 Of all the shows the CW has put out over the years, some of their most notable are those based on crappy young adult novels. Things like The Vampire Diaries, or Roswell, New Mexico, are absolutely horrendous, yet they form the backbone of the network's ratings. Sometimes they make stuff that isn't based on a YA novel, but it has the same energy, like StarCross. They're based on young adult novels, but they often have very little in common with their source material because that isn't important. The important part is that they have an excuse for beautiful 20-somethings pretending to be 17 to suck face. And one of the CW's more successful adaptations is The 100. The 100 is basically just seven seasons of Eliza Taylor refusing to put on a bra, and I guess there's some post-apocalyptic adventure stuff in there too. 97 years before the series begins, humanity wiped out the whole world in a nuclear war and the only survivors were those in space at the time, who managed to bring their orbiting stations together and create a new one they call the Ark. But the Ark is having technical problems that might kill everyone on board, so they send 100 juvenile delinquents to the Earth's surface to see if it's habitable. Turns out it is, but the Ark has difficulty sending people down, so the kids are stuck trying to survive the elements, each other, and the primitive tribes that survived the nuclear holocaust. I can't say it's an awful show. For every dumb bit, there's something intelligent and or emotional that drew me in. The fact that I was able to make it through seven seasons at all is a testament to how the writing is never dull. And sometimes, but never dull. From here on, massive spoilers for all seven seasons. You have been warned. So before I get on complaining, here's some of the stuff I enjoyed. Every faction is just doing what they need to for survival. In the first season, the kids on the ground are attacked by what we think of as savage tribesmen, but as time goes on, their actions become more understandable. After all, this group of strangers suddenly dropped into their homes and started building what looks like a colony, what are they supposed to think? And at the same time, the people from space need to colonize the ground, or they'll die. Likewise, the convicts in season 5 are killing the heroes to get their hands on the last survivable piece of land on Earth because they don't want to starve in space. In their situation, you would probably do the same thing. No, I will not explain that further. We'll be here all day if I do. This show gets nuts after a while. Everyone is just doing what they need to, and they all have perfectly valid reasons to hate each other. There are only a few characters you could really call villains, and they don't take up that much time. There's a major theme that people will often do immoral things to protect those they love, and that applies to both the heroes and villains. While there are a few villains who are simply power-hungry or selfish, most of them have understandable motives and they feel guilt despite the justifications for their actions. President Dante is the best example of this. He straight-up kidnaps a bunch of kids, then tells them their friends and families are dead so they don't try to run off. He also regularly abducts grounders to drain their blood before feeding their corpses to junkies. Again, no time for explanations. All this is so that his own people won't die from radiation poisoning, and despite the justifiable motivation, he clearly feels awful about the things he's done. Characters get killed off frequently, meaning no one really feels safe. That became a cliche in the television world after Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead got popular. The idea that major good guys could be killed off permanently was a new thing that people loved. It rarely stayed in place for more than a season or two, though. In things like The Walking Dead or Salem, they would kill off some of the main starting cast early on, replace them with new characters, then promptly kill the new guys off to repeat the cycle. The core cast would rarely change. The 100 only has three characters who last from the first episode to the last. There are people who die off early, people who last until near the end, people who last until the halfway point, and then there's characters who are introduced later and have their own variety. Some last a long time, some last a little while. Well starts off like he'll be a major character, then bam, he dies in the middle of his character arc. On the other end of the spectrum is Murphy, who seems like a minor antagonist who would die early on, but lives until the very last episode. Anyone genuinely can die at any time, keeping the tension high. Every character has an arc. Okay, they aren't always the best, but everyone changes and grows over the course of the story. People kids like Bellamy grow up and become leaders. Jasper goes from a lighthearted comedic relief to an anxious freedom fighter to a PTSD-riddled alcoholic nihilist who commits suicide. Murphy starts off as a selfish asshole before he learns to care about and sacrifice for other people. And so on. No one is the same when they're introduced as they are when they leave the show, and considering the size of the cast, that's impressive. The show is very violent, but it doesn't shy away from the consequences of that violence. When people get cut into pieces, it's usually not a triumphant moment, it's unpleasant and horrifying. Some characters get injured, and even though they survive, they're never the same afterwards. Raven's leg is in a brace for most of the show because she gets shot in season one. Most fictional injuries aren't like that. Either the character will die, or they'll be unaffected long term. Then there's the mental scars violence leaves on people like Cain and Jasper. Attacking a village or town will kill enemy soldiers, but it'll also kill the innocents nearby. The best example of this is when Mount Weather gets flooded with radiation at the end of season two, killing hundreds of people who wanted nothing to do with the conflict along with those who perpetuated it. When wars are fought, even by the, quote, good guys, bad things happen to everyone. This is all far, far smarter than something like Pretty Little Liars, which is basically just escalating drama with few consequences. All that said, there is a lot of terrible stuff here too. The sci-fi aspect of the show started off low-key and believable, but as time went on things got weirder with no build-up. In season one the arc is barely above modern-day technology, which is believable enough, and it's still on the verge of falling apart. Then season three revolves around an evil AI that can take over your body. Then season five reveals that before the war humans had multiple colonies in other solar systems. Then season seven introduces teleporting space rocks, aliens, and time travel, leaving the show's world unrecognizable by the end. And if the last Harry Potter book suddenly introduced interdimensional gnomes and Harry had to stop them from destroying the world, you would think, whoa, this is a completely different story than I signed up for. In the first season it made sense for Clark to be in a leadership role since she's just one of a bunch of kids that are away from home. She has useful medical knowledge, a strong moral compass, and sets a positive example for the others, so it makes sense that they would follow her. After that the writers have to come up with more and more excuses for the protagonist to be central to the story and it makes her feel superfluous. You're telling me that she just happens to be the one person who has medical knowledge of the grounders' need and also gains the respect of the grounder commander and also escapes Mount Weather and also supposedly gains magic powers that make her a target and by the end she has to be the one to convince a race of alien gods to let humanity ascend to another plane of existence instead of turning them all into calcium statues? That last one doesn't make much sense in context either. The point is that a teenager being so important to the fate of the world feels odd to begin with and it only gets worse over time, even if she's in her early 20s by the end. On a similar note, Octavia goes from someone hiding from the police under the floor, to a prisoner, to someone who can defeat multiple seasoned warriors at once, to leader of a tribal federation that commands enough authority to force others to engage in cannibalism over the course of about six months. That's a years-long story arc. And there's a timeskip they could have used to make this more believable, but they don't. She's just awesome because the writers demand that she be awesome, making it feel very artificial. There are a lot of issues with the setting of the series, which I'll get to in-depth in a few minutes, but the first thing that stood out to me was how families on the arc can only have one child each. Some sort of draconian population control makes sense in an environment where resources are so limited. But how do they maintain their current population if everyone can only have one kid? Wouldn't the population be cut in half every generation? Are there any exceptions? This is admittedly a small issue in the grand scheme of things, but it does irk me. And as long as I'm here, let's talk about the Barrier Gaze thing. In short, Barrier Gaze is the name given to a trope where all gay characters in television would eventually be killed off, meaning they're seen as more expendable than straight ones. In season two, we're introduced to the commander of the Grounder Clans, a woman named Lexa. She and Clark develop a friendship, which later turns into a romantic relationship. Then in season three, Lexa is killed, which leads to a power vacuum that affects the rest of the show. It seems intelligent until you realize that she had to be written out because Lexa's actress wanted to just leave to be on The Walking Dead. Sorry, fear The Walking Dead. God, that title sucks. When this episode premiered, many fans were angry and invoked this trope to explain why this was bad without further explanation. Is this an example of Barrier Gaze? I'd have to say no. Lexa was an enjoyable character and losing her sucked, but it's not like she was the only major LGBT character in the cast. Clark, Nathan, Eric, Nyla, Brian, and Daniel are all either gay or bisexual. The reason that the Barrier Gaze trope sucks is because until recently gay characters were a rarity, so if one died, the showing question was suddenly 100% straight. The 100 doesn't have that problem, and in fact it avoids the similar problem of having a character's sexuality completely define their existence. So in this case, I'd say the issue is being blown out of proportion. Anyways, I think that's a long enough introduction. Time for the world-building stuff. I know how to transition between topics. What are you talking about? From Episode 1, this sci-fi show about a nuclear apocalypse gets radiation wrong. In the pilot, we see evidence of a few mutated animals, and later we learn that mutated humans are either killed or banished from ground or society. Despite that, the vast, vast majority of the world seems unchanged. The 100 land in a forest in the eastern US, which looks exactly like most temperate forests today. It has no signs of damage or adaptation to the new circumstances, same with most of the grounders. The half-life for radioactive fallout is slightly more than 30 years, so by the time they landed, the radiation levels near blast zones would be less than one-eighth of what it was to start. Being able to survive in at least some parts of the planet is believable. Then in Season 2, we meet the denizens of Mount Weather, who are the descendants of survivors that made it to a massive bunker before the bombs dropped. They can't go outside without protection because the radiation will kill them in minutes. It's bad enough that their skin literally burns off. This isn't just in hot zones, such as a nuclear waste disposal site. This is if they go anywhere outside, even the pristine forest. Why do they die while everyone else can go outside no problem? It's simple. Everyone else evolved to metabolize radiation. That's stupid! Use your common sense. The grounders went through some sort of natural selection that allowed a small number of them, those who could resist radiation, to live on the surface with no issues. I guess all the plants and animals did, too, since the environment is largely unchanged. Those on the ark were made resistant to radiation, too. Only in their case, their evolution was spurned on by solar radiation, and none of them died in the process. That's not how natural selection works. Natural selection is what happens when members of a species are unable to cope with something in the environment, and they die off without reproducing. Then those who survived, through some sort of advantage, either physical or mental, get to propagate the species. If no one died, that's not natural selection. On top of that, nuclear weapons released several types of radiation, including gamma, neutron, and ionizing radiation. Solar radiation is a collection of different types of energy that gets lumped together as electromagnetic radiation. So even if the survivors on the ark could have adapted to the presence of solar radiation, they wouldn't have adapted to the other types. Unless their manner of cellular repair unintentionally works on them, too, because you can't actually metabolize radiation, the damage is caused by subatomic particles literally ripping apart your DNA, which is metal as fuck. Some species can repair their cells after being damaged, but they don't metabolize it. Blood transfusion is sometimes used to treat damaged bone marrow. It doesn't allow you to fix severe radiation damage. I think. The research on this topic is very light right now. But it gets worse. In Season 3, we're introduced to nightbloods, people whose blood is black, leading the grounders to believe that they're somehow holy. We later learned that nightbloods were created by a scientist who wanted to give herself and others more resistance to radiation, and she was successful. They're far more resistant than anyone else on Earth. Specifically, she created it to allow people to survive having a chip containing an AI inserted into their head without their brain melting. This chip then goes on to be called the Flame of the Commander, and given to those that the grounders choose to lead them. It also contains the minds of all the past commanders, and a way to shut down an evil AI. And it's similar to the colony of humans that live on a different planet who can store their minds in drives and then put them into the bodies of nightbloods to maintain quasi-immortality, leading to them being worshiped as gods. I'm not making any of that up. This show gets wild. Even if we accept that you can change your blood in this manner so it can repair itself after radiation damage, I don't know how changing your blood allows the rest of your body to resist it. I'm not sure how injecting someone with a serum changes their DNA and allows them to pass the trade onto their descendants, either. And it gets even worse from there. During Season 4, the characters are trying to prepare for a new wave of radiation to sweep the Earth. See, there were apparently a bunch of massive nuclear power plants that were designed to be self-sustaining for a hundred years, and they're just about to melt down, releasing a bunch more radiation. The only people that can survive will be nightbloods and those who managed to hide out in a bunker built before the war. There's nowhere safe on the surface. They call the wave Prime Fire, and by the end of the season it comes and destroys everything. It doesn't just irradiate everything in a silent wave that causes nature to rot away and grow tumors. No, that would be terrifying and cool. It's a literal wave of fire that destroys everything in its path like a nuclear blast. Radiation doesn't do that. Nuclear blasts cause destruction because of the heat and pressure wave they release. The radiation is secondary. And apparently there's no reason for shallow valley to have escaped Prime Fire. The wave just jumped it while hitting the entire rest of the world. K. You know the thing about cultures? They take a long time to form. The more they change from their origin, the longer it takes. Over the course of 97 years, the people in what's left of the United States have created a society so different from ours as to be unrecognizable. They live in a tribal federation simply called the Coalition, led by a demigod with the spirits of other demigods in their head. Not only do they all follow this new religion, any traces of pre-war religions are gone. No grounders are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jedi, or any of the other things that modern people are. How did that happen? How did the keepers of the flame evangelize so well? How did no one ever realize that the flame is an advanced piece of technology? Any knowledge of technology is gone for some reason. I understand losing some or most of it since everything was wrecked in the war, but a few sources should have survived. Hell, the grounders don't even have any firearms, despite relearning steel working well enough to make axes and swords. Even Caesar's Legion understands the past better than these guys. I can forgive their weird governing structure. It seems to be based around tribal warlordism, that's a new term I just invented, where people live in insular clans that all have their own territory, and there's constant small-scale fighting over resources. But the commanders were able to force them into a coalition over generations. They still fight each other, just not on a large scale, so their alliance is loose. I can see how this would all come about in an extreme society, even if all the torture and abandonment of democracy seems like a stretch. Traces of that would likely have survived. Their language is less forgivable. For starters, they swap between English and Grounder Creole seemingly at random. Sometimes they do it in mid-conversation. Everyone speaks both, whatever their level of education or where they live. The use of both makes sense if there were some areas or clans that spoke English and others that spoke Grounder, but there aren't. They just mix together in some sort of odd-tasting soup. Language evolves over time, and you can tell that Grounder is descended from English when you listen to it. That said, for it to change this much would take much more than a hundred years. If this was seven or eight hundred years later, I could buy it, but I spent most of the show thinking that this was an odd choice. However, they do give an explanation in Season 7, which is somehow even stupider. See, Grounder Creole was invented before the bombs dropped by a group of political activists, and that's it. That's how it's spread, I guess. For that matter, shouldn't the denizens of the Ark have been able to look down and see the Grounders? A simple telescope would show the movements of large armies or campfires. They shouldn't have been surprised that people were alive down there. That's not even counting all of the trees. Entire cities are overgrown with forests that would have taken centuries to grow under ideal conditions. Look at the Lincoln Memorial. What the fuck? Later we meet totally new societies on other planets which make more sense. They've existed for hundreds of years longer than the Grounder clans, they have more extreme environments to adapt to, and they have no access to anything left on earth. In Sanctum, for instance, the leaders are immortals who store their minds in advanced chips so they can take over other bodies. They're worshipped as gods, which seems reasonable after a few generations of propaganda, but there are people who don't agree with the current system. They know their rulers are just humans and fight against them because a government will never satisfy everyone. Likewise, they have adapted to their new environment with things like shackles in all their houses so they can chain up their friends who go crazy from the alien pollen. Only once a year though, so it's okay. A big theme of the 100 is how we're all shaped by our surroundings, and in the case of Sanctum, that makes sense. I just wish it worked better on earth. Over seven seasons we only see a small part of the eastern seaboard, the geography of which is vague and doesn't make sense, but there's a whole planet out there, a fact that some of my fellow Americans find shocking. What exists out there? The most we see is a short clip of someone near the pyramids of Giza as they get destroyed by prime fire, so we know other humans live out there, we just know nothing about them. Where are the tribes further inland in North America that the Coalition might have to interact with? The Midwest has fewer targets for military strikes, so if anything there should be more people there. Where are the people in Canada or the Caribbean? Are there any countries isolated from the bulk of the bombs that might have survived semi-intact like Australia or Mongolia? As long as humans have existed, we've rubbed up against one another, sometimes for war, sometimes for trade. Aren't there any other bunkers that could house societies like in Mount Weather? Even just in the US there are places like NORAD that are just as hardy as Mount Weather and other countries, which remember, exist, have their own. Switzerland has enough bunkers to house their entire population and then some. They should have come out after 40 years and conquered everything in sight, then sent out trade expeditions to extract tribute from the savages across the Atlantic. This is the way. I've mentioned repeatedly that humans colonized a few other planets before the events of the series and that they developed their own cultures away from Earth. If we accept that the technology exists to do this, and that it was kept secret for years before the war, it still leaves a few issues. The thing about alien life is that it would have evolved 100% separate from Earth life. All life here is made up of DNA, which consists of four amino acids, adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. If you change a single one of those, or add a new one, you change literally everything about life on that planet. There might be things that look like trees or insects or mushrooms, but they aren't. Our bodies wouldn't know how to interact with them. If we tried to grow crops in the foreign soil, they would die due to lack of proper bacteria. If we ate the foreign animals, our bodies would be unable to digest them. It may even poison us. Hell, there could be germs in the air that we breathe that kill us, despite the mixture of gases being similar to Earth's. We couldn't be infected by the alien diseases, at least not in the traditional sense. If they could interact with us at all, it would be more like mining for resources. Imagine if some small parasites found a way into our bodies and realized they could leech calcium from our bones. The results would be catastrophic. If you ever read The Expanse books, they go into a lot of detail about this sort of thing. The opposite could be true, too. When humans brought rats and rabbits through Australia, they had a population explosion that scarfed up tons of native plant life, causing native flora and fauna to go extinct. Humans might inadvertently do the same when our wheat causes native insects to shit out sulfur until they die and then the sun comes out and starts a forest fire. Or something. I know this was different than what I usually do, since I combined a general critique with worldbuilding analysis, but this is an unusual case. The 100 might be based on a series of young adult novels, but it has little to do with them beyond the starting concept. By all metrics, it's an original show. An original show with a lot of ambition, passion, and clear skill in front of and behind the camera. Most of the conflicts are far smarter than anything else you'll see on television, because everyone is a hero to their own people. At the same time, it's clear that most of it outside of that was written with little thought. There was no attempt to make any of the world make sense. Literally every aspect has at least some problems that I could point out. It goes on too long, and so by the last two seasons, there's nowhere else to go, and the writers are forced to bring in aliens to try and up the stakes one last time. Even if the violence has shown in all of its realistic detail, the characters still look like they've just stepped off a magazine cover after they've been living in the woods for weeks. Sometimes the acting is great, other times it's trash. The sets in the costumes are pretty good, but the VFX look like turds smeared on a green screen. Some of the storylines are engaging and well-paced. Others drag on forever. It's about as uneven as a show can get, making it tough to give it a straightforward review or recommendation. So that's not what this video is. It's not a review, it's just an exploration. A brief one, because just about every episode is worthy of a deep analysis. More video essayists should talk about this show. Come at it from a hundred different angles. While you can learn a lot from the success of others, you can learn even more from their failures, and, weirdly enough, the 100 has plenty of both. If you're any sort of writer or artist at all, I would suggest watching it as a learning experience. Even if you don't like it, take some notes. You'll be surprised at how much usable material is there. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but it's the best summation of the 100 I can come up with. I did not love it, yet I'm fascinated by it. 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