With only one week until The 100‘s season 2 finale, I think I did it: I totally figured out what the City of Light is. (Not really, but just go with it.)
What did you think about “Blood Must Have Blood, Part 1”? Was it not just absolutely spectacular? Although we’re still reeling from Lexa’s unexpected betrayal, we must now turn our attention to the big finale: who lives? Who dies? Will Mount Weather be blasted to smithereens? What happens to poor Clarke and her ever-mounting trust issues?
And, most importantly: what is the damn City of Light? Jason Rothenberg claims we can’t figure it out. “Nobody will guess it,” he tells Zap2It. “I’ll put it that way – nobody will guess.”
You know what I see here? I see a challenge. And consider it ACCEPTED.
Full disclosure: I’m very good at coming up with The 100 theories. They usually have nothing to do with what actually ends up happening in the show though. So the more convinced I am that I’m right, the more convinced you can probably be that I’m wrong.
But speculating is half the fun of being a fan of something, and with the City of Light reveal being set up as the big season 2 finale cliffhanger, now is as good a time as any to start sharing our theories! So I’m gonna give it a whirl, and present my crackpot theory about the City of Light. Prepare for Truman Show references, snow globe science, and some Lost shout-outs for good measure. Javier Grillo-Marxuach is joining the show next year, after all!
The world as we know it? We don’t know squat
When the Ark looked down at the Earth, they detected no signs of life. But as Mount Weather had jammed their signals, we can’t trust anything the Sky People think they know about the Ground.
In the area where our Ark survivors have landed, you can hardly spit without hitting a Grounder (and then you get your head chopped off, because how dare you?). There are thousands, maybe even millions of them, divided into tribes and clearly multiplying quite efficiently despite discarding all their mutant babies.
This nuclear war can’t have been that efficient in wiping out the population, then, considering how many people are frolicking (read: mutilating each other) in the fields only 100 years later.
And since we now know that the acid fog is Mount Weather’s doing, there aren’t even a lot of natural disasters left to keep the population down. Really, if not for Mount Weather and their reign of terror, the Grounder society would probably be a lot more peaceful (all they’d have to worry about was the occasional giant gorilla).
Related: Vote: Who will die in The 100 season 2 finale?
It’s therefore completely illogical to assume that, if enough people in survived the nuclear apocalypse 100 years ago to spawn a population of this size, other areas of the world wouldn’t have done the same. And without Mount Weather to terrorize them, imprison them and turn them against each other, we might imagine that the non-Grounder Grounders (let’s just call them the Others) have evolved – or rather, have not evolved, rather sticking to the laws and norms that governed the world 100 years ago. A lot of them are probably like the Mountain Men, only they’ve never been confined to a mountain.
We think we know what the world of The 100 is like, but all we know is what’s been experienced and observed by the Ark people, the Grounders, and the Mountain Men. But their knowledge is limited, and the truth is that we have no idea what lies beyond North America. And it’s very naïve to assume that Grounder-esque societies would have formed everywhere.
So what lies beyond the Grounder Country?
One thing that’s always struck me as suspicious about the Grounders is that, a) they’re superstitiously afraid of technology, and b) they’re extremely far removed from society as we know it, which is odd considering that it’s been only three/four generations tops since the nuclear war.
Clearly, Mount Weather has done a lot to manipulate them, making them fear high-tech weaponry and keeping them ignorant about the powers of modern medicine. This seems to have been done in order to maintain the Mountain’s supply of fresh blood, without ever fearing a revolt from the people they have conditioned to fear them.
But the working solar panels and the drone which Jaha and his companions found in “Bodyguard of Lies” immediately tells us that whatever the City of Light is, it’s nothing like Tondc. Whatever technology they have, it seems way beyond anything the Grounders, and maybe even the Mountain Men, can imagine.
And let’s not forget that the world was destroyed by nuclear warfare. Some serious war stuff was going on, and my guess is that it’s still going on. The North American forests are gonna feel like a paradise compared to what’s waiting for Jaha and his crew on the other side of that water. (And isn’t that just some beautiful irony right there?)
Related: The 100’s Thelonious Jaha: Is he a madman or a messiah?
The City of Light is a fable, a legend the Grounders only whisper about; a promise of a better place, which Jaha is now treating with a completely inappropriate reverence. It is said to exist beyond the Dead Zone, a place where no Grounder in her right mind will go. It’s protected by land mines. No one who actually gets there has ever come back from it. Most Grounders don’t even believe it exists.
The City of Light may be regarded like a paradise by desperate outcasts like Zoran and his family, but there’s a reason the Grounders haven’t flocked to it in droves. Someone’s keeping them afraid, and convincing them that it’s a myth rather than a real place. It all sounds a lot like the “legends” the Mountain Men have fed the Grounders about technology, like how touching a gun will lead to the death of a village. All of this was done to keep them away.
The snow globe theory
For better or worse, St. Elsewhere made television history when its controversial series finale revealed that the entire show had been the imaginations of an autistic boy, and that the St. Elsewhere hospital only existed inside his snow globe.
Years later, Buffy did a similarly mind-bending episode in which it was strongly suggested that everything that had happened on the show had been the lunatic fantasies of Buffy the Mental Patient. Fans were, understandably, outraged. How dare the writers suggest that the fictional world they’d come to believe in wasn’t even real within its own universe?
Related: Five flashbacks we’d like to see in The 100 season 3
While I obviously don’t think the world of The 100 is a dream or a fantasy (plot twist: Clarke never left the white room in Mount Weather!), the fact remains that so far, we’ve been viewing the show through a macro lens. Imagine the show like the intro credits of Game of Thrones: the telescope starts by focusing in on the Weirwood tree in Winterfell, and then it zooms out, bit by bit, to reveal more and more of the vast world of Westeros.
In season 1 of The 100, we were tightly focused on the drop ship and its surrounding areas. In season 2 we expanded to Mount Weather, the desert and Tondc. In season 3, my theory is that we’ll click out once more and see the world outside the Grounders’ territories. And it’ll change everything we thought we knew about the show.
Crossing the threshold
Unlike in St. Elsewhere, what happens in The 100 is absolutely, brutally real. But the snow globe theory still works, because it’s all about characters existing in a small little reality which turns out to be a cog in a much bigger machine. A similar storyline has recently been explored in The Maze Runner, which of course is a play on the Truman Show trope: the reality our characters think they know is a construct, controlled by outside forces who are monitoring everything that’s happening.
When Jaha and Murphy cross the lake and get through the obscuring fog, it’ll be reminiscent of Truman stepping out of his television show in The Truman Show. They’ll have stepped out of the illusion and into the big, real and very different world beyond, and all the tiny wars the Grounders, Sky People and Mountain Men have been fighting among themselves suddenly seem meaningless.
But what is waiting for them on the other side? A group of people who have been monitoring the Grounder territories, to see how a society might form when stripped of modern amenities? Or a society completely unconcerned with the Grounders and the Weathermen, because there’s a much bigger conflict happening elsewhere?
I obviously can’t say, but I do believe that the world beyond North America is not just a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Some areas have to have been closer to the bombs than others, right? So what if there’s plenty of modernity, technology and societal norms as we know them? What if the tiny section of North America which the Grounders inhabit is just a closed-off world, kept ignorant and isolated in order to be observed by whatever people inhabit the City of Light (light = electricity)?
In the season 2 finale, we’ll discover that our characters are just small players in a much larger game, and our jaws will drop as we realize just how advanced and superior humanity in the City of Light and beyond really is. We’ll head into the hiatus completely unable to imagine what’ll happen next, and feeling like all the small things that seemed so important might not be as relevant anymore, now that the world has expanded so drastically.
Please share your theories about the City of Light in the comments! Even if my theory is dead wrong, I’m confident we can crack this code before the season finale.
Whatever you figure the City of Light to be, one thing is certain: Jason Rothenberg has promised a “big turn” in season 3. Let’s face it, we have no idea what it’s gonna be, but what kind of fans would we be if we didn’t throw some wild crazy theories out there to spark some discussion?
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