The 100: Season 3

The survivors of the Ark have formed a tentative alliance with the native Twelve Tribes, or "Grounders", in the wake of their victory over the inhabitants of Mount Weather. However, a schism threatens to open on the fate of Mount Weather's science and technology. Adding to the chaos, when a long-separated group of survivors from the Ark manage to regroup with their fellows after months of fighting the Grounders, they are horrified by the idea of the alliance and seek to undermine it. At the same tribe, the Ice Nation tribe also seeks to break the treaty and destroy the Ark. The only person capable of speaking to both sides, Clarke, has gone into exile. Meanwhile, the superintelligent AI which unleashed the nuclear war in the first place is still active...and has plans for the remnants of humanity.

The 100 is a fast-moving, intense show. It's covered an enormous amount of ground in just two seasons and the third season continues this trend. When so many shows are capable of sitting back for two or three episodes in a row and not do very much, The 100 can cheerfully tear through a season's worth of plot twists and character deaths during that time. As a story it's relentless, and perfect for binge watching one episode after the next.

The third season is very much a story of two halves: the first half focuses on the Grounders and their internal dispute with the Ice Nation, and the citizens of Arcadia (as the crashed Ark, now being converted into a city, is called) and their own rift on how to proceed with the alliance. The former plot is understandable, as the Skykru (as they are known) have killed a lot of Grounders. The latter is, however, completely ludicrous. The few hundred survivors of the Ark in their single valley with limited bullets and supplies are no match at all for the Grounders, who seem to number in the hundreds of thousands and (as this season reveals) controls most of the Eastern Seaboard of both the former US and Canada, and the notion that any intelligent person would demand to go on the offensive against this unbeatable enemy is fundamentally unconvincing.

Fortunately, this plot becomes moot as the ruthlessly amoral AI known as ALIE begins to take over both Grounders and people from Arcadia, aiming at total subjugation to a vision known as the "City of Light". Survivors from both sides, scarred by their previous conflicts, have to join forces to take on this mutual threat.

The plot structure is pretty standard but The 100 does good things with it. It's also built up enough of an enormous main and supporting cast that dividing them against one another and making them fight (often to the death) is a viable way of telling the story (and cutting actor salaries!). The show also hasn't forgotten about previous conflicts and storylines and some very long-running stories reach their pay-offs this season as well.

Unfortunately, the storytelling is often hampered by plot twists that feel more belaboured than natural. Behind-the-scenes drama led to the early exit of one very popular character, whose death feels cheap and pointless. It's also hard not to feel that the first half of the season is rendered completely moot by the second, although the finale does hint at some more story to come in that area. The show also continues its curious trend of having some pretty good actors in the like of Henry Ian Cusick and Paige Turco and proceeding to not having them do very much. Bob Morley also has to work overtime in his role as Bellamy, who inexplicably switches sides several times for no apparent reason.

For the most part, performances are good (Richard Harmon's world-weary, constantly-expecting death attitude as John Murphy becomes a lot of fun this year) even if a few of the cast are firmly at the cheesy overacting end of the scale. But The 100 does a great line in sneering villainy and pulp action, so it's not inappropriate. The writing could be stronger in places, but the fast-moving plot and ruthless attitude to character deaths makes for a series that is frequently more gripping and interesting than it feels it should be. The cliffhanger, which raises the stakes dramatically to the global level, certainly left me keen to see what will happen next year in the fourth (and potentially final, given the so-so ratings) season.

The third season of The 100 (****) maintains the quality from the second, with a couple of brief dips due to implausible plot twists and a few cheap character deaths that feel more motivated by a producer's annoyance than story requirements. But overall it's still a watchable, fun and sometimes genuinely morally interesting show. The season will be released on 26 October on DVD and Blu-Ray.

The 100: Season 2

The Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war, with the survivors either being mutants ("Grounders") who have adapted to the radiation or genetically-enhanced exiles who have survived in space on an orbiting ark. A hundred delinquents have been sent down from the Ark to see if the ground is survivable, but they have also encountered both the Grounders and a society of survivors living in a massive fallout shelter under Mount Weather, west of the ruins of Washington D.C. The hostility and paranoia of the shelter-dwellers forces both the crew of the Ark and the Grounders into an uneasy alliance.

The first season of The 100 took a while to get going, being mired in tiresome teenage romance and lots of trekking around Canadian woodland for quite a few episodes before it cut loose and turned into a bleak story of survival and moral compromises. The second season of The 100 turns this up to the max and is a much stronger set of episodes from the off.

The second season benefits from a multi-stranded storyline which rotates through sets of characters and locations. The main storyline sees the youngsters from the Ark forced to team up with the survivors of the station's dramatic crash-landing in the Season 1 finale and then attempt to forge a peace with the Grounders so they can rescue their friends (from both factions) who are imprisoned under Mount Weather. This story is rich with drama, with both camps having internal problems and the kids from the Ark - who have spent months surviving on the ground - understandably refusing to relinquish authority to the very people who sent them to their deaths. There is the scope for melodrama, but the show largely skirts it through a relentless pace, stronger worldbuilding (the culture of the Grounders is explored a lot this season) and occasional harsh plot turns that manage to out-shock Game of Thrones.

The main subplot is set inside the Mount Weather shelter and explores what happens to the forty-odd kids taken prisoner at the end of Season 1. This story is also pretty decent, but becomes a little stretched out due to its obvious benefits as a budget-saving measure (since it uses just a few interior sets as opposed to the tons of exterior footage for the Ark/Grounders stuff) and a limited number of characters to explore. Another storyline follows Jaha, the former leader of the Ark, as he - quite randomly - survives the Ark's crash and becomes - even more randomly - a messianic figure who believes he can lead his people to salvation across the desert. This story is the most preposterous, but works because Jaha is played by the hugely enjoyable Isaiah Washington and purely exists because the producers were going to quite blatantly kill the character and then decided to keep him around because they liked the actor. Fortunately it does fulfil a purpose at the end, forming the bridge into the forthcoming third season which will up the stakes even further.

The series works thanks to some enjoyably spirited performances from an enthusiastic cast, a genuinely impressive desire not to wimp out on hard decisions and moral muddles, a plot that spins on a dime and some quite impressive action sequences. That's not to say it isn't perfect. Some storylines feel a bit random and the longer episode run (three more than in the first) feels like it was more accomplished with filler than because more episodes were needed to pack everything in. An episode featuring characters hiding from an escaped gorilla in a desolate zoo is rather pointless, for example. Dialogue also too often based around exposition, and the show does feel like it could do with more humour. More on the plus side of things, the forced romance elements have been dialled way back (and the few romances which do emerge feel a lot more plausible) and the characterisation is very strong. Particularly impressive is how Bellamy, the primary antagonist in the first half of Season 1, evolves into a heroic figure through a natural and believable progression of events.

A few hiccups aside, the season builds up to a genuinely startling finale (apparently based on the idea of what if the good guys were put in a position where they had to carry out a Red Wedding?) that leaves a lot of unanswered questions for the third season, due to air in early 2016.

The second season of The 100 (****) improves on the more variable opening season and soon becomes hugely enjoyable viewing. The season will be released on 13 October on DVD and Blu-Ray.

The 100: Season 1

AD 2149. Ninety-seven years after a nuclear war devastated the Earth, more than two and a half thousand people live in refuge on an orbiting space station, the Ark. With life support beginning to fail, the ruling council of the Ark decides to see if Earth is survivable by sending down a hundred criminals. As adult criminals are executed to save food and air, this means sending down young delinquents.

As the hundred exiles fight to survive on Earth - and later against the other survivors they discover living in the woods - the inhabitants of the Ark also fall into an internal power struggle as it becomes clear that the station cannot support them for much longer, and not everyone can survive to make it to the ground.

The 100 is a post-apocalyptic drama that seems to take great delight in its inspirations: the show comes across as the result of a collision between Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The Hunger Games and Fallout. The show adroitly fuses its inspirations in fun and original ways and ends up being a lot more entertaining than it has any right being, but it does take a little while to get there.

The show is the product of American network The CW, famed its glossy productions featuring preposterously photogenic young actors engaging in life-and-death struggles whilst also trying to straighten out their elaborately complicated love lives. The 100 somehow manages to turn this tendency up to 11: characters angst about their personal relationships almost at the same level they worry about starvation, dehydration, being impaled by spears and radiation sickness, all of which are constant and simultaneous threats. This would risk being silly, except for the odd hints that the writers are deliberately sending up this aspect of the network's shows. The series also gets away with it because it is also one of the most surprisingly brutal television shows on air. Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead have made shocking main character deaths more accepted on cable, but for a more youth-oriented series The 100 is startlingly bleak. We get population counts for both the exiles on the ground and the survivors on the Ark and both numbers drop at a rate of knots as the season progresses and the writers gleefully take an axe (or gun, or airlock, or plague, or in one highly memorable moment, a giant metal shuriken thing) to the cast.

The show gets off to a mixed start, being both unafraid to kill over apparently major players from the off but also unleashing some of the most ham-fisted, expositionary and clumsy writing you'll see on television all year. Characters initially come across as being very archetypal (or, if you're less kind, cliched as hell) and the actors initially seem unsure how to handle the material they are given. Henry Ian Cusick, in his first major TV role since playing Desmond on Lost, is both saddled with a dubious accent and some poor characterisation and can only respond by hamming it up for the first few weeks. Dialogue is poor and little reason is given for us to care about any of these characters.

Fortunately, that changes and fairly quickly. By the sixth episode the writers have added a lot of ambiguity and (relative) complexity to the characters, the actors have much more layered material to work with and the show becomes a bit more experimental, not afraid to ditch half the cast for a week or two in favour of flashbacks to add depth and backstory. The writers also become quite good at creating internal conflict within the characters, giving them more to do than just stand around and look pretty.


This is helped by some fairly intense pacing. The series is uninterested in adopting a format and sticking with it, with shifts in factions, locations and motivations taking place on a near-weekly basis. The initial split between the ground and the space station is well-handled, despite it occasionally feeling like you're watching episodes of Lost and BSG that have been fan-spliced together (the presence of actors from both shows - particularly BSG - not helping). When our heroes on the ground find a mysterious hatch in the forest (albeit one that opens immediately and not after a tediously-drawn out 16-episode struggle) and characters in orbit wrestle with their consciences as they have to ration supplies and blast a traitor out of the airlock, The 100 feels like it is risking becoming a parody of those other series. However, the show then moves into other territory, becoming more confident and forging its own path. The season finale, which not so much changes the premise as drives a bulldozer through it and then burns down the remains, is the most game-changing cliffhanger in a series in recent times.

The actors are, for the most part, likable. The younger castmembers bring enthusiasm and gumption, although some are more experienced than others (Eliza Taylor did her time in the trenches of Australian daytime soap opera). More veteran actors are used to populate the Ark and, after that initial writing hurdle in the first few episodes, are great. However, the show's flirtation with killing off Chancellor Jaha gets a little old. Clearly they realised that Isaiah Washington is too good to off so easily, but it'd be better if they stopped putting him in near-death situations every other week. The weak spot is the handling of romance, which is trite. Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos) and Lincoln (Ricky Whittle) fall in love without exchanging a word (although later on they do manage to earn it back), whilst the budding romance between Clarke (Taylor) and Finn (Thomas McDonell) is hamstrung by the utter lack of any chemistry at all between the two actors. Fortunately the writers seem to cotton onto this and use it to their advantage later on. As the season progresses there is also less time for teen stuff as the prospect of all-out war rears its head and some new, more enigmatic enemies enter the fray.

For its first season, The 100 (***½) starts off pretty poor but improves rapidly to become a solidly entertaining show. The writing starts out clumsy and the dialogue jarring, but it gets better. The characters become a lot more interesting and conflicted and the show gleefully subverts audience expectations at almost every turn. Certainly worth a look, especially as the second season so far has been a big improvement. The first season is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).