear plants were just fine for 97 years, and then 7 of them all happened to start burning a few months after people started coming down from the Ark in large numbers? That's unbelievably convenient timing. 4) This is all happening because ALIE dropped the bombs 97 years ago. Her stated goal in doing this was to solve overpopulation by reducing but not eliminating the human population. Yet we're told that this long-term consequence of the bombing will wipe out humanity. So did the superintelligent AI just not foresee that this would happen? Or did she predict that a willing servant would literally fall from the sky with a nuke that could be turned into a portable power source and allow her to start putting people in the City of Light right as the nukepocalypse was starting to get going? Because if the landfall of the 100 had been delayed by even a few months - say, if Finn and Raven had been caught before they took their unauthorized spacewalk that wasted 3 months worth of air - then ALIE would have been chip out of luck. The Computer from Paranoia has better planning skills than this! This feels like a compromise at the end of a late-night brainstorming session that started a day before the 3x16 script was due when somebody in the writer's room said, "Hey, we ended both of our previous season finales with the arrival of some new threat. Maybe we should do that again this time." INH5 fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 17:41
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Now that it has actually been confirmed by the writers, the whole aborted Jasper suicide thing has retroactively become hilarious to me because A. they were so obviously character-assassinating him to make it easier to swallow when they killed him off, and then B. they couldn't actually follow through with it, so now they have to live with what they made him. I am 99% sure that Jasper's survival was editorial fiat; the CW smacking Jason Rothenberg's hand away from the murder button because he pissed off too many people already. There's a picture on twitter of a board in the writers' room that has character notes arranged under portraits of all the actors, which have their names and the characters they play. Devon/Jasper's portrait is slightly crooked and printed in a different font from all the others, as though the original was at some point ripped off and thrown in the garbage because they thought they were done with it, and they had to hastily print another one and slap it back on there because someone didn't die when he was supposed to. Again.
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Aug 2, 2016 03:42
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Spergatory posted:There's a picture on twitter of a board in the writers' room that has character notes arranged under portraits of all the actors, which have their names and the characters they play. Devon/Jasper's portrait is slightly crooked and printed in a different font from all the others, as though the original was at some point ripped off and thrown in the garbage because they thought they were done with it, and they had to hastily print another one and slap it back on there because someone didn't die when he was supposed to. Again. Link, please?
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Aug 2, 2016 15:46
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INH5 posted:Link, please? I don't have the link to the original tweet, but here's a screenshot of it. https://66.media.tumblr.com/376dbd23b116c5b9a350467047e897ee/tumblr_o9c7peCKye1vq82lto1_1280.png
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Aug 2, 2016 16:21
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Spergatory posted:I don't have the link to the original tweet, but here's a screenshot of it. That is hilarious. ---- The more I think about it, the dumber the Big Twist of the Season 3 finale seems. Either ALIE is an idiot for not realizing that this would happen if she dropped the bombs, or she's an idiot for waiting until the very last minute to fix a problem that she created herself, or she's an idiot for putting herself into a position where the only way she could accomplish her goals would be if someone literally fell from the sky with a nuclear warhead and landed near her island base before the 98 year deadline. But that's only the biggest hole. The second biggest hole is probably: why did ALIE care about overpopulation when her plan would render 96% of Earth uninhabitable within a century anyway, with humans surviving only in a virtual world where overpopulation presumably wouldn't be a concern (or least least would be much less of a concern)? There isn't a single problem caused by overpopulation that ALIE's "solution" didn't make far far worse. I really think this is only a few steps above Mass Effect 3's Big Twist that the Reapers' plan is to create synthetics that kill organics in order to prevent the organics from creating synthetics that will kill them.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:17
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I mean ALIE may be an AI, but she isn't all knowing. She still had to learn from Jaha. It's possible that she was just really shortsighted in her "nuke everyone" plan. Didn't the nukes launch like seconds after she went online / got connected? Either way, everyone will be dead in 6 months 
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Aug 2, 2016 22:39
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:I mean ALIE may be an AI, but she isn't all knowing. She still had to learn from Jaha. It's possible that she was just really shortsighted in her "nuke everyone" plan. Didn't the nukes launch like seconds after she went online / got connected? She had to learn about human behavior and psychology from Jaha. The Nukepocalypse is something that presumably could be predicted simply by looking at how a nuclear power plant is designed and calculating the effects that nuking the world would have on any plants that aren't destroyed in the initial blasts. And if ALIE couldn't predict this back then, when she had access to the entire internet and did enough research to figure out how to nuke the world, then how can she calculate how much time they have left now when she only has access to whatever information is stored on the mainframes that she runs on, what her thralls know, and what her drones can see? At the very least, you'd think that this would be something that Clarke and Becca could throw in ALIE's face. "Did you know that this would happen? If you do, then you suck at planning and we shouldn't pay attention to anything that you say. If you didn't, then how can we trust your predictions that the City of Light will work out long-term, or that there's no way to stop the nukepocalypse, or that the nukepocalypse will even happen, or anything else? If you missed this, then who knows what you're missing now." INH5 fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 23:10
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Honestly, the main thing that pisses me off about this season is how wasted the entire hive-mind aspect of ALIE was. The City of Light should've been a more terrifying threat than any zombie apocalypse. City-dwellers were not decaying corpses-- they were perfectly healthy humans incapable of feeling pain. They could run, walk, climb, use weapons, and were functionally immune to any assault that did not in some way physically stop their body from functioning. They weren't mindless-- they had full access to their own thoughts and, through ALIE, the thoughts of others. They could be ingenious, they could be creative, they could individually and collectively think through problems. They weren't mindlessly searching for food-- they had an artificial intelligence commanding and coordinating them en masse to accomplish specific goals. Their every collective action should have looked like a Starcraft game being micromanaged by the mightiest of Koreans. It probably would have been hell to coordinate and choreograph, but it would've looked amazing on film to see hundreds of people actually moving and acting as one entity. Plus, you probably could've CGed most of them anyway.
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Aug 3, 2016 15:32
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Yeah, that's a really good point. The only times that ALIE seemed anywhere close to the threat that she should be were when Jasper fled Arkadia in the Rover while being chased by seemingly the entire population of the camp, and the time in the finale when the heroes take out the stairwells and ladders to the top of the Polis tower, and ALIE's thralls respond by going, "welp, I guess we're just gonna have to climb up the outside of the tower by hand." I think that the real mistake may have been having ALIE take over too many people too early. The show clearly didn't have the budget for more than a few scenes of super techno-zombie horde action a season, so it probably would have been better to just not give ALIE the power to do that until near the finale, and keep her manpower relatively small until then. But that's not the only example of wasted potential this season. I've mentioned before that Emerson could have been a huge, potentially game-changing threat. If, for example, he knew how to make black powder and was willing to teach that to the Ice Nation (and why wouldn't he be willing to do that?), that would give the Ice Nation's armies a big advantage over those of the other clans. If he knew the locations of bunkers like the supply depot where the kids found their guns in Season 1, then depending on what those bunkers contain that alone might make him a threat to the entire regional power structure. But no, he's a plot device to destroy Mount Weather in his first appearance, something for Clarke to angst over in his second appearance, and a horror movie monster in his third and final appearance. You also see this with individual characters. Remember when Octavia took out those 2 Mount Weather guards in the S2 finale and everyone was talking about how she was going to be a total badass in S3? How did that turn out? Well, she took out a few mooks here and there, but she didn't really do that much fighting, and when she did she seemed to lose as often as she won, including one time losing to a middle-aged woman. Being a Reaper must have been super-traumatic for Lincoln, so I wonder how he'll deal with that going forward...except it is never mentioned at all in Season 3, not even when Lincoln returns to Mount Weather. And I've already gone over how Bellamy and Jasper were mishandled this season.
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Aug 3, 2016 17:38
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So I've been rewatching Season 1, and did you know that during the last 2 episodes of the Season, Jasper believed that Monty, his best friend since childhood, was probably dead? Monty got nabbed by the Mountain Men in episode 11, and it wasn't until Jasper also got taken to Mount Weather 3 days later that he found out that Monty was alive. He also spent much of that time believing that Finn and Clarke were probably dead too. And the entire time, Jasper didn't seem to have any trouble keeping his poo poo together at all. Which makes his reaction to Maya's death in Season 3 even more ridiculous. INH5 fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 19:48
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I like to think Jasper's meltdown in S3 had as much or more to do with him axe murdering people to keep Arkers alive/try and escape as much as the Maya thing, but alas they never touch on it. It would have made his mindset make a little more sense, imo. Not enough to excuse everything he did in S3, but more sensible than just 'my gf of a week or so melted in my arms'-- which, tbf, would be pretty traumatic whether he wanted to bone her or not.
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Aug 3, 2016 20:02
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I feel like they did a good job of making it clear that actually, while Maya was the main focus of his grief the trauma came much more from seeing all of the Mountain Men die, their civilisation, their kids, etc.
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Aug 3, 2016 20:37
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PriorMarcus posted:I feel like they did a good job of making it clear that actually, while Maya was the main focus of his grief the trauma came much more from seeing all of the Mountain Men die, their civilisation, their kids, etc. Maya gets way more mentions in S3 than the rest of the dead Mountain Men, though. For example, when Clarke apologizes to Jasper in 3x11, she says "I never wanted to hurt Maya" (which is a little hard to believe) without ever bringing up any of the other people of Mount Weather that died at the same time. Even Lee, the defector guard who helped Bellamy destroy the acid fog and then Jasper try to assassinate Cage and died on Level 5 when it was irradiated, never gets mentioned at all in Season 3. Also, how many other Mountain People did Jasper actually know? IIRC, the one that he had the most interaction with besides Maya was Dante, who at the end was totally fine with letting Cage murder Jasper's friends. Oh, and another problem with this argument is that during the early episodes of Season 2, Jasper believed that his own civilization had been wiped out, because the Mountain Men had lied to him and told him that no one from the Ark had made it to Earth. Yet during those episodes he seemed happier than he was at any other time in the series before or since. ("But the Ark threw him in prison and then sent him to Earth to die." Yeah, and Mount Weather tried to murder him for his bone marrow.)
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Aug 3, 2016 21:54
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