It’s the penultimate episode of The 100 season 2. And true to the show’s style, everything took a turn for the worse.

It’s official: The 100 has gotten so dark, I actually can’t see what’s going on. Seriously though. In those tunnel scenes I couldn’t see anything. Dear color graders (you know I love you), maybe up the brightness just a tad?

Anyway, so, that’s the last I’ll say about lighting this week, because WHOA. I’m surprised. I’m confused. I feel personally betrayed. And that, my friends, is the beauty of The 100.

The funny thing is, we’ve always known that Lexa is not like the other Grounders. She values peace in a way few Grounders do, and exactly because of this instinct to be merciful, Lexa fights extra hard to prove (to her people and herself) that she is as cold and clinical as she can be.

Her betrayal of Clarke and the alliance was, ironically, the most anti-Grounder thing she could have possibly done. Because here’s the thing: yes, she put her people first. But blood did not have blood. While Clarke was being calm and mission-focused, Lexa was riling her people up for a fight, ready to kill everyone who’d ever tried to hurt her people. “Blood will have blood. The Mountain will fall.” Everyone fell for it, including us.

But by choosing to retreat from a fight, after treating with their enemies and abandoning their allies, Lexa never actually got blood for blood. Some Grounders might see that as a cowardly move, and I think it’s going to backfire spectacularly.

But let’s talk about other stuff first, and come back to this at the end when we’ve had time to calm down and no longer want to angrily throw stacks of paper at Emerson (hands down, funniest part of the episode).

Echo! Echo… echo… echo…

That name really foreshadowed the total lack of despair Bellamy must have felt at the end of the episode, huh?

Guys, when will we learn not to take things The 100 gives us at face value?! Fess up, how many of you were already kind of beginning to ship BellamyBellamy (thanks Dorothy Fortenberry, I’m still giggling about that one)?

It all seemed perfect. She was hot, she had that sexy slashed mummy look going for her, and she was ready to muster an – albeit pathetic – army up behind the enemy lines. Did you see the way the Grounders were let out of the mountain? Those poor bastards couldn’t have put up a fight if they’d wanted to.

Thinking everything was going right (hahahahaha oh Bellamy), Bells hops back into the vents he now calls home and emerges to conveniently – and temporarily – save Maya’s dad. Miller works his magic, and by magic I mean muscles, and that’s one group of delinquents safe. Only problem? Monty’s in the other group.

This was hilarious. Jasper, Bellamy and Maya run off to save the last 12 kids, and as soon as Monty conveniently reveals that he evaded capture, they completely abandon the other 11. The #Jonty was strong this week. But was anyone else a little bit upset Miller didn’t join the Monty-and-maybe-everyone-else-if-they’re-nearby rescue mission?

The hilarity stopped very quickly of course, when they got to the Grounder cages to find Maya’s dad dead and the inside army gone. Damn. And speaking of damns…

Hey Raven, water you doing? #DamJokes

Wick and Raven, I’m counting on you two to be the new powercouple. You can never ever betray each other on the turn of a dime because the story calls for it. My heart can’t handle it.

Also, I’m reeeeeally liking the CSI feel their scenes have. So much banter and science talk I don’t really understand.

But at least their mission was simple enough: they went to the dam to blow up Mount Weather’s external power generators, which would turn off the power holding the door shut for exactly one minute until the backup generator turned on.

It’s basically the post-apocalyptic equivalent of saying, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” And hey, it worked on Lincoln……. (Think about it.)

Of course the damn dam is not left unprotected. Wick has his first kill, and then they pull a Bellamy and conveniently blow up their foes while miraculously surviving with only minor cuts and bruises.

Then the most beautiful, heartbreaking scene happens. Wick wakes up and tries to carry Raven (whose brace is broken) away, only to realize he can’t do it. She starts to speak, and he cuts her off. “I’m not going anywhere without you.” But that’s not what she was going for. “Please don’t leave me.” It’s Raven finally, at the end of all things, allowing herself to be fragile. Letting Wick in, just as everything seems lost.

It’s a good thing the promo showed them alive (…for now), because I was just waiting for the screen to cut to black and the gunfire to start. Oh god. Nothing like certain death to make you truly appreciate how much you NEED some of these characters to survive, right?

Octavia of the…?

Well. So much for our “Lexa dies and Octavia becomes Commander” theory, right? In a parallel universe, this totally could have happened, but I guess this is more interesting. Or whatever. I’ll just write a fanfic about it.

Octavia gets ONE moment of feeling like she belongs this week. Indra dubs her “Octavia of the Tree People,” and states, “you’re one of us now.” Octavia is visibly elated, because all she’s ever wanted was to find a people that accepted her.

This only makes her choice at the end of the episode so much stronger. Because ultimately, she’s always going to be part of a tribe of two: herself and her brother. It’s nice to see that even after everything, Octavia still stays true to that.

She’s her own person and she’s been going down her own path this year (without Bellamy or Lincoln getting a say), but ultimately, you can’t take away the years she spent on the Ark with her brother. He’s the only one who never abandoned her, and she’s not going to abandon him now.

They hear the retreat signal, and Indra leaves. The Sky People leave. Octavia is alone. Octavia of the nothing – for now. Because of course she’ll only rise up stronger after this (if she survives). She and Lincoln are both anarchists, ultimately, and I truly believe they’re the key to some kind of new society – not quite Grounders and not quite Sky People. But it all depends on what happens next week, of course; I’m officially done trying to make predictions!

Turn to page 2 for a dissection of Lexa’s decision to betray the alliance.

Alright FINE let’s talk about the thing

You know what I wish? I wish I was about to launch into a dance of joy about how brilliant this plot twist was, how The 100 never stops surprising me. I’d have lots of happy comments as we all formed a power circle around Lexa and confessed how her complexity only made us love her more.

But I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen. Prepare your pitchforks.

Look, by all counts, Lexa’s decision makes sense for her character: she’s a leader, she values peace over conflict, and the lives of her people come first. And yet her 180 this week felt too sudden, too out of the blue, too inorganic. I didn’t buy it, and I’ve really been working hard to figure out why.

Right after I watched the episode, I was very conflicted. I had no idea what I was going to write in this recap, because I really wanted to be excited about this. I love complex characters. Lexa’s never pretended to be anything she’s not. I’ve always trusted the writers, and I didn’t like this new feeling of doubt.

When I took to Twitter to find some answers, all I got was support for Lexa. Explanations for why it made sense, really; why it was totally in character for her to do what she did:

And this is ALL TRUE. So why do I still feel like the story intentionally misled me? I’ve always admired The 100 for putting character above plot; it’s felt like the characters drove the story, and always reacted authentically to what happened. Even when they surprised or disappointed me, it made sense.

This doesn’t feel like it makes sense. Logically, I understand the arguments. I get why Lexa did what she did. She tells Clarke she made this decision with her head, that she had to put her people first.

So here’s what I’ve come up with. I think it’s an original argument, so it’s probably easy to tear it apart, but just remember: I’m judging with my gut, here. Something can be right on paper without feeling right on the screen. I suppose it’s the head versus heart debate, and I’m Team Heart all the way.

If Lexa’s choice in the finale was in character, her choice to let Tondc burn was not

Kim Shumway (a writer on the show, so what she says kind of trumps any argument I could ever make) wrote a brilliant piece on Tumblr explaining Lexa’s choice, and why getting the door open didn’t guarantee success for the Grounder/Sky People alliance. She says:

Lexa is the commander. She has an obligation to do what’s best for her people. Are we really going to say that engaging in a battle where so many will die is better for her people than minimizing her losses?

Like it or not, this is what leaders have to do: they have to make the hard choices. They have to set aside their personal feelings and look at a situation objectively. Hundreds of lives lost to maybe save some of her people vs zero lives lost to save everyone.

Hell, that’s no choice at all.

I would have no problem backing, even championing this argument, if not for Tondc. See, the fact that Mount Weather is a formidable foe isn’t news to the Grounders. Hell, they have legends about the firepower of the Mountain Men; the Grounders live in constant fear of these people.

So the moment Lexa got news that they were going to bomb her people, THIS was the moment when she should have made the choice she made this week. We’re all agreeing that she chose to let the bomb fall, sacrificing hundreds of her people, in order for Bellamy to lower the Mountain’s defences and allow them to attack, right? Triggering a war with the very people that she turned around and retreated from in “Blood Must Have Blood.”

Even if Lexa did all of that with the intention of freeing her own people at any cost, how many souls are we talking about? 100? 200? More or less than the number of people who perished in Tondc? Ultimately, if Lexa chose to put her people first this week, she should have made the same choice two weeks ago, and we never would have ended up here in the first place. And that’s why it feels contrived.

Lexa, as far as we know, wasn’t necessarily planning to betray the alliance. It was a lucky break: Wallace proposed to Cage that they offer her the trade, and the chance of getting her people back without any further bloodshed was too tempting, so she took it. In this instance, she made the hard choice; she chose her people over Clarke. But only two weeks ago, she made the exact opposite choice – she sacrificed her people for a chance to fight a war she was never guaranteed to win.

But, of course, she’s allowed to change her mind. It’d just have been nice for us to see that happen. As Eric at IGN (who, like most The 100 fans, appreciated Lexa’s unexpected turn) writes in his review, “the one difficult thing to reconcile here is how it all happened offscreen.” Lexa’s change of heart certainly did feel like it came out of nowhere. And maybe that’s why I dislike it. Maybe I just got too attached to her, like Clarke did.

This is probably a careful, brilliant plan by the writers to make me feel exactly as betrayed and conflicted as I’m feeling right now. And that’s great. But having seen Lexa make ruthless choice after ruthless choice in the name of balance and revenge, right now this just feels like a convoluted twist to send our heroes from bad to worse.

Lexa, suddenly, doesn’t feel like a character – she feels like a plot device.

While her choice makes total sense on paper, and I technically agree with all the arguments I’ve read defending the twist, I can’t get over the feeling of unease I get when watching (and re-watching) the moment. Reading explanations online and seeing it play out on screen are two very different things.

As I’ve already said, I’m trying to get behind this development. I don’t actually like criticising storylines before I have the full picture; for all I know, there’s more going on than we realize. There probably is another twist coming – the writers know what they’re doing, after all. And the fact that Alycia Debnam Carey is now scheduled to appear in the finale gives me hope.

But hey, if I was a Yes Man all the time, these recaps wouldn’t be interesting. So this is my stance: everything the show has led me to believe about Lexa is telling me that she would never make this choice – not at this point in time, not after everything she’s already sacrificed to position herself and her army in front of the gates. If the lives of Tondc’s inhabitants were worth sacrificing for the possibility of revenge, the same should be true for the lives of the Grounders trapped inside the mountain. Her sudden decision to retreat is justified, but it’s not consistent.

Now, before you press publish on your awesome and well-thought-out counter arguments, I’d like to point you to this brilliant Tumblr post I found on my quest for answers, which I think makes the same point I’m trying to make, but much more intelligently: “Lexa’s Betrayal: From a plotline/character development point of view, it makes sense; from a contextual one, it doesn’t.”

Ultimately we can argue about the validity of Lexa’s choice for all eternity, because the writers have created such an intensely layered, complicated and human person, and it IS possible to interpret her actions in different ways. (I’m only judging the storyline on how it makes me feel, and it just doesn’t feel quite right to me. Believe me, I wish it did.)

And if The Dress has taught us anything, it’s that two people can look at the same thing and see it in two very different ways. Team White and Gold forever!

NOTE: Well….. I can’t argue with the showrunner. We now know that what Lexa was agreeing to wasn’t just the release of her people, but a promise of peace with the Mountain Men. I wrote everything above under the assumption that Lexa’s only takeaway from the episode was the release of her people. Agreeing to this in the name of peace is VERY much in character for her, and it really helps make sense of everything. So thank you, writers, for being so willing to engage with your fans. I understand this development much better now.

…..Okay, no need to rub it in!

Very important stuff

– Monroe is back, and she had like a million lines! I loved it. The 100 really needs to utilize their tertiary characters more.

– The Cage/Wallace scene was amazing. It speaks to the strength of the show that a lengthy talking heads scene between two guest stars can be so intense.

– I’m intrigued about the capital Lexa was talking about. It can’t be the City of Light, can it? Cause that’s like a Grounder myth, right?

– Will Clarke ever be able to trust anyone ever again?

– Does anyone else kind of feel like Lexa’s last-minute backstabbing move would have been more in character for Anya? It felt like an Anya move to me. But Lexa was her Second, so maybe that should have tipped us off.

– You have no idea how many water-related jokes I had to throw away this week. I had a whole bit about “dam nation,” and the world will never know.

Alright, let’s have it. Share your thoughts on this week’s ‘The 100’ episode in the comments, and tell me how wrong I am.

…But for every counter-argument about Lexa’s decision, please include one #DamJoke for levity.