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VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Wish the title had gone with the Genghis Clarke kill count, personally.

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VagueRant
May 24, 2012
My hope for the show is that the Curse Of The 3rd Season doesn't hit it and ruin the show like it did Community, Nikita and Arrow before it. :smith:

EDIT: and Burn Notice.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I know you guys seemed to all enjoy the Wild Ride, but I still think the show would a lot better off if they'd left Jaha dead after season 1. Him drinking fancy liquor and watching earth through a window was a nice little sendoff to the character.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Reminder that this scene was hard-loving-core:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs__QQc2rr4

Most shows that have two pretty ladies fight, it might be kinda sexual, their clothes would get strategically ripped, their makeup would stay perfect, etc. But The 100? No. They are CAKED in mud and dirt, blood running down ears and into their hair, into their TEETH as they brain each other with rocks, stab at each other and headbutt and just...drat. Even when Clarke gets the advantage and just rains punches down on the side of her head and they both just look super hosed up. It's properly brutal.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
What was this line that referenced Raven's engineer buddy? I missed it. (I also totally blanked on the Miller thing too.)
  • Anyway, I was so happy to see Raven again when she slid out of the car and the crew singing along together in the jeep, with Octavia on a horse was totes adorable. It's nice to have a moment like that to remind me that I basically like all of those characters right now.
  • I also was kind of digging the timeskip if only because the reveal of Arkadia with actual farms and poo poo was REALLY good to see - it has always bugged me that they never had crops.
  • I really liked the moment where Bellamy does his usual "screw protocol" thing, but tells Monty to make the call because it's his people. I like likable characters!
  • So I guess Clarke's full on lesbian/bi now? The pussy-eating scene having cheesy electric guitar like a '90s skinemax movie was A Bit Weird. The other panther kill was rad at least.
  • Other people have said it in the thread but "My back's not big enough." Hah! drat.
  • Cliffhanger wasn't much and I'm still not into the Jaha's Wild Ride feat. Murphy. Although I am curious to see what AI Lady is up to, what with saying she used the missile as a power source...
Overall, the ep was only okay, but it wasn't the shitshow I was worried season 3 was going to be. So fingers crossssssssed for the future.

Also feel like you guys need to remember that Jasper is a teenager, Maya was almost certainly his first love and that she was loving adorable and super nice and you all are terrible people for not being sadder when she died. Especially when she died (arguably unnecessarily) at the hands of someone Jasper was spent the entirety of last season counting on, as a friend. :smith:

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
https://twitter.com/ClaryGriffin/status/691091383629824000

EDIT: oh hey, I guess Twitter links embed now, so my description below is completely unnecessary.

Remember how Maya, the sweet sad girl from Mt Weather was listening to her ipod in her Hazmat suit when Clarke snuck up on her with a shard of glass last season? Now remember what Jasper had in his ears during the jeep ride this episode. :smith:

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I remember thinking that was when the show got watchable, but I wasn't hooked until they were really having a real conflict with the grounders, down to prisoner torture and plague wafare. That's when poo poo started to get REALLY morally ambiguous. Charlotte throwing herself off the cliff was an easy out, and the show doesn't really do those any more.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

muscles like this? posted:

Ricky Whittle (Lincoln) has been cast as Shadow in the American Gods TV series.
Really? I honest-to-god just finished that book today. That is super trippy.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Small thing, but kinda irks me how the grounders stopped putting poison on their blades/arrows, and stopped using biological warfare. Like, you'd think the Arkers would be super loving hesitant about bringing Lincoln's wounded pal in after The Murphy Problem.

Sad to see Lexa again, she still has zero screen presence. Wish Indra was the Commander. Also Clarke's actress did a great job right up until the screaming as she was dragged out? Did that not sound super forced and bad to anyone else? The ugly spit and the "you want the queen of death?!" part was all good, but yeah. And the skyscraper that somehow no one has noticed...

Still hate the Jaha plotline and everyone in it.

But negatives aside: Monty's mum and Pike are Interesting. The Mt Weather drama seems promising. Clarke's constant attempts to escape Charles Vane were badass. And Bellamy and Kane are still Good. (Though shooting the Bounty Hunter guy seemed weirdly extreme. Maybe it was intentionally a questionable thing to do, but it seemed like the writers just didn't think about it and needed an easy end to that scene.)

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

seaborgium posted:

I just figured that the poisoned arrows/blades were more for when you knew you were about to get in a fight. Even if you have the antidote, you probably don't want poisoned arrows and blades just hanging around yourself. Plus, a lot of poisons degrade when exposed to open air, so if you just left it on there it would be wasted unless you used it fairly soon.
That sounds logical. I dunno, I just like the texture it gave the world that grounders would regularly do that, to the point where Lincoln carried a selection of antidotes on him. Adds a little extra threat and a little extra general concern. Like when Clarke stabbed Charles Vane, or when he stabbed Bellamy.

Antifreeze Head posted:

I saw it as an eye-for-and-eye thing. He couldn't stab Clarke where she stabbed him, but he sure could stab this guy up just showed up who she obviously cared about.
Oh, I didn't mean Charles Vane/Roan/GuyFromShameless. Him stabbing Bellamy was super logical.

I meant the unnamed bounty hunter who was beating up Clarke's merchant lover lady and threatening to cut off her hand. And the Skykru guys just come in and straight up murder him. He wasn't a good guy, but he hadn't actually killed anyone yet, and wasn't about to murder this woman and they didn't even give him a warning or anything. Dialogue made it clear they missed the beginning of that conversation so how do they know he wasn't in the right? It just felt oddly throwaway for a show that sometimes tries to ascribe value to lives and weight to deaths.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I'm just glad the chill guy in charge of computers didn't get stabbed. I've always liked that dude and when he was chasing that Letho looking motherfucker, I totally thought he was going to bite it. Glad Raven was there to save the day, but MAN ALIVE that fight scene was horrendously edited/shot.

It's a shame to see Mt Weather and its one hallway go though. Seemed like there was some good potential there, but I guess it would've unbalanced the war in a big way. The easily-activated, one minute self destruct was a bit cartoony though. Why would that one random guard even have that code?

No Jaha/Murphy this ep, and it was way better for it!

Sober posted:

Also that was pretty crappy in an otherwise good episode, felt like the show intentionally wanted to do a take on a particular Red Wedding stabbing given how it was choreographed.
Hah, I thought the same thing. It was suitably brutal and nasty though kind of inefficient. Shame they didn't do more with her as a character, anyway.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

DarkCrawler posted:

Bellamy should just take Pike in the back and shoot him in the head, he's going to gently caress something up at some point
OH! Most hosed up part of the episode. There are some totally reasonable grounder guards who are technically on the protagonists' side but they have to be MURDERED because they're in the way? It makes sense for Pike, but for Bellamy to condone/do it?

Could've just come out and been like "yo, we got info for your boss".

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Yeah, kind of a disappointing ep. It really did feel like they'd skipped an ep in-between. I didn't mind that we missed weeks of scheming and got right to the inevitable coup attempt at the start, but the stuff with Pike and the election was crazy rushed. I get that they struggle to show us much of the Arkers for budget reasons (they seem spread very thin at the moment), but it really seems like they could've done a lot more.

Good parts:
- Clarke's attempt to poison Ice Queen was pretty rad.
- The spear throw was a solid move.
- Jasper expressed his feelings.
- I like Lincoln.
- Still no Jaha.

Extra bad parts:
- "What about Raven?" Uh, yeah, seriously. Where was she? She better not have voted for Pike.
- The Commander still has ZERO presence and acts in every scene like she's wandered onto the set and is hoping no one notices. I will never understand the people who praise that actress.
- The 300 style slow-down-speed-up, silly twirling weapons fight in the extremely low-budget arena. The show used to have some really cool, BRUTAL fights - see Clarke v Anya. This was like He-Man or some poo poo. Sidenote: the second the Commander was within grabbing distance of someone that much stronger than her, she'd have been dead.
- if Charles Vane is allowed to punch a guy and take a spear into the fight, could an Arker not have just handed the Commander a pistol and let her go all Indiana Jones on him?
- "my first act as chancellor is that there are no more elections and i am chancellor forever and also you have to give me all your toys"

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Snak, I appreciate your effortposts.

But Bellamy's arc still bugs me. Because the way he went from bad boy stereotype to actual steadfast cool dude/leader/one of the best characters in season 2 was a big deal. Even at the start of this season he seemed like a responsible sergeant type back in the jeep scene. And now he's just being a big dumbdumb and it's sad.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Kane telling Bellamy "Wake up!" was confirmation that he is the best and most sensible character.

I get what they're going for with Pike and it is interesting, the point Snak made about the way advanced empires treat indigenous peoples...But I still think they've mishandled Pike and his setup and the election SO MUCH that it's an all-round failure as a story. He definitely needed more build up, to show his way, his influence, his motivations. Even the constant references to "the election" in this ep as if it was an event instead of a mention by Kane in one line at the end of the previous episode...

But in terms of great potential being missed, this is Finn all over again. Especially when Bellamy is Finn 2.0 right now, down to the massacre of innocent people.

Snak posted:

I'm thinking that the "compromise" will be to extract and execute Pike and his followers rather than massacring the whole Skaikru. Here the idea would be "it's foolish to slaughter your would-be allies out of misplaced revenge." I'm hoping the lesson Clarke is trying to teach Lexa is that "Seal Team Six is better than Hiroshima". As it stands now, the grounder way is "Blood must have blood", which means they kill every man, woman, and child in Arkadia. Clarke has shown she doesn't have a problem with killing people who need to go, she just doesn't want genocide.
I super want this to be the case, because that would write them out of this ridiculous hole they have dug, but I don't think this is the case at all.

I mean, there's something especially galling after we've seen how hard Clarke and everyone have worked for peace and then when they get it, Pike loving ruins everything and with Bellamy's help no less, after all Clarke and he had been through. (I did for the most part like the scene where he yells at her over Mt Weather and she breaks down a little.)

Clarke's whole "give peace a chance" thing rings real loving hollow when the obvious answer to that is "we did! and it didn't work!" I mean is Lexa supposed to let it go as Pike wipes out villages to secure his perimeter? But yeah, the Arkers did indeed vote for this and they deserve to be burned to the ground for their stupidity.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Yeah, but again, he got one little recappy speech about things that happened offscreen, and suddenly everyone in the camp is rallying behind him.

Also since he wants a safe, self-sustaining camp, he probably should've worked on that BEFORE waging war on the people who were actually assisting with security. That was a pretty stupid decision, even if he didn't trust them.

And remember that from the grounder's perspectives, the Arkers have been doing lovely things to them since the beginning too.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

Spergatory posted:

EDIT: Also, as a side note, what's with all the shirtless Murphy all of a sudden? I mean, I get that it's a CW show and Boys Will Be Naked, but this isn't like a Bellamy or Lincoln situation where there is a precedent for stripping. Murphy didn't take his clothes off once in the first two seasons and now he's getting naked in like every episode. He's not even that jacked. :colbert: I mean, he's not bad, but when you're on a show with loving Ricky Whittle and his ridiculous eight-pack abs and biceps the size of a child's entire head, it's hard to compete.
A little off topic, but people kept saying Ricky was too small to be Shadow in American Gods and it's breaking my brain.

I feel like comic books and video games have massively distorted people's perception of muscles and their scale.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

zoux posted:

Pike is what happens if Trump wins.
Nah, Jaha is the Trump. He's unpredictable, he's inconsistent, he's crazy and he thinks he's basically Jesus.

Kane is probably Sanders. He's been consistently right about stuff, but ineffectual.

Is...is Abbie Hilary? She does seem to flip-flop a lot.

Pike might be this guy.

Clarke is Oppenheimer.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I really liked Octavia for the first of this episode. Scouting the Pikemen, saving the kid, warning the village, "Couldn't have spoken up before I got kicked in the face? *spits blood*" But then she gets knocked out by an old man and just starts getting tugged along by the tide of plot convenience...

I still feel like the show isn't treating the outright murder with the severity it deserves. It's absolutely Finn all over again. But I mean what Pike and his soldiers did was on or near the scale of Mt Weather, right? Bellamy is completely irredeemable to me, and it sucks, because he was one of my favourite characters in season 2. Now he's a complete villain who deserves to die and I'm not even sure WHY he's being like this.

Kane and Abby is a better potential relationship than any other in the show. The actors have good chemistry. But I still feel like Kane deserves someone better. Abby kinda sucks. He is maybe the only remaining sensible person in the show.

Speaking of formerly sensible characters, as a big Raven fan, seeing her all culty like this is too creepy! :smith:

Emerson doesn't feel like a real, consistent character. With all his dramatic screaming and grinning, he just feels like a sockpuppet of the writers to give Clarke some manufactured drama. Titus is much better. His respectful sitdown chat with Clarke where he made reasonable points was a more powerful scene than all Emerson's yelling. But then they kinda hosed that up by having him torture Murphy just to show what an Evil Bad Guy he is.

And goddamn, you goons nailed the prediction that the 13th Colony was going to come back in a big way!

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Cool, so now these genocidal assholes are going to be up in arms "ARGH the grounders murdered one of our own I told you they were all savages ARGHH" when they were only there in the first place because they were going to literally massacre the village.

What I'm saying is Octavia should have let the whole strike team die.
Agreed!

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

I will say, Lexa's actress is actually doing a decent job in this episode. It's weird.
She still feels super out of place to me. There's all these tough-rear end barbarians and when she steps up to command them it still feels like she walked in from the set of Gossip Girl or some poo poo.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

Snak posted:

They aren't treating it as murder because they literally don't consider grounders to be people. Literally. Not like figuratively or subconsciously.
I mean even Clarke and Kane and co. aren't treating it seriously enough.

WarLocke posted:

... So are we supposed to think that the 'night blood' stuff is actually the AI 2.0 suspended in blood? And perhaps the 'First Commander' was this Becky that went into space to get away from ALIE?

Because holy drat that last scene. :catstare:
I forget where I've seen this mentioned, but it seemed like Becky (BECKIE?) or whatever is the name of the second AI, equivalent to ALIE.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Other big question is what should Clarke have done with Emerson?

I think she should have refused the revenge, but the grounders should've swiftly executed him for his part in working against the Commander.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I didn't connect the poison smoke with the toxic sap thing either, for what it's worth.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Alycia Debnam-Carey (Lexa) stepped up her acting game in that one scene with Titus, I thought. She definitely works better with actual emotion, because her attempts at stoicism always came off as bored to me.

Speaking of Titus, I liked him for a while there. He got a rad fight scene with Murphy and he'd made a good political opponent for Clarke. But then of course, he has to be a gun wielding psycho. (Although they did at least seem to characterise him as reluctant, I like that he didn't even point the gun at Clarke until he was going to shoot her - that made him more threatening than if he ran in barrel everywhere)

Lexa getting shot was a strong story beat and fits The 100's style at it's best. I have to admit I laughed though, almost annoyed I didn't see it coming. They give her a good acting scene, and she resolves her relationships with both Titus and Clarke, they finally hit peak shippitude aaaaaaaaaaand she gets accidentally tragically shot. OF COURSE!

Despite the plot point working, her loooooooong death scene with sobbing Clarke and lots of tearful goodbyes and sad music swells felt ultra cheesy and fanservicey. Maybe the cheesiest thing they've ever done? Felt like I was watching some PG13 generic fantasy movie.

And those little tentacles on the computer chip are the creepiest loving thing in the entire show. (I liked the Commander reveal on the spacesuit though. Thought that was clever. Wonder if that was long-planned...)

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
We've still got Miller and his boyfriend, right?

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Troposphere isn't the worst kind of shitposter, but the endless stream of them is tiresome. Especially if you "only watched the show for Lexa" and Lexa is gone now...? Sorry, I know we shouldn't post about posting.

Lycus posted:

If this is true, this is the worst I've heard of a showrunner having a poo poo relationship with his actors since the Dan Harmon/Chevy Chase thing.
Ah, come on, that was two guys that openly respected each other's work but had a personality clash in part because the actor wouldn't turn up to set. The feud was bizarrely exaggerated by The Internet. And for as much of a mess as Dan Harmon, Chevy was worse. He didn't actually start getting cut out of episodes until the next set of showrunners!

Anyway, I always thought The 100 showrunner was quite well liked. I'm really kinda surprised about all this. I'm guessing the Ricky drama is related to the spoilers he allegedly posted, so I shouldn't look too much into this?

Oh, and points about the actual episode:
  • Kane is still the best character, I loved how peaceable his plan was. And I'm furious he didn't have it in him to see it through and plow that truck straight through Bellamy's genocidal face.
  • Raven. :smith:
  • Sinclair gets more screentime! He is sensible! Yay!
  • Monty sucks now.
  • I kind of wish Pike had been taken out and then Monty's evil mum took over as the new tyrant.
  • literally had to stick Maya's name on the ipod so we knew.
  • Is this the first Clarke-less episode? That's super weird!
  • EDIT: and where the hell was Abby?!

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

Dalael posted:

And what about my concerns about white male being killed in drove as if it was nothing? When will we get justice? :argh:
I advocate that no one should ever die in any show because no matter how you look at it, it will include a trope and will hurt someone's feelings.
In fact, television should be nothing but teletubbies from now on.
That's a really silly argument to make. It's a reasonable point that it bothers people when they lose representation on TV. Now it's unreasonable to start twitter campaigns to fire people and send death threats over it - but to conflate the antics of a few crazy people with people just having an opinion and simply feeling what they feel? That's wrong.

I know "privelege" has become an annoying internet buzzword, but the point of it is that a straight white male has never even had to THINK about their representation in the media. If you're not, you're basically constantly reminded of being a (relative) minority. So again, there's nothing unreasonable with being a bit disappointed that they happened to kill off The Gay One.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
But you understand that when they kill off someone who is already under-represented, it's kinda worse? It's not like even Genghis Clarke is running dry the supplies of brown-haired white guys on TV.

There's sort of two trains of thought I have about this kind of thing. The 100 as a piece of storytelling should be able to exist in a vacuum and they should be able to write the story they want without worrying about being ambassadorial for the unrepresented at that particular point in society*. But on the other hand, it is cool when shows DO take that challenge on, and it's still valid for someone to feel let down when they don't.

On the other OTHER hand, I always thought Lexa was a dumb poo poo character and was horribly miscast, and that plotline couldn't have really gone anywhere interesting. So it trips me out that people care so much. Basically: Clarke x ShopLady foreva. She was badass, and didn't give Clarke up to that bounty hunter dude! :D

*of course the other end of the spectrum is the weirdly tone deaf things like The Walking Dead season 3 where they killed off the only black male character and introduced another to replace him, then did it again, and then did it a third time leading the fans to the Black Highlander theory. No one's saying that those showrunners are actively racist, but they are hilariously dumb. TV is weird!

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I did find it a bit of a tough sell that the big swing for Bellamy wasn't the slaughtering hundreds of sleeping allies in their beds, but that Father Figure #1 was going to be executed.

Again, there's just no redemption for him in my eyes and it sucks. I liked him so much in season 2.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

Troposphere posted:

http://variety.com/2016/tv/opinion/the-100-lexa-jason-rothenberg-1201729110/

really good article about the lexa situation

also the same author grilled the gently caress out of jroth about how much pike sucks and it's hilarious

http://variety.com/2016/tv/features/the-100-bellamy-betrayal-chancellor-pike-grounders-1201697285/
The first article rambles for paragraph after paragraph without getting to any point whatsoever and just reminds you how blown out of proportion this all is. Though it does eventually offer a decent explanation for why the scene bothered people so much.

Second article was actually pretty interesting when it got to the interview.

quote:

I think, in a way that justifies somebody like Pike being anti-Grounder and not seeing the differences between the clans and not recognizing [complicated relationships among clans]. Ice Nation is aggressively violent and war has cut his population of people down from 180 to 60 in three months. He’s just been losing people. To me, that made sense. A guy comes out of that crucible and he’s just there to survive today.

I guess there’s an intellectual logic to that description, but these are all things that happened off-screen. It’s hard to care, because I have not seen any of that.

You haven’t seen his experience.

Right. I can sit here and say that Clarke has killed hundreds of people and that she’s a mass murderer. But the reason I feel for her when she tells her mother “I tried” — the reason I have a lot of conflicting emotions in that moment is because I saw how hard it was for her to do all those things in Season 2.

Of course, yeah.

What she went through — those things are not abstractions to me. I understand what Pike went through but, on some level, just being told all this in exposition — it turns all of that into a thought experiment. It has no real impact on me.

That’s fair, for sure. [Farm Station survivors] were living their own story when we didn’t even know they were on the ground for the last season, really. What I was trying to create with Pike was — I’m not going to use the political figures that [we know in real life] by name in terms of the type of story we’re telling with when Mount Weather [is destroyed]. When it blows up in episode three, when Ice Nation destroys Mount Weather, that’s sort of a catalyzing event. That’s a definitive, culturally politically shifting event.

It’s their 9/11, and if you remember here after 9/11, that’s what happened. Suddenly intelligent people lost their minds. Suddenly every Muslim was the enemy. I’ve been told not to talk about it in these terms, by the way. But that was something that I found fascinating and an interesting subject matter for science fiction to get into, in a way that you can in science fiction without being too preachy.
I can see what he was going for and it IS interesting. But yeah, the execution is all over the place botched.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
So uh just to talk about the actual episode instead of posting about posters posting about posts for a second...

Lincoln's execution honestly just confused me. Why bother bringing them outside if you're just going to shoot them in the head in front of six guards? Why couldn't they do that in that hallway? I mean, there's cleanup either way. I did think that outside of the overall downturn of the show and social media controversies, Lincoln's final lines were pretty classy and I genuinely felt for Octavia, before he made his inevitable sacrifice and after.

Also: Titus's death was pretty fuckin' rad.

But I think the show is in a bit of a nosedive right now. Despite the deaths, it feels like there are too many people in the cast and they're way too disparate. This feels like the first time we've seen Abby in months, and I have no idea where Raven, Jaha and Jasper are at. Then you've got Bellamy's characterisation being ALL OVER THE PLACE.

My other issue is that it just feels like the show drags in a lot of parts. It's really hard to put this into words, or explain quite why, that's the nature of the intangible "watchability" of a show. But it's unengaging and not...easy to watch I guess? Maybe it's because I've been bingewatching the show Banshee which for all it's problems you can just fly through episode after episode - there's a great pace and scenes lead into scenes, and it keeps you on the couch.

Whereas in The 100, there's just something about the way when Murphy and Clarke trundle into the "hole that leads out of Polis" set only to have Charles Vane turn up and deliver his "next time i see you we won't be friends" line with all the conviction and passion of a man ordering takeout, and Murphy visibly sags with the inevitability of their plotline and spells out "we're not leaving, are we?" - I'm just very aware that I'm sitting (bored) through a TV show, not looking through a window into another world.

sorry that was complete rambling nonsense, please resume complaining about twitter or whatever

VagueRant fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 3, 2016

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I care. I would actually like it if people didn't shitpost in here.

FRINGE posted:

A lot of the threads are potentially converging.

Bellamy is the thing that bothered me the most, but at this point I just see him as a sadbrain PTSD kid who fell in with a comfortable authority figure and is trying to dig his way back out again.
There's a lot of bluster about wiping out the other side in both plots, but I think there hasn't been any plotline crossover since Pike's massacre.

And it's one thing for Bellamy to vote for Pike, but for him to actually go out and help butcher about a hundred sleeping allies (except spare Indra because "my sister!") really broke the character in a Finn-esque way where I just want him dead now.

Astroman posted:

You're right about the disparate elements. There are a lot of moving parts and the writers can't seem to manage them all. There's the plot of the Pike vs Kane in Arcadia, Clarke and Murphy's court intrigues in Bartertown (including Lexa, Ice Nation, etc and all the politics), Arcadia vs Grounders, the Team Octavia plot to act as go betweens, Jaha's City of Light Cult, and the whole overarching plot of AI vs AI from 80 years ago. As a result, whole episodes go by where we don't even see major characters and they don't touch on certain plotlines. Contrast this to a heavily serialized show like BSG, where there were sometimes A, B, and C plots but everything flowed much better.

If there's any criticism of Rothenberg to be made it's probably this. The writers need an editor. Or perhaps someone to manage them. Or, say, Run the Show...
It only just occurred to me the weird way they had the early season Grounder politics be about a Leader trying to crush the pro-war Conspirators secretly-to-openly scheming against her, and now in Arkadia it's about the Conspirators scheming against their pro-war Leader. If these had run concurrently it might have made for a nice parallell, (maybe have Pike and Lexa have some similarities, even?) but it just seems like lazy writing to me now...Is that fair to say?

enraged_camel posted:

In front of everyone... you mean the six or so guards that were there? Because no one else in Arcadia saw it. They did it outside the gates, rather than in the public square (which is where you'd expect an execution like this to take place).
Yeah, when the camera panned around them, I was really expecting a crowd shot, but no. It looked like the same handful of guards that had all three of the executionees on their knees in that corridor ten minutes ago.

EDIT:

Troposphere posted:

I'm talking about television not writing my doctorate thesis, BabyFur Denny
You're not doing that though. I'm fine with you actually posting about the show, but you replying to every single person replying to you is at best annoying trolling and at worst pure awful self-centred forum-addicted gooniness.

double edit: literally your last TEN posts were not related to the show.

Rhyno posted:

Exactly. I'm sure she has plenty of valid things to add to the discussion but I'm pretty much blowing her off as a tumblr warrior because of her inability to post like an adult.
Then put on ignore, or don't reply maybe?

VagueRant fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Apr 3, 2016

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Definitely a lot more moving pieces to get our interest in this episode, some plot crossover at last, but...it still felt kinda weak. It was watchable but not amazing. Between the eye-gouging and the aggresive sexuality, the new Commander lady feels like someone's self-insert Game Of Thrones fanfiction character. Bellamy's redemption arc is hosed because he basically committed genocide and I will never care about him again. Isaiah Washington continues his streak as the worst actor on the show. (Okay, that's probably an exaggeration, but I do find him very dull and unlikeable and desperately wish they'd left him for dead in season 1)

On the other hand, every scene with Raven was basically amazing. I don't know what it is about Lindsey Morgan but I ALWAYS find myself feeling for that character. Every time she cries, it makes me want to cry. Eliza Taylor has done some fantastic acting in this show and totally sells Clarke as a character, but there's always been something more relatable with Raven...

I really just want this to be the Raven and Kane show.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
Holy poo poo, that was actually Lindsey Morgan (Raven) doing the voice when she was possessed by ALIE? I totally assumed they dubbed it and she just nailed the physical mannerisms.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

raditts posted:

It sounded dubbed to me.

DarkCrawler posted:

Dubbed, but the acting was still awesome
I could've sworn it was dubbed too, but the actresses on twitter seem to be implying otherwise...

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:

That poo poo with Raven was horrifying :stonk: Alie taunting everyone was loving hilarious. Dropping some serious truth bombs.
I liked what was being said, but I thought the reactions were terrible writing. The better, subtle way to play it would be to have the characters suffer it in silence, let the actors react on their faces. Instead we got "SHUT UP! YOUR SUPER OBVIOUS PLAN TO GET UNDER OUR SKIN IS TOTALLY WORKING!"

I felt like Eliza Taylor's (Clarke) acting was real disappointing, and I guess I have to blame the writing because she was loving amazing in season 2. Her freakouts at RavenALIE and with the "It's LEXA!" moment just rang real hollow for me.

CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:

Octavia laying the verbal smackdown on Bellamy was nice. Please die horribly Bellamy.
Yes! When he was like "they could've attacked us at any time!" uh what the gently caress anyone could attack you at any time, you don't loving kill them

CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:

You too Jasper. No one cares about your whiny poo poo and the girlfriend you knew for like a week.
What? No! Maya was so nice! And now that he's actually back to doing things, Jasper's been basically one of the best characters. (Alongside Raven, Sinclair and Kane)

pahuyuth posted:

Lindsey Morgan (Raven) is just a beast of an actress, goddamn. She just kills it every time.
Absolutely! Have we figured out if that's officially her doing the ALIE voice yet? It didn't sound dubbed this episode.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012

MMM Whatchya Say posted:

Seeing Monty make the impossible choice was cool especially after seeing people take the easier choice earlier in the season.
I was like "oh just shoot her in the arm or the leg or something, you don't need to dramatically kill her, this is so convolute- OH there's no pain in the city of light! Oh, Monty, noooo!"

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I legit didn't notice them until she was captured by Mt Weather at the end of season 1 and they put her in a white tank top and it was like woah.

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I stopped paying attention midway through and thought for a moment that the body Octavia was crying over was Bellamy's - that he'd somehow died before anyone else in the airlock - and then I was super disappointed when the camera cut to his stupid gormless face.

VagueRant posted:

And now that he's actually back to doing things, Jasper's been basically one of the best characters. (Alongside Raven, Sinclair and Kane)
:smith:

MMM Whatchya Say posted:

Wow we're really going to keep this one going eh?
I know we shouldn't bring up titgate again, but I did think it was funny that in the episode RIGHT AFTER the thread had a hugfest over Clarke's boobs (and how hidden they usually are) she was suddenly dropping cleavage.

Rocksicles posted:

I find it hilarious that after all these scores of people she'd murked or killed by force of will, she can't loving fight. Like at all.
Eh, she knocked Anya out with a rock to the temple and she put up a good fight against Roan. But I think it totally makes sense that even though she's got sick-rear end survival instincts and probably knows her way around a blade, that she'd be overpowered by a huge dude with actual training. Show would be a lot less interesting if she was an all around badass Mary Sue type.

Monicro posted:

At the risk of kicking up another social justice argument, man what's happened to Octavia this season? She went from

To being laid out by like every character, it's bullshit :colbert:
Sadly, that was pretty much the first and only time she ever got to be a badass. (Although it still REALLY annoys me that she throws the machete through body armour. As if throwing it wasn't bad enough.)

VagueRant
May 24, 2012
So there was a way bigger dip after episode 3?

I think the lesson here is less about pissing off social-media-website-of-choice and more that ratings usually degrade over a season, moreso when the show has been outright dull and the scheduling has been erratic.

Reckon you'd see a similar dip for The Flash this season, though much higher on the scale.

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VagueRant
May 24, 2012
I was bored by the episode. It all felt very by-the-numbers. The scene where they find the location on the map, but it's not what they were after and they're all distraught, but wait, there is a convenient clue that lets them carry the plot along. Masked dudes come out of the water pointing weapons but capture the crew so quickly that it's really obvious they're not a threat and are just taking them where they need to go. Then the Kane-chip scene was exactly the same as when they made Abby take the chip, so why even show us it?

And gently caress knows what's going on with Pike at this point, honestly.

Also: Radioactive is a good song (if terribly on the nose for it's use in the pilot) and this version was a...curious choice. I kinda liked it, but the way they faded out and back in for the Kane scene was real awkward.

jfood posted:

Murphy is clutch, as always.
Why did he look so much more punchable in the flashbacks? Is it just because his face was clean?

Was trippy seeing Kane without the beard.

Johnny Truant posted:

I predict next ep starts with him spitting out the chip? Idk I feel they already did the "take the chip cause you're under duress" thing with Abby, you know?
ALIE would instantly know if he hadn't swallowed the chip though. He wouldn't be linked to the hivemind. So that would be real bullshit.

Spergatory posted:

loving loved it when Octavia fainted the actual second after Jasper drank the goo. Like it gave him just enough time to regret every single decision he had ever made in his life before he zonked out.
His resigned "aw, crap" was the best moment in the ep.

raditts posted:

Yeah, they say it all the time. It sounds pretty goofy to me personally.
I thought it was fine when they were actually on the Ark, but it's increasingly more stupid the longer they've been on earth.

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