The 100 season 7, episode 4 “Hesperides” continues the stories on Sanctum and Skyring and sends everyone to new planets. Here is our review.

The fourth episode of The 100’s final season is written by co-EP Sean Crouch and directed by Diana Valentine. Both are newcomers to the show, and both do a fantastic job with what they had to work with.

So far, season 7 suffers from a pacing problem that I’m hoping will be resolved once the story moves to the fun Interstellary planet-hopping part that, in retrospect, maybe should have been initiated sooner. “The Garden” was fantastic because it slowed down on purpose; the other three episodes have just seemed slow.

But I think “Hesperides” takes advantage of the decision to tread water better than the others. In isolation, the story it tells with Echo, Hope, Gabriel and Orlando is incredibly compelling. I enjoyed seeing them go from a fake family to a real family, and I hope the fact that they’ve spent five years together has permanently shifted their allegiances, because I am now fiercely invested in the idea of them choosing each other.

Were their actual interactions a little shallow? Yes. (After five years together, the most insightful thing they can say about Gabriel is that he likes food? Really?) But genuine nonetheless.

Was it a weird choice to give Echo a second five-year time jump in the span of three seasons, with roughly the same outcome? Super yes. But there were excellent moments of levity and emotion throughout that grounded the characters and made me feel more connected to them, which I imagine was probably the point.

Echo and Hope is a squadgoals I never knew I needed. Gabriel is utterly delightful. The mythology developments are fascinating. Plus, I have concocted my most elaborate conspiracy theory yet.

Let’s discuss The 100 season 7, episode 4 “Hesperides.”

A new Hope

Picking up straight after “The Garden”, Little Hope is left alone on her planet, calling for her mother and Octavia, who have just been taken by the Bardo boys.

Luckily for her, and the plot, it just so happens that a prisoner is dropped off to serve his sentence not long after, leading us to a trust-gaining montage reminiscent of Madi and Clarke’s in season 5.

(One question about the timeline: How little Bardo-time would have had to pass between Diyoza and Octavia being taken and the new prisoner being sent to Hope? It would be like, five minutes, right?)

Hope spends the next 10 years in the company of the most distractingly dreamy man all the worlds have ever seen, who seems to mold himself into exactly who she needs him to be: a pseudo-older brother, a pseudo-crush, a pseudo-personal trainer.

Considering the kinds of prisoners Hope came from, and would have grown up around if not for the Anomaly, it really is outrageously lucky that she ends up raised by such a standup guy who didn’t even hesitate for a second when deciding whether or not he wanted to spend his isolation sentence raising a teenage girl and taking her side in the fight against his own people.

Whatever conditioning and cultish brainwashing had supposedly shaped him his whole life, it sure melted away very quickly when faced with his own little Arya Stark. (“What do we say to the god of Dev?”)

All of this is set to a beautiful piece of music that lets the montage go by faster and makes it all more impactful. The 100 has been very hit-and-miss recently with its many sequences featuring characters we just met doing completely mundane things of no significance, but this particular montage was a big hit for me. I like Hope, I like her story (in all its YA heroine formulaicness), and Dev is now my fictional husband. Yes, we are wed.

The game plan that 20-year-old Hope and fabulously aged-up Dev come up with consists of killing the guards when they come to get him, sneaking into the Bardo fortress (!) as ‘disciples’, and basically hoping that nobody questions the fact that Dev has a random new friend nobody’s ever seen before.

But alas, the plan goes horribly wrong. Hope is, like Echo so rightly surmised, not a killer (yet); she hesitates, Dev dies in her arms and becomes the skeleton we met in episode 2. I am now widowed. What a brief yet beautiful love story we shared.

It is worth noting that Hope actually carries on with the plan: she puts on a suit and goes into the Anomaly, presumably to Bardo, where we know she tried and failed to rescue her mother, and was likely captured and tasked with retrieving Octavia in exchange for her mother’s life. Only ‘we’ don’t get to experience that part with her.

The reason we don’t see those flashbacks is probably just because they don’t want to reveal Bardo yet, but it’s weird that she doesn’t even talk about it. When Orlando asks why she failed, she deflects and points to her failure to save Dev before going through the Anomaly. Not a single word about what she actually experienced on Bardo, even though you’d think that would be relevant information.

I’m not saying Hope is luring Echo and Gabriel into a trap (she seems too emotionally raw and transparent to be able to hide such an agenda), but it definitely seems like there is a missing piece of her story they don’t want us to know yet — and it might involve the incident that prompted her to write herself that “trust Bellamy” memo.

Going through the motions

In present time, history repeats itself with a new Hope, a new family, and a new prisoner.

Hope tiredly explains to Gabriel and Echo that they must manipulate Orlando into fulfilling the role that Dev would have, acting like a slightly senior intern being tasked with training up the new guys at a big company that none of them really want to work at.

“[When the five years are up] he’ll love us, and that’s why he’ll help us. I’ve done this before,” she explains, with enough genuine frustration in her voice to offset the totally sociopathic words coming out of her mouth.

Hope is very literally stuck in a loop, following the only blueprint she knows. She genuinely cared about Octavia and Diyoza and Dev; now she has Gabriel, Echo and Orlando, and she doesn’t mind performing a calculated reconstruction of genuine emotion with them, if it gets her where she needs to go. She really is a curious mix of childlike naiveté, fierce emotion, and disillusioned, cold calculation. Truly both her parents’ child.

Forced to confront the fact that this is their best and only plan, Hope, Gabriel and Echo begin playing the part of happy family.

They start gardening, which is riveting, and really is what I most hoped this final season would devote a lot of time to. (Okay, Echo talking to the plants is very cute, I will give them that.)

A flashback name-checks the episode title, “Hesperides,” in the context of Octavia nerd-runs-in-the-family Blake telling Hope the Greek myth of the three maidens tending their garden and guarding the golden apple that Hercules steals.

As great as it was to get a little dose of Octavia, I’m not sure I understand why this scene gave the episode its name (wouldn’t it have made more sense if the titles of “Hesperides” and “The Garden” were swapped?). Unless the Hercules part is a clue about my Conspiracytheory About Dear Orlando who Got Axed… Not! (let’s just call it the CADO(w)GAN theory for short) that I’ll explain later.

And if it isn’t, I guess the show just wanted to hammer home the Greek myth imagery in case fandom didn’t pick up on it, which, fair. I sure didn’t.

In present Skyrim time, Orlando approaches Echo to give her pumpkin seeds because, apparently, “Hope likes pumpkins.” A) greetings, fellow Halloween loving child, and B) how would he know that?? Hmmmmmmmm.

He still spooks when Gabriel shows up though (or is that just what he wants them to think???), so they amp up their happy family charade to lure him in.

They send Hope out to “drown” while Orlando plays chess with his skeleton friends, thinking they’re trapping him, when really, he’s trapping them, winning the game right in front of us!!

Just kidding. Unless…?

He rushes to save her, and they invite him to dinner, unwitting of the fact that THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS.*

(*CADO(w)GAN. Stay with me here.)

Slowly, over the next five years, they use Orlando’s inexplicable (I can explain it!) affection for Hope, that we are meant to believe is solely based on a name on a wall and a doll he made himself, to win him over to their side. Allegedly.

Their interactions with Orlando give us a lot of clues about who the Bardo people really are. He is a “level 12” – the highest tier of believers. He talks about a ‘Shepherd’ who delivered them to Bardo, his prayer later filling in that this Shepherd, “saved us from the fire that consumed the Earth.”

Sooooo yeah, it’s Second Dawn, Bill Cadogan’s doomsday cult that also originated the Grounders.

The question now is whether the Bardo founders came to the planet aboard Eligius III, which various imagery hints was funded/initiated by Cadogan (and could have been the ticket to salvation offered to secret Level 13 cult members), or if some of the Level 12 members that emerged from the bunker underneath Polis went on to travel through Earth’s Anomaly stone. Or both.

And was Cadogan among them? If the Shepherd himself and/or his memory chip actually made it to Bardo, I’m inclined to believe it was through the Anomaly stone, since Becca called out to Cadogan when she was being burned alive in the bunker. (Although I guess he could have had a son or something.)

And if Cadogan and/or his memory chip made it to Bardo, well…

Yes, what I’m saying is that Orlando is Cadogan. HEAR ME OUT.

Orlando is, to put it bluntly, a completely pointless character. The purpose of him in this episode is to let Hope use her genuine bonding experience with Dev to manipulate someone else; he was there to give them a seemingly arbitrary five-year timeframe before they could move on to Bardo.

But if the point was to get them to Bardo, they could have just shown Echo and co. milling around their garden for a few days before the Bardo boys showed up to drop off a prisoner, and they could have given Hope the information she needed through Dev. Instead we spend two whole episodes planting tomatoes and get to know some rando. Why? Just to wring emotion out of us for emotion’s sake? Just to pass the time?

I mean, maybe.

But let’s say there was a greater purpose. Let’s assume Orlando was planted here for a reason other than to be a plot device. Let’s assume they spent an entire episode introducing a character that we actually need to know. Let’s not take everything he says and does at face value — and suddenly, everything takes on a second meaning.

First of all, the character is remarkably fleshed out for a one-off appearance. Darren Moore and the way the camera lingers on him brings a level of gravitas that seems out of proportion with the character’s significance (I do recognize that this could just speak to the notable talent of that particular actor).

There is, demonstrably, more to Orlando than we are initially led to believe. He is introduced like a deranged hermit but quickly sheds that skin to reveal a deep intelligence and an ability to sniff out Hope’s bullshit. He transforms before our eyes. Why should we assume he was as he seemed to them off the bat, when we literally watched him become someone else?

He seems obsessed with Hope and keeping her alive, but based on what? A name carved into a wall? Hope is trying to manipulate him based on her experiences with Dev; Orlando conveniently seems to be a lot like Dev, showing her what she expects to see: a lone prisoner who will turn on his people because of his affection for her.

(Plus, the first thing he does when he encounters our heroes is to smash Gabriel’s computer, “”conveniently”” trapping them there with him. But why? Because he doesn’t want to know what’s on there? Because he wants them to stay?)

Once he’s convinced them how easy he is to manipulate, he agrees to a dinner, where they are so busy feeling superior that they let all their guards down. While they think they are drawing information out of him, Orlando is doing the exact same thing: he gets hope to Hope explain Dev’s plan and, when recounting heavily it relied on her being able to fake knowledge of their faith, he pointedly asks, “Is that why you failed?”

His question suggests that he wants to know what kind of person she is (what weaknesses caused her to fail?), and exactly how much Dev told her about Bardo. Whether or not it is actually part of some elaborate master plan, he is clearly studying them. Learning about them. Trying to understand them.

And is that not memory capture without the technology – which seems to be in line with the Bardo people’s ultimate end-all-wars agenda, which involves searching through memories looking for something/someone specific (that they now think they’ve found in Clarke)?

If this is a case of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, or a Hercules infiltrating the garden to steal the golden apple of knowledge and start the Trojan war, ‘Orlando’ would have sent himself to them under the guise of being a tool they could use so that he could get close to them — visualized by that inexplicable chess setup in the woods, where we deliberately see Orlando outwit his invisible opponent.

And then there’s the fact that his ‘death’ happens off-screen, a throwaway revelation by Anders to Clarke. Everyone who watches television knows that if you don’t see the body, that’s because there isn’t one. (And the reason that’s the rule is because if you don’t show the body, it’ll feel like a red herring, and the Selinas in the audience will come up with rambling tangential theories just like this one!)

Of course, in this case, there might actually be a body even though Orlando isn’t really dead. We’ve already been given all the information we need about how memory chip personalities can be retrieved remotely and downloaded into new bodies to put the pieces together, after all.

There’s a great Shepherd who led them to Bardo. There’s a ‘Him’ in charge now, that may or may not be the same person. One or both of these could be Cadogan, and one or both of these could have a memory implant chip that allowed him to survive and lead his people just like the Grounders’ Heda and Sanctum’s gods.

And if he has a chip, that means he could be anyone. And if he could be anyone, why not make himself exactly who he needed to be in order to get the information he wants from the people the Bardodians are clearly obsessed with?

Orlando being the leader in disguise would also explain why Anders announces his suicide to Clarke, who has no use for this information. The audience needs to think he is dead, and maybe Anders also thinks he’s dead, if he isn’t aware of the deception (much like Gabriel disguised himself as Xavier last season and hid amongst his ‘children’).

The surface-level takeaway from this episode is that genuine love and manipulated affection are interchangeable, and that either will get you where you need to go in the all-important quest to serve your ‘people.’ (A quest that runs counter to what we’ve been let to believe is the show’s ultimate reckoning with humanity’s destructive my-peopleist tendencies.)

But if Orlando turns out to be the Ben Linus of Bardo — the secret leader and mastermind who sent himself there to a) sabotage Gabriel’s original way off the island and b) infiltrate the group and counter-manipulate them in order to learn what they know and perhaps further trick them once they got to Bardo — the episode takes on a whole other significance. Suddenly it becomes our backdoor introduction to the season’s big bad (maybe Cadogan, maybe someone new; Orlando could be anyone, if memory chips are involved); the sympathy for the devil we need to make the Bardo folks more than one-dimensional antagonists.

And what I particularly like about this theory is that it would mean Echo and Hope literally have to face the choice they made: they manipulated someone they believed to be an innocent man for their own gain, and ultimately betrayed him. If Bardo is looking for the ‘best’ human, they both failed the test, and it would make sense to see them having to be ‘judged’ for that (by another villain who believes himself to be a god).

It would be a neat way to show that you (literally) can’t outrun your choices: paralleling how Raven is facing her demons this season (treading the familiar path Clarke, Bellamy, Kane, Abby, Murphy, Jasper, Luna and Octavia have all tread before her), Echo and Hope made what was meant to be a huge decision to sacrifice one few for the sake of another few, and need to be confronted with that somehow.

Anyway. Whew, what a detour. But this is what I’m here for, right? At the end of the day, this is just a fun theory that increased my enjoyment of a seemingly throwaway plotline. But I hope I’m right, it would be such a satisfying twist!

The sacrifice the island demanded

The years spent training with Orlando appear to be purposefully unremarkable. They all grow close, but not too close; they experience the wonders of gardening, but seemingly not to the same soul-cleansing extent as Octavia and Diyoza.

In one of Hope, Echo and Gabriel’s more genuine bonding moments, Echo says she won’t know what she does if she loses Bellamy, which is a very sweet sentiment. But I think she’d survive.

Especially coupled with the fact that, as much as the trio is just pretending to be a family for the sake of their mission, I like to think that these scenes are intended to show us that they eventually really become one.

At least it seems true for Hope. Throughout the episode, Hope is working so hard to replicate her and Dev’s relationship with Orlando, but it’s Echo she ends up saving like she wished she’d saved Dev. It’s Echo and Hope who seem to be on the same wavelength when they head into the Anomaly (the more conscientious Gabriel, who has no personal horse in this race, remaining more of a wild card).

Once Orlando has seen them kill one of his people, Echo makes a quick risk assessment and realizes that what is true for her is equally true for Orlando: he’ll never pick his friends over his people, which turns him from an ally and into a reliability.

In lieu of Orlando turning out to be Cadogan (🤞), the closest thing to a ‘twist’ in this episode is Echo deciding to betray him after she assesses that his priorities no longer aligns with hers.

I wouldn’t call that a particularly shocking or defining move for Echo to make though (what would be shocking was if she’d realized she felt more strongly about not betraying Orlando than she did about saving Bellamy!). Echo making a decision that favors blind loyalty to a ‘people’ over compassion and mercy just confirms, again, who we are told over and over again that she is.

Without hesitation, she makes the strategic call: she butchers the Bardo soldiers and leaves Orlando behind, with a knife to cut himself free. It’s not a heartless move, exactly, just a way of signalling that Echo’s value system has not shifted. Much as she didn’t change on the Ring – she just changed her people – the latest five-year isolation stint hasn’t compromised the core of her character in the slightest.

I’m both impressed and frustrated by this. On one hand, there’s an integrity to Echo that I really like: she really is unshakeably loyal to the people she considers herself a part of, which (I hope) now includes Hope and Gabriel, and she doesn’t ever let sentimentality cloud her judgement.

The writers and Tasya Teles have committed to the core of who Echo is and only let her expand her personality without compromising her very strict honor code (My People first, my conscience second), and I appreciate this commitment. I’m not sure we can claim that same continuity for a lot of other characters on the show, or most shows. And I enjoy that they refuse to make her softer for the audience’s benefit.

On the other hand, objectively speaking, when you make a character so fundamentally static, to the point where an episode’s ‘surprise twist’ hinges on them not evolving, what is the point?

We don’t come out of this episode learning anything new about Echo (or Gabriel or Hope); nothing has ultimately changed in her mission or priorities, and even though Hope and Echo are clearly bros now, there is no reason to think Echo won’t still ultimately choose Bellamy over her, too.

But maybe her bond with Hope and Gabriel is what will break her out of this evolution plateau, of forcing her to finally have that self-confrontation they’ve owed her since season 5 – for example by testing her loyalties in a situation where she has to choose between Hope and Bellamy, and actually has to make a purely emotional call without being able to hide behind strategy.

After all, in a story supposedly about breaking the ‘us vs them’ cycle, the obvious endgame arc for a character evidently incapable of unlearning her for-my-peopleism regardless of how many five-year time jumps she has to sit through would be one that led towards more concrete individualism.

I really want this for Echo. In my opinion, she is wonderfully complex within her scope of grey, and while it would be disappointing if they betrayed that grey in favor of making her ‘likeable’, it would be equally disappointing if they never let her break her own cycle.

Bargaining (chips)

In Sanctum, Clarke and her new/old friends finally notice that four of their people are missing – unbelievably, not by ever actually noticing they were gone, but because some ‘foragers’ discovered the dead Bardo soldier in the woods and Clarke’s Bellamy senses immediately begin tingling. “This super-advanced suit-wearing alien popped out of nowhere, but I refuse to believe that this planet has more than one gun!” she says. Or something like that.

I’m still miffed about how patchwork-y the first act in Sanctum has seemed, and how much it has made me disconnect emotionally from the bonds the show has tricked me into investing in, in such a short amount of time. I acknowledge that there were behind-the-scenes reasons I’m not aware of, but at the end of the day, that’s really not what I’m here to review.

Anyway, now they’ve gotten their call to action at last. Clarke, Miller, Niylah, Jackson and Gaia – in what I believe is the show’s first scene featuring all the show’s known LGBTQ+ characters together, and hopefully not the last – stand over the Bardo soldier’s body [and show no emotion about the stunning revelation that four of their people are missing, what the f] and try to figure out how to get the suit off.

Referring to herself, Miller, Jackson, Niylah and Jordan, Gaia says, “we are the backup,” which is both endearingly self-aware in terms of their role in the show and also sets them up to finally become more than just backup, if only out of necessity. Right now, they’re all Clarke has.

In last week’s review, I lamented the fact that characters like Miller and Jackson have been constantly shoved to the background instead of having bigger roles in the story, so I really appreciate the effort to include them here.

And Gaia’s loyalty to Clarke is, as usual, very touching. I still wish there was more context for their growing connection, but now that it’s here, I really enjoy it.

Clarke and her new squad go to the edge of the field to rendezvous with Anders, who asked for Clarke specifically. They seem to have a lot of information about her, likely from extracting the memories of Diyoza and/or Octavia (has Bellamy been gone long enough for them to brain scan him?).

The Bardodians describe themselves as “disciples of a greater truth,” and their mysterious leader (cough Orlando cough) believes that Clarke is the key to winning the last war mankind will ever wage. Bet there’s a lever with her name on it somewhere.

He also spews the usual bullshit about ‘Oh nooo your friends dared to defend themselves when we kidnapped and/or tried to kill them, so now we have the right to re-retaliate,’ which was a flawed argument when the Grounders used it in season 1 and has continued to be a flawed argument every time it’s been used since.

Clarke goes to get Raven’s help unlocking the suit, and actually has a moment of genuine reaction when seeing how beat up she is.

(I want to say it was a nice surprise, but when a character’s authentic humanity is surprising, it makes you wonder why they don’t get to act authentically human more often.)

They have a conversation about responsibility, hammering home how this is the incident that will finally make them see eye to eye:

Raven: “I can’t forget their faces.”
Clarke: “And you won’t. Just don’t forget the ones you saved.”

If anything, Clarke being able to rationalize Raven’s actions by referring back to her own shows how far she has come in terms of making peace with her own impossible choices. It also serves to build a bridge between Clarke and Raven that allows them to move past the resentment Raven has harbored for Clarke for so long.

They’ll move forward as equals, which is great, if long overdue.

Raven and Jordan also have a great bonding moment that attempts to make up for some of the weird disconnect between Jordan and the rest of the group last season.

Jordan reminisces about the two of them being alone on the ship together at the beginning of season 6, and pointedly asks, “I got stabbed. Did you know that?” (Translation: “Um, care, maybe?”)

I don’t know, I liked this moment too, but I in general I feel like the show has gotten into a bad habit of retroactively addressing issues of disconnect between the characters – giving Raven a Clarke-shaped moral conundrum, throwing random “are you okay”s around without follow-through, having characters say little self-aware digs at their own emotional aloofness – and it ends up feeling a little hollow.

I can’t speak for every viewer, but at least what I’m missing when I critique the emotional disconnect between the characters is moments of human connection that happen organically and matter in the moment when they’re relevant, helping to enrich and influence characters’ relationships moving forward.

Rearview-mirror apologies cut off by plot developments before the conversations can go anywhere new aren’t only a story crutch, they stand in the way of fresh opportunities to build something meaningful on the rich emotional foundations between the characters. This could be done at any time from now until the final scene of the show (and I still have hope that it will be), but not as long as they keep trying to catch up with opportunities already missed. Just turn the page.

They wasted Jordan last season, but what matters now is that they don’t continue to waste him and his potential for developing unique relationships with characters like Raven and Clarke.

But since they’re all in the same storyline, I’m cautiously optimistic that won’t happen.

Raven has a guilt vision of Hatch when the helmet first comes off, signalling the Murphy-lite path they seem to be sending her down this season.

But the guilt (momentarily) passes when she puts on the helmet and activates Friday. Raven sees the whole universe open up in front of her, which is basically her version of the City of Light. Spacewalking without the walking part.

She sees Sanctum, one of six planets (it’s a moon though?) connected by the Anomaly wormhole system. Of the others we know Bardo – symbolized by a phoenix rising From the Ashes, very subtle – and Skyring. Then there’s the ice planet Nakara, one called Etherea, and what must be Earth, which is probably the ‘offline’ one.

Jordan and Raven then team up to save Clarke and the others by Aragorning out to meet them. Woo, heroics!

And okay yes, it’s murder and Raven feels super bad about it but come on. This is season 7, Raven, get with it.

Beginning our Interstellar-portion of the season, the B-team becomes the A-team as Clarke and Raven take Niylah, Jordan and Miller on their next (last?) big adventure.

(Toni, can we call them the Badventure Squad?)

Gaia offers to stay behind and protect Madi, which takes a huge burden off Clarke’s shoulders. There probably wouldn’t be a lot of other characters Clarke would trust with Madi as easily as she’ll trust Gaia, and it’s great to have someone to rely on like that.

Gaia and Clarke hug goodbye and Gaia leaves her with the words “bring them/him home” (a distinction not wholly unimportant, I just genuinely can’t tell which word she says).

They all step into the Anomaly… and Gaia doesn’t get to warn or protect anyone, because she is immediately knocked over by a surprise Bardo boy, who also powers down the Anomaly stone.

It doesn’t look like he was planning to go through with her, but once they begin fighting, he grabs her and pulls her in.

Where do we think they went??

And… it’s Bellamy, right? It’s gotta be.

We end the episode with two sets of characters heading for brand new planets. But what will happen to the people now left in Sanctum without any clue about what happened to anyone?! Invisibility and cryo sleep and living forever as a machine is all well and good, but someone should really consider inventing a cell phone.

For your consideration

The 100 returns next Wednesday at 8/7c with episode 7×05 “Welcome to Bardo.”