The 100 5×07, “Acceptable Losses” is all about Monty, Madi and Kabby, and sets up the inevitable, sure-to-be-epic Clarke vs Octavia showdown. What’s not to like?!

Not to alarm anyone, but we are officially more than halfway through The 100 season 5. (It would probably be a lot less scary if we didn’t know the sixth season is already being written, but hey.)

After an immensely fantastic first act, the middle part of the season is moving along smoothly, with “Acceptable Losses” foregoing fast-paced action for the sake of quieter, excellent character moments before the pace (presumably) picks up again for the big finish.

“Acceptable Losses” had pretty much everything I want in an episode of The 100. It was funny, it was heartfelt, it was creepy AF, and it showcased the deep connections between (some of) these characters that make the current crisis not only thought-provoking but emotionally resonant to watch.

It also took the time to look back, something that always serves to make the present-day storyline feel more epic. Not back to the six years we skipped past, but all the way back to the season 3 finale, aka. the second time Jasper almost died on The 100.

Jasper’s letter was not only given to Monty, but read out loud to all of us, allowing both us and the characters to not only remember Jasper, but remember what broke him: the shattered belief in humanity and the ground as anything other than a living hell.

That it ends up being Jasper’s posthumous legacy that sparks what could potentially be a game-changing development – an actual breaking of the cycle of war and violence that has defined the series thus far – and that it should come through Monty and Clarke is such a big, significant, heavy thing that threads back to the very beginning.

Clarke and Monty’s relationship has never been central to any storyline, and yet it has always been there, brewing in the background, informing both characters’ actions in bigger or smaller ways. And that is exactly why having an episode so (relatively) heavily devoted to their friendship, and their shared love of Jasper, matters so immensely.

And tying it all into the over-arching theme of the show – that humanity will always lock itself in unnecessary ‘us vs them’ conflicts, to its own undoing – is a stroke of absolute genius. I already loved The 100 season 5, but this angle has just added a whole new layer of excitement for me. Plus, any episode that features a solid dose of Monty Green (GREEN!) is a winner in my book.

Let’s discuss the excellent episode “Acceptable Losses,” written by Jeff Vlaming and directed by Mairzee Almas.

(And my apologies that this review is coming so late — I was on holiday.)

Breaking the cycle

Clarke Griffin: Wanheda, Mountain Slayer, Mother of Nightbloods… Breaker of Cycles?

In November of last year, I wrote an article titled “We’re all Grounders now: Humanity, tribalism and the pursuit of unity on The CW’s The 100.” Honestly, this is probably still the article I am most proud of.

In this article, I wrote:

“Showing a divided humanity coming together, finally managing to achieve something resembling true unity — breaking the pattern that has consistently led to our downfall, and continues to cripple us today — not only works within the parameters of science fiction storytelling tradition and aligns with the conclusions of the series’ generic ancestors, but would give the story of The 100 an over-arching cohesiveness and deeper meaning.

In The 100, humanity won’t continue to go around the same circles for infinity. They will, eventually, break the wheel and move forward.”

It seemed like a wild hope at the time. But IS THAT ACTUALLY WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW? Is that what Clarke just vocalized, on screen, in canon???

I don’t know how successful they will actually be in “taking out” Octavia, and whether letting Diyoza win will actually be how they get to peace (oh, wait…). But I am on board with what is currently happening vis-à-vis the characters calling out the repetitiveness of their own (and our) narrative and finally taking strides to be different, and to do better.

A big theme of The 100 season 5, apart from the obvious themes of family and belonging, is the idea of mythologizing the story as it was and exploring the friction between memory and reality.

Clarke’s stories to Madi glorifying her friends and her friendships stand in painful contrast to the in many ways impersonal mess they find themselves in now, and characters like Octavia, Bellamy, Raven, Kane and Emori are similarly struggling to reconcile their loved ones with the people they have become.

But the benefit of this meta mythologizing is that at least some of the characters – Clarke, Monty and Kane, the thinkers and peacemakers – can now more clearly see the bigger picture.

Particularly Clarke and Monty, who didn’t live through the Dark Year and therefore have no context for the cult of Wonkru, see Octavia for what she is: another ruler addicted to ruling, high on the drug of herself, going harder and bigger in a desperate effort to prove to everyone, and herself, that she is as worthy and special as she claims to be. Octavia isn’t just making the same mistakes as the leaders that came before her, she is intentionally doing what she has seen others do, what she has read about others doing, because that is the only way she knows how.

Clarke partly recognizes what Octavia is doing because she has been down that road herself, as Octavia indeed points out: in seasons 3 and 4, Clarke had people telling her she was born to rule to the point where she started to believe it, and started to make judgement calls on behalf of humanity because she believed she was the best person to do so.

In that respect, Octavia is no different. For six years, she has poured her blood into Wonkru and that name, that unity, that legacy of Lincoln, is her entire world now. It’s not the individual people that matter to Octavia, it’s what they collectively stand for. Is that sympathetic? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s understandable, from her perspective.

(I recently published an article in which I argued that Diyoza comes off more sympathetic by contrast exactly because we’ve seen her care about individual lives, but I would add the caveat that Diyoza is probably basing her ‘affection’ for her people on an idea, and the fervor she feels for her own cause, as much as Octavia is.)

That said, breeding war worms and risking the destruction of Eden because she (and Cooper) would rather nobody get to live in it than Wonkru losing this war is obviously utter madness, short-sighted and speaking to the same delusion as “the wind has not met Wonkru” (low-key my favorite line of the season tbh). Power corrupts, and Octavia is corrupted. Jasper was right. Luna was right. Humanity is its own undoing, and Octavia is falling into all the same traps as the leaders she tries so hard to emulate.

But how fitting that the people to realize that Octavia indeed needs to be stopped are Monty and Clarke, two of her earliest allies. Last week, I lamented the lack any significant personal connection between these recently reunited characters (and I stand by that the emotional disconnect felt very jarring in that episode), so it was a pleasant surprise to not only see Clarke and Monty actually interact this week, but to see them clicking back into the easy understanding and camaraderie they had in season 1.

Monty/Clarke is one of those peripheral dynamics that always had the potential to be so much more than the narrative allows it to be. There isn’t time for everything, but I’m glad that the show is finally finding a pocket of time to show them finally working side by side again.

And these characters are really more similar than we usually consider them. They have very different temperaments, but they have a very similar way of seeing the world, and they’ve got the shared ability of being able to separate their own personal morals from ‘the greater good.’

And after six years, they are both tired of war. Perhaps more than any other two characters, Clarke and Monty each found a kind of peace in relative solitude that they weren’t keen to give up, and post-time jump, they are similarly weary – not surprised, not angry, not confused – but tired of all the drama. They see now what Jasper saw two seasons ago: that this latest cycle of hell is a never-ending spiral.

Heaven on Earth

”I was happy. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. … I think I was in heaven. And now I’m not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out, by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch. This is Hell.”
– Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 6×03 “After Life”

I have been quietly marking the similarities between Clarke’s season 5 arc and Buffy Summers’ story in Buffy season 6, in which she is resurrected by her friends after sacrificing herself to save the world: once she comes back to life, she is miserable, self-destructive, and detached from the people around her. We find out that she was in Heaven, and she can’t deal with the harsh realities of life, to the point where it nearly kills her.

After seeing this episode, I think that this comparison applies not just to Clarke — who was literally ripped out of Eden, her days of simple happiness swapped out for terror and torture and constant worry that Madi will be harmed — but also to Monty, for whom space provided a similarly simple routine that might have felt monotonous to others, but where he felt at peace.

The Ring might not have been Heaven for any of his companions (except maybe Emori), but Monty felt safe and happy there in a way he never did on the ground. Unlike Jasper, Monty didn’t realize how much he missed the Ark until after he went back there, but he understands now the sharp contrast between the peaceful life he can lead there and the horrors that will always haunt him on the surface.

(Sidenote: I am wondering how Harper actually feels about this. It doesn’t seem to me like she actually misses the Ring, or was particularly keen to stay there, but it’s hard to say… since she isn’t, you know, saying it.)

Of course there was one character who saw the truth before any of the others. Jasper’s suicide note, which Clarke finally gave back to Monty (without ever reading it – that’s mad self-control), revealed that already before he knew about Praimfaya, Jasper was done with the cycle. He saw humanity for what it was, and he wanted no part in it.

But even though Jasper had decided to stop fighting what he considered the inevitable, some part of him clearly wanted others to keep trying. He wanted Bellamy to keep trying. He was devastatingly disappointed in Clarke because he trusted her to save them and she failed.

And it is that desire to do better, that hope – however faint – that it is possible to break the cycle, that might just be humanity’s salvation. Even in a bleak of a narrative as The 100, we can see it: yes, humans will always keep trying to destroy themselves and each other, but there are always people trying to do better, to change the world, to usher in something new and better. And sometimes those humans even succeed, at least to a point, at least in some small way, even on The 100.

Even though hope is (allegedly) not a theme on this show, the desire to do better (break the cycle) is as much a part of our nature as the desire to destroy. And The 100 clearly understands this, as the story is ultimately about these two sides of humanity battling each other for dominance.

And I just love the idea that, while Diyoza and Octavia are busy destroying themselves and each other for the physical possession of land, Clarke and Monty might just be the ones to lead the charge in terms of bringing some kind of tangible peace. It would be the perfect legacy for Jasper, and a great way to bring these four characters’ bond full circle.

Of course as I wrote in the last article, actually breaking the cycle of violence and self-destruction is easier said than done. But with so few humans left on the planet, and so little land for them to live on, you would think that this is their best chance yet – if someone is ready and willing to step up and lead them to peace.

Madi’s World

Everyone is busy judging Octavia for the harsh actions she’s taking to secure a future for her people. And, yes, fighting a territorial war rather than sharing the space is a fundamentally terrible idea. Neither Octavia nor Diyoza actually need to position the other as ‘the enemy,’ and it is totally false to posit that only one people can inhabit Eden. There is plenty of room. There is no need to fight except fighting is all they know.

But Octavia isn’t wrong when she points out that, under different circumstances, Clarke was willing to irradiate a guy and Bellamy was willing to slaughter an army. Do they justify that differently? Yes. Does the audience? Probably. But it’s all relative. All of it. From Octavia’s perspective, she isn’t doing anything she hasn’t seen other leaders do before her.

And even this season, while we can (and should!) certainly side-eye Octavia and Diyoza for putting Eden in jeopardy and risking all of humanity in order to give their own people the best chance, we have to recognize that Clarke is in a very similar position.

Clarke’s people is now Madi, and we’ve already seen her willing and able to sacrifice everything and everyone to save her. Even though Clarke is obviously motivated to break the cycle, she only acts on it when it is Madi who is being threatened. Clarke can admire Octavia’s ability to hold her people together, but when Octavia goes after Madi? She becomes an enemy of ClarkeKru.

(And can you blame her? Madi is amazing.)

It is interesting, because in many ways, Madi’s story is archetypical in a way unusual to The 100 — she is the chosen one, the one girl in all the world, etc etc — and if the writing and acting hadn’t been as tight as it is, this kind of character might not have felt at home on a show like this. But she really does.

The spirituality of the Flame, and the narrative’s vague suggestion that maybe she does indeed have a ‘destiny,’ don’t feel out of place in this world at all. I maintain that Madi is one of the best new characters this show has ever introduced, and her arc is one of the ones I’m most invested in — with or without the Flame.

The saga of Becca Pramheda and her line of successors has been an intricate part of The 100’s mythology since the first time someone said the word “Commander.” This storyline has building up all the way from the infamous Pauna episode, in which Lexa told Clarke that the Grounders’ leaders are somehow ‘chosen’ by the spirits of the former Commanders.

We’ve had so many false starts and fakeouts since then, and obviously the Flame continues to matter to so many of the characters regardless of whether it’s relevant for the current storyline. Eventually, we had see a Nightblood character actually go through the process of being chosen, or it would have felt like a massive missed opportunity. (Whether or not that story actually ends with Madi taking the Flame is another matter of course.)

That it is Madi, whom we already know and care about outside of her Commander potential, makes the storyline a million times more interesting to watch. I don’t necessarily want Madi to take the Flame, and who is to say if she actually will, but even just seeing her ‘meet’ her legacy for the first time, and getting the sense that it is indeed calling to her, felt like a payoff to years of elaborate setup.

Will Madi actually become Commander? It’s hard to say No matter how I look at it, it’s weird to imagine her with a bit of Lexa inside her head. But based on what we know about her, I absolutely believe that Madi would take the Flame, if she felt like it was the right thing to do.

Madi is noble and brave and morally uncorrupt as only a child of Eden could be: she has all the best parts of Clarke, with none of the damage, and like Clarke, she would absolutely take the Flame if she thought it would save the human race. If Wonkru needs a leader that would cede to Diyoza, then Madi could be that leader, and that would be how they could get to peace.

I don’t know if Clarke would ever agree to such a plan (does she not want Madi to be Commander because of the task itself, or specifically because she would be in danger from Octavia?), but I’m not sure she’d have to. Madi has already proved that she won’t hesitate to do what she believes to be right, regardless of what Clarke has – ahem – commanded her to do.

Trouble in Paradise

Out of all the new SpaceKru relationships, Echo and Raven’s might be my favorite (okay, second-favorite, Emori and Raven’s dynamic is hard to beat). That it should turn contentious so fast is regrettable, but it says a lot about how much they feel like family that Raven is ready and willing to go along with Echo’s plan even when Echo goes behind her back.

From Echo’s perspective, this is a solid plan that will save SpaceKru and earn her a place in Wonkru. From Echo’s perspective, Shaw is an acceptable loss the same way that Echo and Raven are acceptable losses to Octavia.

And her plan does work. She implants the software, and she begins to earn Diyoza’s trust. That she does it knowing that it might cost her her friendship with Raven speaks to how desperately Echo wants to prove herself, and how much she feels like she stands to lose if she fails. (And of course Echo is doing all of this thinking that she is enacting one plan, whereas Octavia obviously has a different endgame in mind.)

But Raven, obviously, is already working on her own plan, and Shaw – standoffish as he is – helped her when she most needed it. Clearly, betraying him pains Raven greatly (Zaven rise), and it literally pains Shaw, who is beat up and tossed in with the prisoners.

Why didn’t Diyoza kill him? Presumably because she still needs him to steer the ship. But will he do it? Will his and Raven’s relationship recover?

By the time you read this, we might already have the answer, but I’m tentatively going to say yes. Diyoza alienating Shaw further won’t inspire loyalty in him, regardless of how they started — after all, Shaw originally helped the prisoners because he felt like they were being unfairly treated, so how will he feel when Diyoza unfairly treats her prisoners?

Our second chance

Sooooo Diyoza is pregnant. Who knew?! Certainly not me!

I mean, we kind of all knew. At least we all knew that Ivana Milicevic was pregnant when shooting season 5. But there are ways to cover it up, if they had wanted to. The 100 has avoided pregnancy storylines like the plague up until now, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if Diyoza had just carried a lot of beach balls (or, more appropriately, giant grenades) this season.

But I really, really admire the fact that they chose to go with it and make Diyoza pregnant. Because sometimes that happens. It doesn’t in any way define her character or her arc, but it’s a part of who she is, and will obviously be a part of her journey, and it just adds more layers to her character.

And of all the characters to get pregnant, making it the main villain was a pretty badass move. Some of the best, boldest and most interesting story decisions on The 100 comes from letting the story go where it organically wants to go, and this is a prime example.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when/if the baby is born, too, since we’ve never had a baby on the show before. (No, Madi was NOT a baby when we met her, I don’t care what Clarke says.) I like to think that this lessens Diyoza’s chances of dying at the end of the season, because I love her, but you never know what the big twist is going to be and how they’ll be transitioning to season 6, so this really doesn’t change anything beyond finally having a character on The 100 actually being pregnant.

And, yeah, we don’t actually know that McCreary is the dad, but he is for sure the dad, so… good luck to that girl?

Meanwhile Kane and Abby are further away from #kabbybabytheory than ever. Poor Kane is trying so hard to get Abby off the pills, even while working with Diyoza, but Abby has so much pressure on her – – her ‘usefulness’ ostensibly keeps both of them alive, after all — that going through detox simply doesn’t feel like an option right now.

Kane, complete with twirling a white flower, genuinely believes in Diyoza as a leader who can bring peace. (Or maybe he just wants to believe it.) “This was supposed to be our second chance,” he tells Abby, desperately, not wanting all their suffering and sacrifices in that bunker to have been for nothing.

But to Abby, it is her responsibility to save them all. Only with those pills can she keep herself, Kane, and all of the defectors that just became an extra burden on her shoulders, alive. Stopping taking the pills would, in her mind, be the selfish choice because once she starts going through withdrawal she is essentially dooming them all. But in Kane’s eyes, her continuing to take the pills is the selfish choice. There is no right side here.

It is an interesting hurdle to give Abby at this point in the story, because addiction and the damage it does to your personal relationships is so painfully real, and complicated enough to deal with in our world, that putting a character through it in the world of The 100 is almost overwhelmingly terrifying. We can all relate to Abby or Kane’s struggle, but certainly not in this context, and with these stakes.

What should Abby do? What would you do? Is Kane right to give her an ultimatum? Would you? Once again, The 100 presents an impossible moral dilemma with no correct choices, and I have to be honest, I love the angst.

I’ve always been a fan of Kane and Abby’s relationship, and it is heartbreaking to see them so at odds. But one of the things I like about this relationship is that it has always been real, and this situation, the fact that sometimes love isn’t enough, is so very real. It is painful, but evocative storytelling. I’m excited/scared to see where this story goes.

For your consideration

What did you think about ‘The 100’ 5×07 ‘Acceptable Losses’?

‘The 100’ season 5, episode 8 airs TONIGHT! Like, right now. I just made it. You’re welcome, Jason.

Image credit to The TV Shows.US