The 100 aired last night on the CW, and it had us feeling a lot of things, not many of them good.
Let’s preface this review by saying that we had a lot of hope for The 100 – we were looking forward to this show ever since we saw the trailer last fall. Now that it’s aired, we’re disappointed with the direction it took.
If you’re looking for mindless entertainment that will keep you guessing, then The 100 is definitely the show for you, but if you were hoping for something with likable, interesting characters then you might want to look elsewhere.
The 100 takes place 97 years after humans devastated the Earth in a nuclear war, and is named after the 100 prisoners, all teenagers, sent down to check the conditions of Earth. In the universe of the show, any broken law, no matter how small, is punishable by death unless you’re under 18, which is why all the prisoners are teenagers.
The gigantic space station in the show is the only one left, forged from several stations to form it. Naturally, it would make sense that they would need to keep populations controllable, so this is definitely not a Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century type living situation. This is actually one part of the show that we liked, the danger aspect of the satellite brings intrigue to the space counterpart of the characters.
But it seems that the characters themselves are all idiots. Everyone, ranging from the hormonal teenagers sent to a strange planet to the adults on the satellite controlling everything — almost all of them are just plain dumb. The man in charge of the prisoners, who turns out was only temporarily in charge (bad character introductions everywhere, by the way), sent the 100 kids down without so much as a training class or update on what they were supposed to do. They’re expendable, according to the Chancellor, which is why they’re sending prisoners down to test the environment.
You could say that this is just another way to lower the population, but the shuttle used to send the kids down on the trip was equipped with a message from the Chancellor explaining what they were doing and what they had to do next, which implies this trip was definitely planned. Ignore the fact that none of these teenagers pay attention to the video, except one of the few main characters we like, and focus on this fact instead: If they had time to provide these kids with a map, a video with instructions, and a ship, you’d think they would have educated these kids at least a little bit before sending them down to a planet with unknown dangers. And the fact that they didn’t send a single guard down there to watch a crew of delinquents is a little unnerving.
Okay, we admit we pointed out a ton of plot holes, and some of them could be filled in with bits of information we learn throughout the episode, but let’s face it: If your pilot has this many plot holes, how many holes will the show in its entirety have?
Take away the idiocy of the characters and their bad introductions, and you still have a plethora of characters that you just don’t like. When Lost aired and they crashed on an unknown island, everyone there (even the kids) knew the situation and were level-headed enough to understand the need to learn how to survive in their new environment. In The 100, 90% of the kids adapt this “do whatever the hell we want” mentality that points out they’re all a bunch of uneducated miscreants, and only a few of these characters make you want to root for the smart ones.
We’re firm believers of the idea that to like a show, you need to like the characters – and there’s only a handful of characters that we end up liking at the end of the episode, so we really couldn’t care less about the rest of the 100. Oh, and never mind the fact that one of the characters we really liked ended up being killed in the last few minutes! They literally had 99 other people to kill off to make their point across and they killed the one character who was starting to show real growth – totally disappointing.
Although the show had some really intriguing mysteries set up for the rest of the series, and a few great commercial cliffhangers, we don’t think we’ll be continuing the series. If we catch next week’s episode, it’s for the off chance that these characters don’t make us want to kick our TVs.
Grade: C-
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