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A few weeks ago, I binged through the first 2 seasons on Netflix. I was impressed by how much the show improved after the first few episodes, and generally liked in. However, I really didn't like the Season 2 finale, to the point where it pretty much killed my interest in most parts of the show besides the Murphy and Jaha plot, for reasons that I don't want to get into. So I decided to wait until Season 3 ended up on Netflix and I could watch it without paying per episode, but then a few days ago I got impatient and started watching Season 3 on Amazon Instant. I just finished episode 4. There are some things that I like about the Season so far. Murphy is still awesome, I like Emori, and crazy messiah Jaha is still fun to watch. I don't like the direction that Jasper's character went in this season, but him getting drunk and fooling around with Finn's ashes was a nice bit of dark comedy. I really like the visual design of Polis. But the problems are obvious. Am I imagining things, or did this show really, in the space of 4 episodes: Introduce, set up as the Big Bad, and kill off the Ice Nation queen? Have the Arkers wary of even supply runs to Mount Weather, then deciding to turn it into a hospital, then moving Farm Station survivors into it, and finally having Mount Weather get blown to smithereens (this one in 3 episodes)? Have Clarke go from living alone in the woods, to a prisoner in Polis, to reuniting with her Mom in Polis, to becoming ambassador for Skaikru even though she hasn't spoken to any of them in three months? Introduce the Farm Station survivors and then have their leader become dictator of Skaikru. Oh, and have Bellamy decide that he wants to follow them in killing a bunch of allied grounders because...a completely different group of grounders killed his girlfriend? I had heard that Season 3 of this show had pacing issues, but there are some things that you have to see for yourself to believe. This is starting to remind me of the third season of Heroes. What happened to this show? It has had some significant writing missteps before ("Radioactive" during the PIlot, the Finn massacre arc), but for the most part the plotting and pacing was good to excellent throughout the first 2 seasons. Does this issue get better, at all, later in the season?
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Jul 21, 2016 17:59
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Pixelante posted:What's the in-show time-line of this stuff? I mean, we've got ark kids becoming fluent in the local dialect in what... months? According to the fan-wiki, the kids getting sent down to Murphy getting let out of the Lighthouse was about 5 months. Though that timeline also has most of Season 3 taking place in February, in and around what was the District of Columbia, raising the question of why it never snowed. Maybe global warming turned out to be even more severe than current predictions?
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Jul 22, 2016 01:43
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Just watched episode 5. On the positive side: The pacing seems to be getting smoother, with no sudden changes in the plot this time. Very glad to see Murphy again, and it is awesome to see him getting a girlfriend and becoming a con man. The Jaha plot looks like it has potential (though it is still too early to judge). Raven's actress did a phenomenal job at selling her scenes. On the negative: I have one gripe with the Jaha plot: do people really implant the City of Light chips by eating them? That is so dumb. I'll suspend my disbelief and accept that ALIE has magic nanotech that allows the chips to survive digestion and "reconstitute in the brain." I'll even accept the implantation happening ludicrously fast for something that supposedly goes through the digestive tract. But why would ALIE want to do it this way in the first place? It would be so much easier to simply have people place it on their neck or somewhere else close to the brain, then have tendrils or whatever burrow in and connect that way. The only conceivable reason I can see for making the chips digestible would be if she wanted Jaha to hide them in drinks or food and get people to ingest them unknowingly, but the chips supposedly have to be taken voluntarily due to ALIE's core command or something. The worst part is that there was absolutely no reason for this. Nothing about the plot would change if the chips were implanted in a sensible way. The only thing that would be lost is the imagery of eating the chips like communion wafers, but that seems like a really weak reason to do something like this. On a much more significant negative note, whoever wrote this episode desperately tried to justify Bellamy's actions, but there is just no way to square the circle. Bellamy has plenty of reasons to dislike Grounders in general and Trikru in particular, but he has absolutely no reason to think that massacring an army that is allied with them, providing them with protection, and has shown absolutely no sign of even thinking about betraying them would accomplish anything. Especially when his sister, who we have been told ad nauseam is more important to him than anyone or anything else, pretty much is a Grounder now and would almost certainly be at risk in any war between Skaikru and Grounders in general. At this point, the only way that Bellamy's character can be at all redeemed would be if the writers either start pretending that this never happened or reveal that he was under some kind of mind control. This is Finn all over again, except 10 times worse and the character is too popular to kill so we'll be stuck with him as long as the series continues. This is hands down the biggest screw up that the writers of this show have ever done. The Grounder political plotline is quickly approaching similar levels of dumbness. "Are you saying that my subjects will defy me?" Yes, Lexa, because any leader of at least a few hundred people faces constant threats to their power from those who are one rung below them, and it has been that way since before the human race existed. For someone who recently only barely managed to not get overthrown by the Ice Queen, you'd think that Lexa would be aware of this.
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Jul 22, 2016 05:58
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:Yea the chips have to be ingested voluntarily. It's a bit silly but it does fit with the whole Jaha preacher angle. If that was what the creators were really after, it seems like it would be pretty easy to do some kind of baptism imagery with the chips getting attached to the neck or whatever. Even something like "the chips need to be immersed in water to successfully attach to you, so put the chip in the bucket and then dunk your head in" would be much easier to buy than people literally eating them. But this is ultimately a minor point. CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:Bellamy is a bad man and yes the show tries to redeem him. It's real dumb. I am so not looking forward to watching this, but thanks for warning me ahead of time. INH5 fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jul 22, 2016 |
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Jul 22, 2016 06:20
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Yeah, I have no problem with the voluntary requirement. I just think that the creators could have thought a bit more about what they wanted the visuals of people chipping themselves to look like and how it would come across onscreen.
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Jul 22, 2016 06:36
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Rocksicles posted:Bellamy is a loving dickhead, who tends towards doing the right thing. But he hates being told what to do, and he's terrible decision maker. But he's super brave and is either ten toes in or violently opposed. He hates being told what to do except when Pike tells him to do something mindbogglingly stupid that could easily get his sister (his responsibility) killed. VagueRant posted:INH5, what was your beef with the season 2 finale? That was maybe the peak of the show to me. The short version is that it felt like the writers were dead set on having a "dark" and "serious" ending where the protagonists are forced to kill a bunch of innocent people including children, and bent everything in the story to that outcome without stopping to think if the end result was compelling, watchable, or even just made any kind of sense. A lot of events pretty much only happen because the script says so: Right when the Grounders are about to pull open the blast door and storm Mount Weather, Lexa suddenly walks onscreen and says that despite the 10 zillion repetitions of "blood must have blood" in previous episodes, she made a deal with the Mountain Men because reasons (yes, I know about the behind the scenes issues with the machine gun scene that couldn't be filmed due to budget/network censor issues, but that doesn't change what ended up onscreen). The Mountain Men somehow capture a bunch of adult Arkers offscreen, including Kane who was last seen being taken to Camp Jaha in a stretcher with a massive leg injury and is now able to stand and walk just fine (even for a show that has always played fast and loose with wound healing times, this is ridiculous), for literally no reason except to make the marrow extraction scenes a bit more dramatic. The Mountain Men leave their control room completely operational and totally unguarded when they know there are saboteurs in the bunker, because the writers couldn't be bothered to come up with some clever way for Clarke and co. to gain access to Level 5's cameras and life support. Not only Cage but also Dante, who has been built up throughout the season as the pragmatic and non-cartoonishly evil Wallace, is now totally unreasonable and unwilling to negotiate even when the enemy has a gun to the collective heads of his entire civilization. No one brings up other possibilities like getting on the PA system and telling the people of Mount Weather that they will all die if they don't stop Cage (before you start giving me reasons why that wouldn't work, my problem isn't that alternative options aren't available, it is that the characters don't talk about possible alternatives). I don't have a problem with the general idea of Clarke and Bellamy being forced to irradiate Mount Weather, but the execution felt really forced and contrived, and like the script could have used another draft or two. Then there's Maya, where the writing quality goes from "sloppy" to "total nonsense." We've been shown over and over again that Mount Weather hazmat suits can be used for many hours as long as they haven't been damaged or deliberately given insufficient air. We see ground teams in hazmat suits capturing the 48 at the dropship 20 miles from Mount Weather, walking to just outside Camp Jaha (later stated to be an 8 hour walk), following Clarke and Anya through the woods for hours, etc. When Clarke drains Emerson's air tank, we get a close up of the dial that seems to show that one air tank can hold enough air to last for 12 hours. Yet for no reason at all, Maya runs out of air after maybe 2 hours if we're very generous despite having at least 2 air tanks with her (Jasper says that they just changed the tank when the 30 minute warning starts beeping). Maya, Jasper, and Octavia head down to Level 5, where all of the spare oxygen is, to "help Maya," and when they get there they immediately forget the reason that they came down there in the first place. They get in contact with a defector guard who has a high enough security clearance to smuggle an assassin with a knife into the same room as the President, and no one thinks to ask him to bring them some canned air so that Maya can put her hazmat suit back on and go somewhere that isn't filled with people who will kill her on sight. Jasper gives Maya a gun before he leaves to go after Cage, but the gun disappears between scenes so that when a couple stumbles into Maya and Octavia's hiding place they can't point the gun at them and tell them to get up against the wall and stay quiet. It is almost hilarious the lengths that the writers went to to kill off this character when they could have easily just had her get shot by a random security guard. But the worst part is that the script cheats this much only to achieve a pretty mediocre result. Apart from a few standout moments (Octavia being badass, Lincoln killing Cage, all of the scenes with Murphy but especially him finding the Lighthouse), most of the episode fell flat for me. The dialogue is unengaging for the most part, the marrow extraction scenes end up as pretty much just tiresome torture porn, and the final decision scene that is supposed to be the climax of the entire season is devoid of tension. The tone is deliberately as grim and depressing as possible to the point where I started to wonder why I was even watching it. Contrast this with the Season 1 finale. Everything involved in the final battle was set up in previous episodes: the kids, the Grounders, their weapons (guns, pipe bombs, and land mines vs. spears and bows), the Reapers, the dropship's engines, the damage to the dropship courtesy of Murphy that means that it has to be repaired before it can blast off, and so on. Everything that happened during the finale was the culmination of these established elements and plotlines. Even the Mountain Men had been foreshadowed. You didn't have Anya suddenly deciding that she doesn't want to kill the Sky People after all, or Murphy ending up back in the camp offscreen with only a brief handwave as to why or how, or when the kids are in the dropship at the end some last-minute contrivance coming up that forces a character to go outside and die. I'm sure that you can poke holes in the story if you look hard enough, but for the most part it all holds together and delivers some tense and exciting action, good character moments, and one of the best season ending cliffhangers I've seen in years. Most of the Season 2 finale felt like a big drop in quality, and when I took a look at what the third season was about it sounded like it had a lot of the stuff that I didn't like about the former. That's why it took me so long to get to Season 3 when I binged through the first 2 seasons in a week and a half. VagueRant posted:I thought the Jaha/Murphy stuff was the least interesting part of that season. (And yet the most unintentionally hilarious.) I think that most of the comedy in that plotline was intentional. Murphy repeatedly points out how idiotic the whole quest is, and Jaha's continued insistence that this is all part of their destiny in the face of increasingly absurd obstacles reminds me of Pangloss in Candide. Even the minefield scene seems to have been at least partially played for dark comedy ("A shower would be nice right about now. Wash off the rest of Harris."). I think the main reasons that I liked the way the Jaha/Murphy plotline ended more than the end of the Mount Weather plot are: 1) it felt like a story where the characters drove the plot, instead of the plot jerking the characters around like puppets; and 2) the tone was something other than unrelenting grimdarkness, in large part because by the end of the second season Murphy seems to be the only one in the cast who still has a sense of humor. INH5 fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Jul 23, 2016 |
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Jul 22, 2016 23:52
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Fat Shat Sings posted:The whole five months from landfall to end of Season 3 makes a ton of things hilarious in retrospect. To be fair, Octavia knew exactly two people for the entirety of her pre-landfall life, and one of them got shot out of an airlock. Oh, and a slight correction: it is five months from landfall to the beginning of Season 3, after the 3 month time skip. The fan-wiki doesn't have a detailed timeline for Season 3, but I think it is about another month.
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Jul 23, 2016 04:06
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Cocks Cable posted:Man, living in one small room and only ever interacting with 2 people for all of your existence is really bizarrely trippy when you think about it. Octavia should be far far less adjusted than she is portrayed. Yeah, it is weird to think about. Octavia's very early childhood wouldn't be all that different from many normal children, so she wouldn't end up like a feral child (IE not being able to talk), but the further you go past that, the more questions come up. I don't know if there are any equivalent real life cases off of the top of my head. I'm sure that there have been people who had little social interaction outside their family in childhood (IE isolated farmers in places like Appalachia), but even they got to go outside once in a while.
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Jul 23, 2016 05:42
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Watched Episode 6. Positive: Pacing continues to improve. This felt much more like a Season 1 or 2 episode in terms of plotting. While the Pike plot as a whole still isn't working for me, I like Octavia's scenes in this episode. While the timeline for the development of Trigadesleng is implausible, I like how it is constructed close enough to English that you can sometimes sort of understand it. I giggled when Octavia saying something like "I na no bash you up" was subtitled as "I mean you no harm." The Jaha/ALIE plot is alright, I guess. Interesting twist that to paraphrase Abby, the chip takes away more than just pain. I like the callback to Season 1's mention of the 13th station, though the hints of what this is going to lead to aren't very inspiring to me so far. I'm not that big a fan of Lexa, but Clarke drawing her was a cute little moment. Negative: Now Monty is going along with Pike's bullshit too. Is the goal of the writers to end the season with as few sympathetic regulars as possible? Arkadia needing to take Grounder land to feed itself might have been an interesting plot if it had been set up at all at any point earlier in the show. The thing about them needing it now that they don't have "Mount Weather's resources" raises a whole bunch of questions. Yeah, Mount Weather had hydroponic farms, but everyone who worked those farms is dead, and we know that the Arkers didn't move in and start working them. Were they just eating stored food from Mount Weather? If so, then why didn't they move all or at least most of the food to Arkadia months ago? Wouldn't that have been the very first priority for supply runs? I don't normally ask questions like this, but if the show wants to make Arkadia's food supply a plot point, it should have a few answers ready. Also on this subject: Monty's never eaten corn? The corn seeds must have come from either the Ark or Mount Weather, and he has eaten at both of those places, so that seems highly improbable. This is a minor point, but I think it is a sign of how sloppy the writers are being with their worldbuilding. Again, if the writers don't want to pay attention to these kinds of details, they shouldn't be doing a plot like this. I've heard that Emerson only survived the Season 2 finale because they didn't have the budget to film the scene where he was scripted to die. It shows. I really get the sense that the writers have no idea what to do with the character. It doesn't help that we learned basically nothing about him in Season 2, but the stuff in this episode doesn't do much to improve it. Also, are we supposed to believe that Emerson hasn't changed his clothes in 3 months? Speaking of which, the writing is not doing a very good job of selling the "blood must not have blood" thing. I think that the Grounder politics in general is handicapped by the rushed pacing in the first episodes not leaving enough time to properly establish the setting and characters. The fact that the show still has to split time between Arkadia and Polis just makes it worse. Season 2 handled this sort of split much better by putting most of the outside plot in the early episodes and most of the Mount Weather plot in the later episodes. Polis = Polaris with the "ar" missing? Come on, that doesn't even begin to make sense. At most you might end up with "Pol is," but there is no way that anyone will think it is one word when it has that big space in the middle.
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Jul 23, 2016 07:59
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Watched episode 7. There's a lot to talk about in this episode. Let's get the big stuff out of the way first. First, the Polaris backstory: I like the concept, there are some interesting ideas here, and I liked seeing the flashbacks to the apocalypse. However, there are some serious issues with the execution. I think the biggest problem is that the Cargo Cult thing is getting pushed way too hard. This goes beyond the general issue of there not being enough time for Grounder culture to develop. Even if we mentally add a few centuries to the timeline, there is no way that people who have access to artifacts of the modern world would not know what an infinity symbol is. Sure, maybe the average illiterate peasant wouldn't recognize it, but an educated person like Tidus should absolutely know what it means, just like educated people today (or for that matter, educated people during the Middle Ages) know what Greek letters and Roman Numerals mean. In fact, there is speculation that John Wallis, the English mathematician who coined the infinity symbol in 1655, based it off of a variant of the Roman Numeral for 1,000 (CIƆ or CƆ). The same goes for turning the escape pod into some kind of altar. I can buy the Grounders not understanding what the AI chip is, because that was implied to be ultra cutting edge tech even during Becca's time, but forgetting what the escape pod is makes no sense on all sorts of levels, again going beyond the general timeline issues. 1). Even the simplest societies have oral history, and "the ancients built houses in the sky and sent people to the moon" is exactly the sort of thing that sticks around in mythology. 2). It was repeatedly demonstrated during Season One that the Ark could be seen from the ground with the naked eye. It is a little hard to forget something like this when you have a visual reminder every night. 3). It was stated in Season 2 by Lincoln that people coming down to Earth from the Ark in escape pods to commit "suicide by Earth" was a semi-regular occurrence. If the star that zips across the sky multiple times every night doesn't remind you that space stations exist, then surely a person falling from the sky in a metal pod will. 4). Even we ignore all of the above, it is now 5 months after hundreds of people came down from the sky in spectacular fashion and started interacting with the Grounders, often in hostile ways. At this point, even the poorest and least educated peasant within 200 miles should be well aware that space stations are/were a thing. In general, I think the show is pushing the idea of Grounders as noble ignorant savages too far. A while back, I visited the Casa Grande museum in Arizona and watched a video presentation that included descendants of the Ancestral Sonorran Desert People that built the structure telling tribal legends about how it was built and how it came to be abandoned. This is a people that was totally illiterate until a few centuries ago and has lived through two civilizational collapses (the first in the early 1400s for reasons that aren't totally clear but seem to have involved floods that severely damaged their canal system, the second a hundred years later due to the introduction of European diseases) followed by centuries of colonization by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans, and yet 600 years later they still know a few things about their own history. People don't forget all that easily. Second, Lexa. I knew that this was coming because I heard about the controversy months before I started watching the show. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, there were behind the scenes issues with the actress and the death does advance the plot significantly. On the other hand, the way it happened does seem pretty lame and like it was written more for shock value than for anything else. Lexa is a warrior who regularly goes into battle and a political leader during a very turbulent time where she is at constant risk of being assassinated, and the best death that the writers could come up with was getting accidentally shot? That, and having it happen right after the love scene seems incredibly manipulative. I was never much of a fan of Lexa, but I definitely understand why people who were really didn't like this. More general comments: Murphy is awesome, even when he is being tortured. I like Octavia's scene with Indra, but Octavia bouncing back and forth between identifying as Skaikru and identifying as a Grounder is really starting to get old. INH5 fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jul 24, 2016 |
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Jul 23, 2016 22:24
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Sober posted:For instance, a friend of mine actually met Bob Morley and even he was confused with what he had to do this season and just had to do the best he could to have it make sense when he was on scene. Like yeah, even the actors are kinda not digging it. Between this and the time earlier this year when Ricky Whittle accused Jason Rothenburg of a whole bunch of awful things and exactly zero members of the cast or crew came forward to defend Jason, I get the feeling that we'll learn about some really horrific/hilarious stuff after the show ends and enough time passes for the people involved to be comfortable talking about it. On a semi-related note, I recently came across a tumblr post by a writer on The 100 that talks about a major change in the writing process that took place in Season 3. Kim Shumway's Tumblr posted:"Hi. I was wondering how you adapted from working with an episode outline on the former seasons to now going directly to the script. Which way do you feel most comfortable with and how has that changed your approach?" (emphasis added) This explains so much.
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Jul 24, 2016 07:33
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The thing is, while you can come up with explanations for why Mount Weather was a big deal for Jasper, the real problem is the type and magnitude of the reaction. If Jasper's primary motivation was anger at his friends over a perceived betrayal, for example, why would he become suicidal? There's also the fact that, regardless of whatever theories we make up, the show repeatedly and explicitly tells us that Jasper is acting this way as a reaction to Maya's death. Period. Less than 30 seconds after we first see Jasper in Season 3, Monty flat-out says "Maya's death broke him." I think the most ironic thing about this is that if Maya had survived the S2 finale, it actually would have been much more plausible to have a character be really broken up by what happened at Mount Weather. Because I'd say that "I watched 90% of everyone that I had ever met get melted by people that I had repeatedly risked my life to help" beats even "I was raised under the floorboards and then thrown in jail for being born" in the Tragic Backstory Contest. INH5 fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 03:53
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Spergatory posted:I was rewatching Season 1 recently. Does anyone remember those goddamn flashback lens flares? Seriously, in almost every ARK flashback, there are constant screen-eating lens flares for no goddamn reason. It's really distracting. Most of the time there isn't even a visible light source. It's like whoever was editing that day discovered a lens flare setting on AfterEffects and wanted to show everyone the cool new trick he found. Yeah, that was really bad, and I'm glad that they stopped with that. ---- My thoughts on Season 3 as a whole: This isn't the worst TV show season that I've ever seen, but it is a significant step down in quality from the first 2 seasons. I'll start with the good stuff, and there were good things about the season. Most of the cast did a great job wtih the material that they had to work with. Eliza Taylor did a good job with some very intense scenes this season. Isaiah Washington was great as a megalomaniacal villain who honestly thought that he was doing the right thing. Michael Beach managed to elevate Pike's lackluster material into compelling scenes at times, and really shined when he was given a decent script to work with. Richard Harmon continued to impress, making Murphy likeable and fun to watch without ever seeming OOC or inconsistent with his portrayal in earlier seasons. But the real standout is Lindsey Morgan. She faced enormous challenges as an actress this season. She effectively had to play 3 different characters: normal Raven, chipped Raven, and ALIE directly controlling Raven's body. Lindsey did a phenomenal job with each of these roles and knocked all of her scenes out of the park. She deserves to end up with an Emmy someday. There are good moments throughout the season. Most of the action scenes are well done and exciting. I like the car singing scene in the first episode (and I love the detail of Raven hanging Finn's pendant above the dashboard). This show has always done caper plots well, and the schemes to overthrow Pike and destroy Jaha's backpack are no exception. Raven pointing out everyone's bullshit in 2x11 was a real treat. Most of Murphy's scenes were good. But there are also serious problems. The biggest issues are with the plotting. Like I've said in my episode reactions, the pacing is out of wack. Normally in a serialized TV show, a season will start off relatively slow and then speed up as it continues. This season does the opposite. The early episodes burn through plot points at a frantic pace, then during the middle episodes it slows down to a reasonable clip, then during the later episodes the plot starts dragging its feet as much as possible, padding out the runtime with filler, pointless detours, and false victories. All sorts of problems are created by this. During the early episodes things change so rapidly that the viewer isn't able to get aquainted with the characters and setting, and there isn't enough time to develop character motivations and establish plot points. The late episodes, meanwhile, are a chore to watch, as the characters run around in circles trying and failing to stop the Big Bad, only to have an attempt finally succeed when it comes time for the finale. There are other problems with the plot. Way too much of the story is driven by events that only happen because the script says so. Pike gets elected Chancellor offscreen, because the script says so. This somehow makes him dictator, even though previous Seasons have shown that the Chancellor's power is checked by the rest of the Council, because that's what is written in the script. Arkadia is in danger of running out of food in a year and then in a week because the script says so. Ontari turns against Murphy and accepts the chip after a brief conversation with two complete strangers because the script says so. Jasper takes the chip offscreen because the script says so. These problems spill over into the characters. I've already spilled plenty of ink on how Bellamy and Jasper were mishandled this season, so I won't repeat myself. But I honestly think that among the regulars, only Raven and Murphy had genuinely good stories this season. Clarke runs around in the wilderness for an episode, then gets captured and brought to Polis, then inexplicably becomes Skaikru ambassador, then does a bunch of political stuff which is rendered totally pointless when Ontari becomes Commander, then comes around to save the day at the end. Monty joins Pike's army for no onscreen reason, then defects because he doesn't like going against his friends, then kills his Mom twice, and after that does basically nothing except help stop chip!Jasper and randomly hook up with Harper, none of which adds up to any kind of coherent character arc. Abby and Kane have some good moments scattered throughout the Season, but most of the time have very little to do. Lincoln sits around Arkadia doing almost nothing for 9 episodes before being executed for basically no reason. Octavia has some good stuff in the middle of the Season when she is trying to warn the Grounders about Pike, but once Lincoln dies, she becomes just another angry and grieving 100 character. Which ties into another problem with this season: the tone. One of the things that I most disliked about the S2 finale was the relentlessly GRIMDARK and depressing tone outside of the Jaha and Murphy scenes, and this continued into Season 3. The number of massacre and torture scenes is increased to the point where they all start to blur together and lose all impact. By the end, virtually everyone is emotionally broken, an rear end in a top hat, or both (including Murphy, who stands above the rest by being a likeable rear end in a top hat). I can't recall a single time anyone other than Murphy made a joke. Even the cinematography and color grading are tweaked to make everything look drab and grayish, a stark contrast to the vibrant color pallette of Season 1 and most of Season 2 (after rewatching the early Season 2 episodes, I finally figured out a major reason why the "Knocking on Heaven's Door" scene in the S2 finale felt "off" to me: it is much more desaturated than the Camp Jaha scenes of previous episodes). I recently rewatched Season 1, and it honestly feels like a completely different and much better show (after the first 2 episodes, of course). It is more character driven, the plotting is tighter, and there is much less reliance on contrivances to drive the story forward. Sudden new elements, like the acid fog, tend to complicate the existing plot rather than creating a new one. There is also a much broader tonal range. Season 1 has some really dark stuff like a 12 year old girl killing Wells and then herself, but it also has Jasper's Anti-Grounder Stick and Monty barging into Finn and Raven's tent while high to rant about the moon and tides. Unity Day, is a good candidate for the darkest episode of Season 1. It includes a terrorist bombing that kills children, the Grounder/100 peace talks failing spectacularly, and ends with the implied death of everyone on the Ark. But that episode also has a scene where the entire cast gets drunk on Monty's moonshine and plays Quarters. I think these lighter moments are important. Not only are they enjoyable in their own right, but they make the darker and tragic moments that much more powerful. Death and destruction have no emotional impact if the viewers have no reason to care about the characters and/or the world. If everything sucks, everyone is a jerk, and things only get continually worse as time goes on, then why should I care about any of these people? The question I keep asking myself is, "what happened to this show?" You can blame some issues on Behind the Scenes messiness like Alycia Debnam-Carey only being available for a few episodes and backstage drama resulting in Lincoln getting killed off early, but the problems run deeper than that. Looking at IMDB, there were some significant shake-ups in the staff going into Season 3. Bruce Miller was co-executive producer for the entirety of the first 2 seasons, and Lina Patel was a staff writer for the entirety of Season 2, but they both left after Season 2. But on the other hand, it is clear that these problems didn't suddenly pop into existence at the start of Season 3. Finn in Season 2 had similar characterization problems to Bellamy and other characters in Season 3, though they weren't quite as bad, and I'd argue that the Mount Weather parts of the S2 finale are as poorly plotted as any S3 episode, in addition to the aforementioned tonal issues. We'll probably only find out exactly what happened long after the series finale airs.
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Aug 7, 2016 20:06
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Zebulon posted:They had a large dropship/HLV or something like that suitable for the job, but it got destroyed in the rebellion when the rebelling group tried to steal it to go to the surface and leave the rest to die. Breaking the station was a last resort after that happened. There were other dropships too (we see like 8 or so separating from the GoSci ring when Jaha's looking at a computer animation of "Project Exodus", plus they repeatedly refer to it as the "first dropship" in dialogue before everything goes to hell), but presumably the docking structures were so damaged by the ship's improper separation procedure that they were rendered unusable. jfood posted:They had batteries of escape pods just waiting to take people to the surface. All they had to do was remove the nuclear warhead and they had themselves some sweet little lifeboats. I agree that it was ridiculous that in 97 years, nobody thought about using the nuclear missiles as shuttles until Jaha came up with it in like one hour when he got desperate. Also that no one thought about the possibility of using the Ark Stations as dropships, even as a last ditch emergency plan, until Jaha had his ephiphany moment. Seriously, what the hell has the Ark's engineering department been doing all of this time?
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Dec 5, 2016 17:50
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I have to say that I'm underwhelmed by the Season 4 trailer. It's mostly just a bunch of people running around, yelling, and pointing guns at each other with basically no information on what they're actually fighting about. You'd think that the impending end of the world would get people to join together in order to figure out what to do, a la Watchmen, but I guess that wouldn't provide enough drama. Also, not nearly enough Murphy. On the upside, S4 Octavia looks pretty cool. Spergatory posted:Apparently Monty and Harper are still a Thing after the world's most left-field hookup last year. After rewatching Season 2, I have to say that it wasn't entirely out of left field. Monty and Harper do have a few "moments" over the course of that season. The problem is that the thread was pretty much entirely dropped in Season 3 until it was suddenly reintroduced the third to last episode of the season, plus the whole "Monty helping Pike while Harper was trying to overthrow Pike" thing somehow didn't cause any problems with their relationship even though it really, really should have. Acacia REI posted:It's not even high tech though... like at all. And I mean it sounds like it's a pretty important mission considering they're at the point of culling the population. Considering that the wristbands had to contain a transmitter powerful enough to send a signal to space and a battery large enough to power them for weeks (by comparison, satellite phones typically only get 2-3 hours of talk time, and they tend to be significantly bigger than those wristbands), they may simply not have had enough room left to install anti-tampering devices. Though putting that much thought into it raises other questions, the most obvious one being, since the dropship's transmitter is down, wouldn't the signal from the wristbands get blocked every time someone stepped inside? Real life satellite phones have trouble communicating from inside cars unless they're connected to an external antenna.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:03
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Astroman posted:What was that bigass crashed thing? At 0:54? It's in the snowy mountains, so my guess would be Farm Station.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:30
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Spergatory posted:Apparently Devon Bostick has been vaguely shade-tweeting (and promptly deleting) mild spoilers about the fact that he is barely in this season. I guess them not killing Jasper is the equivalent of those moments in Bioware games where your decisions can possibly get characters killed, but they get shuffled offscreen and cease to be relevant to the plot either way because Bioware are hacks and actually writing a significant fork in the plot is way too much work for them. The writers on this show don't seem to cope well with unexpected changes of plans in general. It's been all but confirmed that Gina was a last minute replacement for Wick after Steve Tailey got fired due to his racist tweets. When you watch her scenes in 3x01 and 3x03 with this in mind, you get the sense that, apart from adding romantic moments with Bellamy and presumably deleting romantic moments with Raven, they didn't even bother changing most of the dialogue. Which is also something that Bioware is known to do, come to think of it. Plus there was that time when they didn't have the budget to film a scene in 2x15 where a bunch of Grounders got slaughtered by machine guns, convincing Lexa to make a deal with the Mountain Men, so they just cut that scene and had Lexa take the deal anyway without even bothering to come up with another good reason for her to do that. Spergatory posted:Eh, he gets pretty steady work in horror, music videos, and indies that no one watches. For an actor, that's not bad. Besides, he was doing the same thing last year, probably with the assumption that his end-of-season death would stick. My guess is that it's Ricky Whittle all over again; he already knows he's getting killed off (for real this time) and has stopped caring. Personally, I love this kind of poo poo. Jason Rothenberg must truly be a shithead for this many low-to-mid-level actors to be so willing to burn their bridges with him. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I can't wait until enough time passes after the end of the show for the people involved to start spilling the beans on what really happened BTS and how they really feel about J Roth. enraged_camel posted:Meh, I think Jasper pretty much played out his usefulness. He was one of the least interesting characters last season. Yeah, and it's all the more disappointing because it didn't have to be this way. S1 and S2 Jasper may not have been the most original or compelling character ever, but he had stuff going on that was a lot more interesting than S3's one note "I'm sad because this girl that I knew for 3 weeks died, so I'm going to become a totally useless alcoholic jerk forever." Of course, the hilarious irony of this is that they made S3 Jasper that way solely so that they could have a main character commit suicide in their S3 finale in an attempt to have a SHOCKING SEASON FINALE TWIST ENDING that would be talked about in the media...only for that plan to get killed by executive meddling at the last minute. It gets funnier every time I think about it. INH5 fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 08:11
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The funny thing is, while there is a lot of unrealistic/fantastical stuff in The 100, some of the things that people complain about are actually areas where the show is more realistic than a lot of other post-apocalyptic media.Zzulu posted:All the cities of the world got overgrown in 100 years to the point where you can't even see them anymore. First, no that didn't happen to all of them, as Polis is clearly still visible. Second, the other major city that we see the ruins of is Washington DC, which in addition to getting overgrown, also got the poo poo nuked out of it. Third, abandoned cities really do get overgrown fast, as seen with Pripyat etc. Fourth, between termites and fire most wooden buildings in a climate like that of Northern Virginia probably would vanish within a few decades of no maintenance, which would leave only scattered brick and metal frame buildings outside of city centers that managed to avoid the nukes (like the one that became Polis). There's a story from Fallout 3's development that Bethesda tried to do some computer modeling to determine what would be left of Washington DC after the nukes + 200 years of decay. The answer they got was "nothing," which would make for pretty boring scenery, so they decided to ignore it and just make whatever ruins looked pretty. Zzulu posted:All humans reverted instantly back to tribal states. How long did it take for something like that to happen in Syria or Afghanistan? Heck, we even see something not entirely dissimilar with criminal groups like the Mafia, inner city gangs, prison gangs, and so on. Zzulu posted:All guns vanished except the ones the 100 suddenly found in barrels or whatever. With the factories all disabled or destroyed, ammunition is going to run out fast. And even if some people did manage to hoard a bunch of bullets, there's this thing called "rust." The military really does dip guns in barrels of grease when storing them long term, because if they don't do that the guns will be useless from rust in not much time at all. Finally, considering how hard it is to make smokeless powder and especially primers (the first primers in the 19th century used mercury fulminate, but there are virtually no mercury reserves left in North America), producing new guns more advanced than single shot black powder muskets is almost certainly beyond the abilities of a post apocalyptic society like the one depicted. That's probably the sort of guns that Mount Weather scared the nearby Grounders into giving up. Zzulu posted:All technology vanished. Large power plants are prime targets in a nuclear war and gasoline goes bad in a matter of months. Even if you have a source of power, most of the repairmen/machinists/engineers/etc are dead so the chances of you being able to repair or replace something if it breaks are pretty much nil. And even if you avoid that, there's the problem of rust again. And this is assuming that the US wasn't hit by a high altitude EMP, when there's a very good chance it would be in a nuclear war. The question people should be asking is not why the Grounders reverted to a roughly medieval level of technology, but why the Ark and Mount Weather didn't. Zzulu posted:Grounders seem to not remember anything even though the world ended just 100 years ago so it's almost even still in living memory. However, I agree that this part is totally unjustifiable. Modern Native Americans that are descendants of relatively advanced pre-Columbian civilizations like the Mississippians and the Hohokam have plenty of oral history about how their ancestors used to live in cities and build vast earthen mounds/canal systems and adobe dwellings. That's several centuries after a biological apocalypse that killed ~90% of their population followed by various wars and genocides, all in societies that never developed writing on their own. Even the most isolated backwater Grounders should have plenty of stories handed down through the generations about how the ancients could talk to people on the other side of the planet using magic boxes, traverse the entire world in a single day, and build houses in the sky. Zzulu posted:In these 100 years, animals have evolved to become monsters because of ~radiation~ Now that part you just have to chalk up to Fallout-esque B-movie science. INH5 fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Dec 18, 2016 |
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Dec 18, 2016 15:31
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Hollismason posted:Welp Season 2 is really good but now it's totally ruined my viewing because I actually have a back ground in medicine and the Fallout Vault people don't understand blood donations. The human body can donate a unit of whole blood every 8 weeks and you regenerate blood at a like 60 days. So basically they have 47 units of blood every 60 days. They could just keep Outsiders there fed and well treated around 50 of them along with the 47 kids would give you 97 units of blood 50% being SUPER BLOOD. They don't use the Grounders for blood transfusions, or at least not conventional blood transfusions. We're shown the procedure in 2x05 and it's more like using them as human dialysis machines. Running out of blood shouldn't be an issue - any blood that the Grounders end up losing should be replaced by an equal amount of MM blood. The reason why it kills them is because the procedure has harmful side effects, as shown when Jasper starts puking afterwards, and presumably if they do it too often the "donor" will die. Which is pretty much entirely made up, but real life blood donation science is still irrelevant. Also, we have no idea how many 'treatments" the MM actually need, or how many Grounders they can bring in each year, so we don't have any numbers to crunch anyway.
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Dec 21, 2016 04:51
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Elias_Maluco posted:Speaking about the medical science behind the MM, is there any valid reason why they would need to collect the bone marrow like that, with the subject alive, awake and not sedated? Not really. Mount Weather clearly has plenty of anaesthesia. They even use grenades that spray knockout gas everywhere as weapons. Plus they show zero hesitation in sedating Bellamy after he gets a little uppity in his Grounder cage. You could maybe justify Harper since Cage and Tsing were trying to avoid detection by Dante and hospitals tend to keep a close eye on their anaesthetic supplies (because they're afraid that doctors might steal them for recreational and/or commercial purposes). But there's no justification for why they would keep doing it that way after Cage takes over. Especially after Raven bites a doctor's ear off, which she wouldn't have been able to do had she been sedated before they took her out of the handcuffs.
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Dec 21, 2016 18:22
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Lycus posted:Okay, since Mt. Weather having more missiles was a plot point in S3, is there a reason given as to why they didn't use them against the army before the acid fog was shut down or threaten the capital at any time? Judging by the destruction wrought on TonDC, the missiles almost certainly have conventional warheads, so you'd need to fire off a lot of them to do significant damage against an army of that size. Especially if the army deliberately spread out specifically to limit the amount of damage that missiles or artillery could do to them. As for threatening Polis, maybe they did do that and that was one of the reasons that Lexa took the deal. CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:Also clearly it's better to leave the MM alive because they would never go back on their word and start attacking you again, now with radiation immunity! All the ghost leaders wept at her decision. The MM would have to be colossal idiots to start a war with people who have to outnumber them at least 100 to 1* right after they've solved both their "can't go outside" and "need Grounder blood to survive" problems. And it's not like the Grounders have anything that the MM really want. The resources of MW are clearly capable of meeting all of their material needs, the fact that the Reapers were only used for jobs that MM couldn't do indicates that they don't have a large demand for unskilled slave labor, and considering that there are less than 400 of them, the territory surrounding MW that the Grounders already let them have should give them way more lebensraum than they'll need for a long time to come. If the MM ever did come into conflict with the Grounders, it would probably look more like the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas than the English/American colonization of North America: the MM would ally with a group of Grounders that wasn't a fan of the current power structure (the Ice Nation is a very likely candidate) and help them take over in exchange for whatever the MM were after. However even there there would be significant differences, because without plagues to devastate the native population** or further waves of colonists to replace them, the equivalent of the Tlaxcalans would ultimately end up running the place. So it might not be such a bad idea for Lexa to step into that role at the start. * There were 382 MM before a bunch of them died on Level 5, in the acid fog explosion, etc. Meanwhile, if the nearby Grounders have a population density of even 1 person per square mile, then there are more than 40,000 Grounders just in the former territory of Virginia. Considering the size of Polis and the various Grounder armies, and considering how in pre-industrial societies you need ~9 food producers for every non-food producing specialist, that's probably a low-end estimate. ** Nobody knows about Nukepocalypse 2.0 at this point. Elias_Maluco posted:Yeah. And probably they woulndt even have time to execute all those prisoners. And even if they could kill them all, previously Lexa sacrificed and entire village she could have saved so to not compromise this very plan, because beating the MM was so important I think you're greatly overestimating how easy it is to assault a fortified bunker defended by people with modern firearms and explosives who have literally spent their entire lives inside that bunker with a force consisting of several thousand warriors who are scared of guns plus maybe a few dozen space cops. The writers actually originally scripted a scene where the Grounder+Arker army gets the door open only to be met by two .50 caliber machine gun turrets that proceed to slaughter wave after wave WWI-style. Then Lexa decides to take the deal. Unfortunately they didn't have the budget to film that. However, I totally agree with this: CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:Ya except Lexa made that huge speech about vengeance and poo poo at the start of the day. It isn't hard to come up with good reasons why Lexa might have wanted to take the deal, but it is still awful writing to have a character make a complete 180 like this offscreen without even an attempt at an explanation. Even if they didn't have the money to film the aforementioned machine gun scene, they could have made this a lot better by simply having Clarke ask Lexa, "Why are you doing this?" And then having Lexa explain her reasons for doing it. But they never do that, not even in Season 3 when they have absolutely no time pressure. EDIT: As a side note, does anyone else find it hilarious how the whole Nukepocalypse 2.0 thing retroactively makes Season 2 totally pointless? If the Mountain Men had won, they would have gotten the chance to live on the surface for nine months, at best, before they would have had to go back into their "concrete coffin" for who knows how long. INH5 fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 16:05
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Combat Pretzel posted:Can't wait to see them explain how all nuclear power plants on earth decided to throw a party after 97 years of idling happily ever after. And the party date just happens to be less than a year after the Arkers finally returned to Earth. Everyone in Arkadia should be very grateful to Finn and Raven, because if those two hadn't wasted 3 months of air with their illegal spacewalk, they would all be totally screwed, judging by how quickly things go to poo poo in the S4 trailer.
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Dec 26, 2016 04:14
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Elias_Maluco posted:Well, no. Then again, the entire premise is flawed. It's simply not possible to develop resistance to radiation the way one develops resistance to iocane powder. Actually, while the degree of radiation resistance depicted in this show is most definitely impossible, some degree of adaptive or evolved radiation resistance does seem to be possible in real life humans. From a study performed on residents of Ramsar, Iran, which has the highest natural background radiation levels of any known inhabited place on Earth: quote:An in vitro challenge dose of 1.5 Gy of gamma rays was administered to the lymphocytes, which showed significantly reduced frequency for chromosome aberrations of people living in high background compared to those in normal background areas in and near Ramsar. Specifically, inhabitants of high background radiation areas had about 56% the average number of induced chromosomal abnormalities of normal background radiation area inhabitants following this exposure. This suggests that adaptive response might be induced by chronic exposure to natural background radiation as opposed to acute exposure to higher (tens of mGy) levels of radiation in the laboratory. There have also been some studies of wildlife in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that seem to show that at least some of the animals in the area have started to evolve to be more resistant to radiation.
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Jan 2, 2017 22:58
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muscles like this! posted:I'm really not sure where this show is going, like could they really spend even just one season completely stuck in the bunker? Because they really aren't doing anything to stop Primefire from coming. Maybe they'll have a 5-year timeskip in between seasons so that they no longer have to pretend that these late-twenties/early-thirties actors are teenagers. Because, yeah, stress and hard living can make you look older (the National Geographic Afghan refugee girl was 12 when the famous photo of her was taken), but it's been getting more and more distracting each season, especially when you take a look at the timeline and you're reminded that only about 6 months have passed. INH5 fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 07:26
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