The 100 season 6, episode 3, “The Children of Gabriel,” is all about first times, first impressions and second chances.

With “The Children of Gabriel,” The 100 delivers a solid setup episode for what season 6 will (seemingly) be about: Russell Lightbourne, the Primes, Sanctum, and of course the titular Children.

But the episode is much more than an information dump: a lot of care is given to little moments between the characters, and we get hints of some of the underlying themes of this season: guilt, forgiveness, second chances, and the value of a single life.

“The Children of Gabriel” provides a thrilling introduction to the new world, its inhabitants, its conflicts and its mysteries and also serves to slow the pace of the story and check in with some of our core dynamics — and fringe dynamics. Jackson and Emori, hello! Spinoff, anyone?

I don’t know how much of this came from Drew Lindo’s writing, Dean White’s directing or the actors’ own input, but someone made sure to let the camera linger on small but significant little moments of physical affection between the characters.

Abby and Clarke, Abby and Murphy, Murphy and Bellamy, Bellamy and Madi, Emori and Raven, Jackson and Emori, Jackson and Miller, Clarke and Jordan, Clarke and Madi; this episode checks in with so many character constellations. The 100 sometimes barrels full steam ahead with its conflicts without ever letting the characters just enjoy each other’s company (which is what makes us care about all those conflicts), so I highly appreciate “The Children of Gabriel” taking the time to do so.

On that note, I have to admit that I am a little disappointed by the lack of fallout (so far) from the psychosis episode last week. That seems like something the characters would have wanted to reflect on or talk about, particularly seeing as a lot of those affected were locked in a room together with nothing better to do for most of the episode.

As I wrote in my review of “Red Sun Rising,” I believe the psychoses revealed a lot about the characters’ mental states and their current feelings about each other. I still believe that, but I suppose it would be nice to be proven wrong/right about those interpretations.

As this episode so effectively proves, you don’t have to sacrifice a lot of screen time to show us that these people care about each other. An instinctual protective lunge (like Clarke’s toward Jordan) or touching hands (Bellamy and Murphy — apparently an unscripted moment!) goes a long way. This episode is as much about checking in with these dynamics as it is about the new characters and their world, and that really elevates what could have been a much more by-the-numbers transition chapter.

Of course it also helps that the new characters and their mysteries are incredibly compelling, but that should hardly come as a surprise. Probably The 100’s biggest strength is its ability to introduce interesting new characters.

Welcome to Mount Sanctum

First of all: J.R. Bourne is absolutely incredible as Sanctum’s not-so-peaceful leader Russell, as we knew he would be. He plays Russell with the exact amount of kindness and charm to make it seem genuine, which makes his measured condemnation of Clarke and his furious dismissal of Diyoza all the more impactful. You want this guy to approve of you, you know?

Equally formidable is Tattiawna Jones as Russell’s wife Simone. Her frosty demeanor toward Clarke is totally understandable — she too is protecting her people, and Clarke is not her people — but her dismissal still seems unfair from our/Clarke’s perspective.

Simone and Russell don’t just decide that sending Clarke and her friends packing is in the best interest of their people. They make a moral judgement of Clarke based on events they haven’t witnessed, deeming them unworthy of a second chance and comparing them to animals, as though they consider themselves superior beings. (As, in all likelihood, they do.)

While Simone is more openly hostile, Russell is an even scarier threat for being (or seeming) genuinely kind. He is the kind of person who can calmly talk his way into making his tyranny seem reasonable — a trait he shares with many of the show’s past leaders, including but not limited to Jaha, Dante Wallace, Lexa and Pike.

Sanctum’s people would appear to select their leaders by a similar practice as the Grounders, choosing the Primes’ new bodies successors from their pool of Nightblood subjects, but without the wasteful conclave part.

And, chillingly, the Primes seem to perform the same eugenics-inspired value judgement as the Mountain Men, deeming it just to sacrifice one ‘lesser’ person (a Grounder for their blood/a Nightblood for their body) to prolong their own lives. But where the Mountain Men called themselves the keepers of history, all signs point to the Primes being history in and of themselves.

…They’re totally hosting some altered carbon in this dollhouse, y’all.

Here’s what we know: Sanctum was originally colonized by four families now known as the Primes. Those 12 Primes had Nightblood, intended to help them survive in conditions of heightened radiation. That blood is now considered ‘royal,’ and those who have it are referred to as ‘hosts.’ On her Naming Day, the Nightblood/host Delilah will become ‘Priya the 7th,’ which she indicates to Jordan marks the end of her own life.

Here’s what we think we know: the Primes are transferring their Flame-like personality chips into new Nightblood bodies once per generation and living forever as rulers/gods of their people, and this is why Kaylee (Sarah-Jane Redmond) doesn’t seem to consider her family members dead before they have their heads chopped off. Rose, Delilah and now Clarke are marked as hosts for the Primes, which means their bodies can/will be taken over by Primes in need of new bodies.

Russell clearly changes his mind about letting Clarke and her people stay because of her Nightblood; likely, his daughter Josephine is in storage somewhere, waiting for her turn to be resurrected in a suitable host body, and Clarke gives Russell an opportunity to let Josephine jump the queue.

This seems like a logical deduction based on the information we get in this episode (not that I called it last week or anything, no big deal), but obviously nothing is confirmed yet, and for all we know, it could be a giant misdirect.

But it’s always fun to speculate! So let’s indulge for a moment in this exciting possibility that Josephine and co. are still ‘alive,’ living in other bodies or waiting for a worthy body to jump into.

I think we’re pretty much all assuming that Clarke becomes the host for Josephine at some point, either by force or by choice in exchange for Madi and her people’s safety. This would, certainly, be a great new acting challenge for Eliza Taylor!

And I honestly hope we’re all reading the cards right, because this development would open up some incredible opportunities for both Clarke and everyone else to actually reckon with who Clarke is and what she is worth to them. Not as a leader or a savior or a martyr, but as Clarke.

Russell drops a major anvil about Clarke considering herself “disposable” early on in this episode, building on last week where her psychosis made her ready to take herself out of the equation to save Madi. If Clarke actually takes the leap and gives up her body to host a Prime, it’ll force everyone around her to truly reckon with how much they love and need her, and perhaps prompt them to fight for Clarke for a change. Imagine characters like Murphy, Bellamy and Raven being faced with this scenario. If the price of true peace is Clarke’s soul, is that a price they are willing to pay?

However you feel about the overarching Becca tech arc and the expansion of the Flame mythology, this reads strongly to me like a vehicle through which to explore Clarke’s diminishing self-worth, and force other people to confront how they feel about her worth. Not a superficial ‘I’m going to blame/forgive her for XYZ past action,’ but ‘This how how I truly feel about Clarke as an individual human being right now, and this is the length to which I am willing to go to save her.’ That is the story that could be at the heart of a potential AI reincarnation storyline this season. And I want that heart.

(I am trying and failing to not get too excited about the possibility in case the story goes in a totally different (and probably equally interesting) direction, but it’s hard. It would be SO GOOD.)

I obviously hear and understand the concerns shared by fans about this Prime/host business being a repetition of the Flame storyline and Commander lore, and while I suppose we’ll have to wait to have that conversation properly until we actually know if our theories are even correct, I will say that I wouldn’t consider a story about resurrection to be a Flame rehashing.

At the core of The 100‘s mythology is the multi-faceted legacy of an ancient scientist on a Holy Grail quest to crack the code of eternal life (it’s an ∞ symbol for a reason, right?), and The Flame was just one branch on the Becca Pramheda story tree. ALIE/the City of Light was another. The Primes could be a third.

If our prevalent Prime chip theory is correct, it would be one entire brain mapping on a computer chip overriding the existing ‘programming’ of whatever brain it was embedded into, ala Altered Carbon (permanent), Dollhouse (reversible) or The Host (the new mind battling the old for control of the body). The Flame is an AI that collects minds and molds them into one consciousness. The tech would be similar, but used for very different purposes and used to tell very different stories.

I personally think the slowly unfolding mythology of Becca Pramheda as the scientist/god/creator of the post-apocalyptic universe is brilliantly done. The flesh and blood of The 100 is always going to be its main characters and their relationships, but the bones are an overarching, multi-faceted exploration of humanity’s symbiotic yet mutually destructive relationship with technology. And that all of this technology ultimately stems from the brilliant brain of one female scientist is pretty damn cool.

Children of the forest, corn, blood… etc.

So if the Sanctumnians(?) are the new Mountain Men, that must make the Children of Gabriel the new Grounders, right?

We met the Gabriel they take their name from in last week’s episode: a member of the original landing party, Gabriel Santiago was a geneticist who was probably there to take care of the embryos.

Gabriel witnessed the first eclipse massacre and escaped into the forest, but in this episode, Russell tells a story of the ‘demon’ Gabriel who believed he could walk on water, implying that he fell victim to this or a future psychosis himself.

Was Gabriel a Prime? If the Santiagos were one of the founding families (he is shown in last week’s episode to take care of a boy that could be his younger brother), then yes. Or he could have been a geneticist on board for his particular skills, right?

Did he reject the resurrection thing (or whatever keeps the Primes in power)? Was it denied him? Whatever happened, at some point he split from the (other) Primes, becoming an active threat to them to the point where they had to demonize him to turn their people against him and his followers and prevent dissent.

Obviously the symbolism of Gabriel as a fallen angel cast out of Heaven and becoming the demon king of the underworld is pretty on the nose, but the first thing the Children of Gabriel reminded me of was actually an Icelandic legend that speaks of the ‘underground people.’

The story goes that when God came to visit Adam and Eve, he asked to see their children, but Eve hadn’t finished washing them all and so she only brought out the clean children and hid the others away. When God asked if there were more, she told him no, and God then said, “What man hides from God, God will hide from man.” These unwashed children then became the trolls and gnomes and elves that live in our forests, invisible to humans unless they want to be seen.

If we assume the Primes transfer their consciousnesses into new Nightblood bodies once per generation, then the Children of Gabriel would be outcasts because they reject this practice, thus rejecting the ‘gods’ of this world. Cast out of this planet’s Eden, they have blended into the forest to the point of invisibility. But they still refer to Sanctum as their home as though it should rightfully be theirs.

So, 263 years after Gabriel landed on Alpha, his ‘children’ chant “death is life” because, I suppose, death is what makes us human. Without it, what are we? What are the Primes? AIs in human flesh? (Legend goes that this was once called a ‘Cylon.’) If Sanctum’s religion is based on the immortality of the Primes, the religion of the Children of Gabriel appears to be the sanctity of a natural death. And not only for themselves: they also seek to destroy the Primes, ending the — ahem — cycle.

But what about Gabriel himself? Could he somehow still be living in his original/first resurrected body, as the “old man” who has apparently abandoned/rejected them? Do the Children of Gabriel truly want to harm the Nightbloods they capture, or do they want to save them from becoming Prime hosts? Do they want a host for Gabriel? (I suppose Octavia will find that out next week.)

However they got to be outcasts, it doesn’t seem like an accident that fellow outcast Octavia is the one to make contact with them. Her attempt to track and attack the Children of Gabriel recalled her attempt to track Indra and the Grounders in season 2 almost beat for beat, except now everyone has leveled up. I mean, the forest! Is their weapon! So cool.

…Full disclosure, I’m totally team these guys right now, without knowing anything about them.

Dead to me

As always, the fandom is split on how to feel about the ongoing Blake family feud, and as always, I find The 100 remarkable for being able to make me feel so strongly about both Octavia and Bellamy’s wildly different points of view.

Watching Bellamy leave Octavia behind on a planet he surely must know is likely to kill her is almost unbearably sad. Not only for Octavia but also for Bellamy: for someone who has very deliberately been shown to practice almost limitless forgiveness (of Murphy, of Echo, of Clarke, of Kane, of himself), taking such a hard line with the person he loves/once loved the most speaks to how much her betrayal of him (and his own betrayal of her) has crushed him.

It is exactly because Octavia is the person he loves/once loved the most — that she is his blood, practically one half of his soul — that he can’t offer the same forgiveness to her which he can offer others. He can’t bear what she has become, he can’t bear that she tried to kill him, and he can’t bear that he tried to hill her.

That Octavia has become someone whose first instinct is violence and murder must fill him with an unbearable guilt, because he feels like it was on him to save her from that. If she is a monster, he is a monster. And that in turn gives him a desperate need to believe that this ‘monster’ he considers Blodreina to be cannot possibly be his sister. It is easier to think of the old Octavia as dead than it is to admit who Octavia has become. (You might recall me talking about Octavia’s willingness to die last episode coming from a similar place: she would rather die feeling justified in her actions than live with her guilt.)

So he leaves her to die or fend for herself as she might. Octavia is dead to him; it hurts less. It seems cruel in the moment, but this is Bellamy finally practicing self-preservation where Octavia is concerned. Cutting himself off might be the healthiest thing for Bellamy to do now, after everything that has happened. Just because someone is your blood doesn’t obligate you to bleed yourself dry for them.

And, besides, Octavia is an adult. She was the queen of her people for six years. He can’t be the big brother to her and take her pain as his own as he did when she was a child on the Ark, and she can’t expect or demand him to prioritize her safety over his own or his people’s.

From Octavia’s perspective, this is of course wildly unfair: Octavia does and always has done what she feels is necessary for the people she loves to survive. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs her. She solves their problems. She keeps them alive. She saves them. What she does in this episode is no different.

Why doesn’t Bellamy accept her methods when she gets the results he wants? Why can’t he understand that she always did what she felt she had to do for her people, just as she has seen him do? Why can’t he see that even when she put him in the fighting pit, she was looking for a way to save him while also making sure her people would get to Eden?

In a post-apocalyptic context, and understanding the messed-up complicated history of Octavia’s life and the traumas that have shaped her way of thinking, Octavia’s perspective makes just as much sense as anyone’s. Why not use murder and violence to help her people? Literally everyone else has done exactly the same thing, and their justification for why they are better than her must seem completely arbitrary and illogical.

An audience member watching all this from the real world might find it easy to side with Bellamy in his decision to finally put himself first — and as a fellow inhabitant of the real world, I would agree that the burden for Octavia’s life cannot rest on Bellamy’s shoulders — but that doesn’t invalidate Octavia’s point of view, and it doesn’t invalidate the fact that from a real world perspective, Octavia needs help, not abandonment. She has PTSD, she is suicidal, and deeply traumatized from being locked up all her life!

But you can’t really talk about Bellamy and Octavia in any real-world way, can you, because their relationship (more than any other in the show) is heightened and intensified to symbolize the world they live in.

When we discuss the pain Octavia and Bellamy inflict on each other, it is important to bear in mind that this is a heightened fiction and that their treatment of each other is similarly heightened to fit the tone of the story. There should be no coming back from beating your brother bloody and there should be no coming back from poisoning your sister and there should be no cannibalism and there should be no fighting pits, but those are the realities of this world and these characters.

Of course, Bellamy’s ‘violence’ toward Octavia is not physical, and him declaring her dead to him now is nowhere near as problematic or viscerally traumatic as when Octavia declared him dead to her in season 3 (you know, when she chained him and beat him up, lest anyone forgets about that). But Bellamy poisoning Octavia in season 5 and now doing what essentially amounts to kicking her out of the car on the side of a dark motorway are still violent acts.

Bellamy and Octavia hate each other and love each other and hurt each other more intensely than they ever will anyone else because of their shared traumatic upbringing and the codependence they developed as children. Everything about their relationship is and always has been messed up due to circumstances outside of their control, but they still deeply love each other. Octavia never stopped loving Bellamy and Bellamy hasn’t stopped loving Octavia. As an audience member, you (or at least I) still want them to eventually reach a good place because it’s such an important step toward them being able to make peace with their own and each other’s demons.

(They can exist apart from each other, of course, but as the story is still very much about their sibling relationship, I do think it’s reasonable to assume we’re headed toward some form of reconciliation.)

To that end, as I’ve said before, it was vital to physically remove Octavia from the people who knew her as Blodreina (including the people of Sanctum) so she is able to properly shed that skin and become Octavia again, violence and compassion and trauma and all.

We already see her treading in the footsteps of her season 2 self, and I really like how the conflict between her and Bellamy’s people is handled here (she is trying to help in her own way, and she succeeds in her own way, it just isn’t their way). As the promotional images for the next episode indicate, she will attempt to save the captured girl, which she wouldn’t have been able to do in the company of people she knew without them accusing her of having some selfish motive.

I had a preseason theory that Octavia would eventually join up with the Children of Gabriel, and I’m not totally ready to abandon that yet (especially if Diyoza also finds her way to them!). And I think that might be exactly what she needs: a people who don’t know her, joining a cause that rages against the machine, and finding a constructive outlet for her violence and the freedom she associates with that physicality, much like she did with the Grounders.

And, obviously, Xtavia endgame. 😎

Heda and Sheidheda

Not only is this Prime story a cool spin on Becca’s tech, it also opens up a fantastic central storyline for Madi and the Flame. Because if we assume that the Primes only have their own personalities transferred, obviously the existence of a chip that lets several personalities coexist as one entity will be of great interest to them.

As for Madi, it looks like she’s set up for some self-realization as her mind vies between good and evil influences. Gaia explains that inside the Flame, the previous Commanders are vying for each new Commander’s attention, and it is up to whomever has the Flame which ones they’ll let themselves be influenced by. She introduces ‘Sheidheda,’ the Dark Commander, who might try to lure Madi to the Dark Side.

This is very cool. Very Star Wars. Very Echo in season 2 of Dollhouse. Very Voldemort inside of Harry’s head in Order of the Phoenix. (Yes, I am saying The Flame is a Horcrux, don’t @ me.)

It allows for a story where Madi has to decide not just what kind of leader she’ll be, but what kind of person she wants to be. The Flame serves as a sci-fi metaphor for transitioning from childhood into young adulthood.

The trailer for the season showed us Madi ‘meeting’ Sheidheda over a friendly game of chess, so they probably become the best of friends (lol jk). Maybe Madi being strapped to a machine forces her into some kind of trance state where the past Commanders become ‘visible’ in her mind? Or maybe Sheidheda has some specific power that allows him to manifest to her if she falls prey to his influence? Whatever happens, I can’t wait to see Madi go on this journey!

John Murphy is dead, long live John Murphy

I had a feeling they were going to ‘kill’ off a character only to bring them back to show the extent of the new planet’s powers! Of course I was hoping it’d be Shaw, but anything that keeps Murphy breathing is good with me.

But how exactly did Murphy resurrect? He was already dead when the snake sucked the venom back out, so what made his heart start beating again? Is Murphy truly alive in the same way he was before?

And what exactly did he see when he ‘died’? His vision of hell and subsequent despondency could simply be a symbolic wake-up call he needed in order to begin actively being more selfless, or it could have something to do with the venom or the moon’s powers. Or… I guess we’ll find out!

Murphy’s conversation with Abby continues this episode’s (and the season’s, and the show’s) theme of action vs. intent. Murphy believes he is going to hell for the bad things he has done; Abby argues that any hypothetical celestial judge would look at their intentions, not their actions (clearly she is also applying that hope to herself). Of course, that isn’t much comfort to Murphy, historically if not recently the show’s most self-serving character.

What can we, the audience, take away from this conversation? Nothing about Heaven or Hell, certainly, unless the show plans to eventually follow Murphy into the great beyond and show us how exactly he’s judged for what he has done/what he might now do in an attempt to further his chance of getting into the Good Place.

In the world of this show, where (permanent) death is the end of your journey, judgement and guilt and blame are arbitrary, man-made concepts that every character (and audience member) must decide for themselves and that evolve and change as people move from circumstance to circumstance. Right now, some characters have elevated themselves to a place from which they feel they have the right to judge others, but the Primes are not gods, and Murphy is only as doomed or saved as the narrative judges him to be.

What is relevant to us isn’t whether Murphy actually goes to Hell, but how Murphy’s belief that he is going to Hell for what he has done in the past changes him while he is alive. Will he actively try to be better? Will he consider his soul forfeit and sink into depression/destruction? How might Murphy’s journey contrast to Abby’s, Octavia’s, Clarke’s, or anyone else’s who might similarly struggle to justify doing what they had to do to survive/keep their people alive?

Speaking of Murphy: if nothing else comes out of “Red Sun Rising,” we at least need to know why Murphy wasn’t affected by the eclipse like the rest of them, right? So it does seem like Murphy’s storyline will be bigger than ‘just’ a worry for the state of his eternal soul.

Jordan and Delilah, sitting in a tree, I-H-O-P-E-T-H-A-T-S-H-E-D-O-E-S-N-T-D-I-E

FINALLY Jordan gets a major storyline, am I right?! Yes, I know we’re only three episodes into the season, but we’ve been dying to spend some quality time with this character for almost a year already!

And what a beautiful, overwhelming and heartbreaking experience he has in this episode. He meets a girl. And a no-parental-baggage girl, at that. He flirts. (Definitely gets that from his mother.) He makes out. He screws up. He makes up.

Everything about Jordan is so new, and yet, so familiar. As Shannon Kook himself has talked about in interviews and on social media, he has worked very consciously to layer in Monty and Harper (and even Jasper)’s personality traits and expressions into his character, and it pays off. It’s Harper’s smile, it’s Monty’s eyes.

His relationship with Clarke is particularly fascinating. He clearly adores her, but in a way a student might adore a particularly strict yet fair teacher. As for Clarke, a part of her sees him as a child, like Madi, to protect. Another part of her sees him as Monty and her second chance to be the friend he deserved. And another part of her sees him as a stranger and potential liability. All of that comes out in this episode, and it’s really brilliantly done by both actors.

And poor Jordan. It’s one thing to be the keeper of your parents’ legacy, innocent of humanity’s sins and corruptive influences. It’s another to suddenly have a very real slice of responsibility for compromising that legacy when the very thing that makes you ‘good’ — your friendliness and openness — is used against you.

It’s good for Jordan’s character to have such a harsh (though in the context of this show, I guess it’s relatively mild) wakeup call because it puts him on a more even playing field with everyone else. It’s also necessary for him to realize that stories have power: both the ones he has been told and those he now chooses to tell.

More than anything, this episode proves that Jordan isn’t only here ‘to be Monty and Harper’s son’ or to serve as Clarke’s guilty conscience, but that he has a genuinely new and interesting perspective to offer the show. He’s a bit of a reset delinquent plucked out of season 1, a Monty/Jasper from before the ground ruined their lives, and through him we get to see what a human being growing up good, raised by good people, actually becomes.

(The episode also suggests an interesting dichotomy between how everyone treats Jordan and how they pre-judge Diyoza’s baby — a child of two mass murderers, as Madi says.)

Also, how absolutely adorable is Delilah? Ashleigh LaThrop is another amazing addition to the cast this season. I instantly fell in love with her, and my heart is already breaking for her if she has to go through with Naming Day. Her story really is incredibly tragic, and LaThrop conveys that quiet sadness and regret in a way that makes you feel like you’ve known this character for years.

If she does become Priya VII, that probably means we’ll lose her character even if we don’t lose the actress, but I hope she somehow avoids that fate. For Jordan’s sake and ours!

For your consideration

What did you think about The 100 season 6, episode 3, “The Children of Gabriel”? Tell us in the comments!

‘The 100’ season 6, episode 4 ‘The Face Behind the Glass’ airs next Tuesday at 9/8c on The CW