The 100 season 7, episode 9 “The Flock” shows us how Octavia and her friends ended up in the Second Dawn.
I have to be honest, this episode of The 100 had much less crystal giant content than I was expecting or hoping for.
“The Flock” is yet another fill-in-the-blanks episode of what is shaping up to be a very hit-or-miss final season. This one is more of a miss for me.
It doesn’t help that “The Flock” directly follows the excellent backdoor pilot last week. It’s hard to live up to the very vivacious, fresh, full-of-potential prequel, particularly when you evidently don’t have a lot of leeway in terms of character development or exposition.
The structure of season 7 — jumping ahead to do ‘shock reveals’ and then circling back to fill in what are often very predictable blanks — is getting old very fast. We’re over halfway through the final season. Something of consequence needs to happen already.
I am aware that poking too much at the structure and pacing of season 7 is unfair. Just as I imagine the writers were during production, reviewers are in a difficult spot this year, because we don’t know how the season would have been different if Clarke and Bellamy hadn’t been AWOL for most of it.
How we let that influence our judgements of the final viewing experience is of course an individual decision. I’m personally willing to cut the show a lot of slack, simply because I don’t know how much of this season was premeditated and how much was the result of last-minute patch-up solutions. And I’d rather be too forgiving than unnecessarily nit-picky.
But whatever over-arching structural issues that might force episodes like this one to tread water, I still feel like the water-treading could have been done with more finesse and originality than was the case here.
The episode is enjoyable enough, and some storylines and characters continue to be absolute standouts. Hope is the best addition to the show since, well, her mother, and despite some absurd leaps of logic we have to make in terms of how/why the Penance Alums flip the Team Bardo switch, her story continues to be moving and surprising and her reactions to the absurdity of the situation are refreshing.
Echo, too, is becoming a highlight of the season for me. Of course it all hinges on how she ultimately reacts to Bellamy’s return (y-i-k-e-s if she ‘finds her humanity’ again through her love for a man), but so far, it seems the writers have made the less safe, more interesting decision to fully commit to her grey, slippery shapeshifter nature and create a character who – if they don’t chicken out and soften her again – could stand out as a truly unique character in sci-fi history.
(A main female character who never ‘seeks redemption’ or finds softness and peace in family, but instead embraces her own nature — be it through gruesome revenge or as a soldier in any given war? It’s rarer than I would like, and Echo could be a great contrast to the family-oriented turns Clarke, Octavia and Diyoza’s stories have taken.)
Other than that, though? “The Flock” fails to expand The 100 with anything new or exciting, and also somehow doesn’t feel fully congruent with the show’s DNA. Too many throwaway characters, too much generic fill-in-the-blanks storytelling, too many overused genre conventions, and too much clichéd dialogue. The show is usually more original in its approach, at least, even when treading familiar ground.
But the worst offender is how the subtext is made text: the villains have transcended familial love, so we have to see them literally grow babies in tanks. Sheidheda is pure evil, so he has to be a blood-covered ‘demon’. Octavia and Levitt are in love, so they have to have a shoehorned-in, standard issue teen drama sex scene. All done in the spirit of quickly ticking boxes because the season doesn’t let us linger in any constellation or scenario for more than an episode before rushing on to the next big shake-up.
It’s not bad. It’s just not The 100. I think this episode is just a prime example of what happens when the writers get too caught up with wanting to make A Generic Genre Story with fire and blood and bright colors, rather than commit to the uniqueness and gravitas of this particular story, or letting itself linger in and explore the emotional reality of these specific characters and their specific relationships.
Let’s discuss the highs and lows of The 100 season 7, episode 9 “The Flock.”
They might be crystal giants
The Bardo part of this episode is basically the cliffs’ notes of Cultism for Dummies: four of our show’s most fearsome warriors have decided to join the last war, it turns out, for no particular reason other than *shrug.*
Despite the fact that the Bardoans have a system perfected over a thousand years where they grow warriors from seed and mold them like clay, they drop everything and expend precious resources on four fully grown killing machines, breaking millennia-long traditions because, again, *shrug.*
The Bardoans’ underdeveloped motivations aside, I think the most frustrating thing about this storyline for me is that I don’t understand why any of these women to sign up for what they must assume is a lifetime of blind devotion to a cause they neither believe in nor seemingly understand, beyond the extratextual plot reasons (they need to be on Team Bardo by the time Clarke & co. get there to save them, in order to manufacture yet another allegiance-split between the main characters).
If we pretend for a second like we don’t know that development is coming — because FarmerKru do not know this development is coming — this is a story about four women who have spent the past 5-20 years of their lives farming and are now agreeing to bury their emotions and become soldiers in a war that has nothing to do with them, fighting for a man who caused the death of at least one person they love in order to… avoid going back to farming?
They still don’t know who the enemy is, or what happens if the Bardoans win or lose. They apparently don’t care; they’ll transform into emotionless robots until they get to fight and maybe die for someone else’s cause, as long as they… don’t have to be farmers? (Sure, Echo is probably planning some elaborate revenge, but that doesn’t explain Diyoza or Octavia’s placid compliance.)
There might be an argument to be made for why Octavia, Diyoza and Echo would each choose Bardo cult indoctrination over lonely, but peaceful, solitude where they at least got to keep their memories. But this episode doesn’t really attempt to make it. Because it doesn’t matter.
All of this is plainly just setup for Clarke’s arrival and rearview explanation for that ‘shock’ of seeing Echo, Octavia and Diyoza ‘converted’; it’s temporary, like all the show’s time jumps, and most of the emotional development we watch these characters go through will probably be forgotten in three episodes anyway.
After opening the episode with the words “I’m about to open your eyes to the truth of our cause,” Anders proceeds to share very little truth and reveals exactly nothing about their cause.
He takes them to the surface to show off the infamous crystal giants — who are very beautiful, granted, and I love them — and gives one of what appears to be several conflicting accounts of how they died.
(Have they not given us two different explanations for this now? The crystal giants died because they ‘lost the war’ against a tangible ‘enemy’ that turned them to stone, but they also died because they breathed in their planet’s carbonated atmosphere and calcified from the inside out?)
It says a lot to how desensitized The 100 has made itself to war and conflict as the magnum opus of humanity that during this entire scene, not once are questions asked like “Who are we fighting?” or “What do they want?” or “Where do they get off going around turning people to stone?”
In fairness, three of those four characters were forged in battle themselves and would be the first people to assume war was always on the agenda. But still. Didn’t Octavia and Diyoza find peace like three episodes ago? Shouldn’t that mean that they’d need at least a bit more motivation before jumping back into the fray?
And because the characters don’t care, the audience isn’t invited to question this enemy’s — for lack of a better word — humanity. Just calling them “the enemy” is sufficient shorthand for us all, apparently. No need to know what or who they are, where they come from, what they want, what they’re waiting for, why the Bardoans need to beat them, or why they can’t all just move to Penance and see humanity rise and fall of its own accord in the span of a Bardoan fortnight.
Because we do not in fact learn ‘the truth’ about anything and end the episode no closer to understanding why this war needs to be fought at all, everything we learn about the Bardoans and their weird lives just seems a bit silly to me. Especially the woop-woop hands they keep throwing up for no reason.
One for all, and all for…?
We move on to what I have to assume is the highlights reel of the three months the farmer quartet spent on Bardo before Clarke and the plot arrive.
They train, perfunctorily. They are given ‘partners’ to eat and sleep with (except Octavia demonstrably sleeps alone, but okay). They are put through simulations to test and improve their loyalty to the many, learning to control their dedication to the one. Eventually, we are made to understand, they will be true believers in the cause.
Diyoza has the most powerful transformation, seemingly being so afraid of going to Penance by herself that she turns on a dime and learns to block out her love for Hope in favor of the collective.
It’s a weird tactic, to incentivize Diyoza to learn to ‘turn off her emotions’ by threatening her with the one thing that inspires the most intense emotion in her. I’ve never understood the logic behind this villain tactic, no matter how many times I see it used (and a variation of Anders’ speech seems to inevitably turn up in everything I watch).
But it works, somehow: whether she learns to turn off her emotions or she simply controls and compartmentalizes them, Diyoza passes her final test by ‘killing’ her daughter to save the collective. It’s the My Person vs My People debacle, but overblown to the extreme.
I don’t really buy that Diyoza would ever be able to make herself pass this test, to be honest, even if she was aware that it was a simulation. Forcing herself to make everyone, including Hope, believe that she was capable of killing her daughter just doesn’t seem like something Diyoza would do because she “loves an unwinnable war.”
Echo, meanwhile, is seemingly in her element: an army to join and a mandate to turn off her emotions? Sign her up.
“You just like having someone give you orders again so you don’t have to think for yourself,” Hope accuses, and Echo – as usual when prompted to make some kind of progress – deflects rather than confront the accusation.
But this, maybe, is what makes Echo such a unique character. Nobody has had more chances to improve than her. Nobody has been granted more blanket forgiveness they didn’t ask for or try to earn. Nobody has had more peaceful time jump breaks. And yet she persists in being a soldier, in finding someone to follow, in denying herself every single opportunity to pursue individualism. (And whether her current goal is to live for Bardo or die for Bellamy, the point still stands.)
Back in seasons 5-6, when it seemed like Echo had evolved, I expressed regret that the show was seemingly letting her backtrack in order for her to fulfil some narrative function, but – whether this was always the plan or the writers have only recently figured out what they want to do with her – I like the idea of having a character that simply refuses to change. It’s stubborn and petulant and nonconforming, and the more she does it, the more I want her to keep doing it.
Right now, I absolutely do not want her to ~find peace~ with Bellamy. Save that story for a character who fits the mold. Echo has to find peace and contentment with who she is at her core, not who she, or Bellamy, or the audience, wishes she would become. Not all phoenixes rise from the ashes. Not everyone ‘ascends.’ That doesn’t mean they have to burn. She was always Ash, and it’s time she accepts that this was always enough.
Echo, ever the ambitious sidekick of her chosen king, apparently relishes her status as Bardo’s best student; she pulls every dirty trick in the book to become top of her class and uses her ‘reward’ to send Hope to Bardo to “have her spirit broken.” She seems like she enjoys the pain and betrayal this decision causes Hope.
…It’s almost certainly a ruse. Echo could have said five years to ‘spare’ Hope from a lifetime sentence. Or she could be sending Hope away to keep her safe while she carries out her secret revenge plot.
But it’s purposefully ambiguous. She could legitimately also just not give a f*** because Bellamy is dead and her heart has turned to stone. I think it’s true when she tells Hope that she “believes what they’re teaching.” Bardo soldier life, devoid of emotion, would be right up her alley, if she hadn’t already pitched her loyalty tent elsewhere.
Based on what I think I know about Echo, I’m assuming that she’s planning revenge. But we won’t know for sure until the story tells us, which is the great (and frustrating) thing about this character. And yes, I personally would prefer to know a story’s main characters well enough to not have to guess at their endgame, but Echo is such a well-established wild card that it works better in her case than it would have for anyone else.
Finally we have Octavia, who somehow manages to hide away her emotions (certainly she shows no trace of having just watched her brother die), even while letting herself feel something hinging on profound with Levitt.
The two are very unsubtly making eyes at each other for most of the episode, and Anders definitely notices. Next thing we know, Levitt is knocking on Octavia’s door and they both admit to their illegal feelings, seemingly forgetting that Octavia is meant to be bunking with her training buddy and that the Bardoans are meant to be watching their every move.
Somehow, this scene is not a simulation. Somehow, Levitt is not a construct of Octavia’s imagination acting out scripted build-a-boyfriend scenarios to win her allegiance.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the scene. Good for Octavia finding love in a hopeless place, and good for Level Elevitt breaking his conditioning, and being A Natural At Sex despite having no reason to even know what it is.
It all just seems too good to be true, and not in an ‘aww look sometimes good things do happen’ way, but in a ‘this just doesn’t feel true’ way.
But regardless of the shady setup for this scene, I’m glad it happened, because I love the idea of Octavia connecting with someone who has seen and can love every part of her.
I don’t think Levitt is a plant (at least not knowingly), despite the fact that the story makes him seem super suspicious, but I sure think Anders is going to find a way to use their connection against them, if he isn’t already.
After this intimate moment, that should be a complete game changer for both characters, Octavia and Levitt are able to carry on with their brainwasher/brainwashee dynamic without anyone being the wiser. (Except everyone clearly knows.)
Levitt is instrumental in their training, presumably when he’s on break from his totally-real janitorial duties, and orchestrates a final test scenario that has each woman paired up with the one they care most about — which is Hope, for everyone but Hope herself — and prompted to save the Many by killing their One.
Lev’s simulated plan is for them to burn down the Bardo farm, which is obviously hilarious (he’s so obsessed), but also begs the question: did he see past season 3 in Octavia’s memories, and thus knows where the Flame really is? Octavia did say he’s seen her at her worst, which must mean Blodreina, right? So what reason does he have for keeping this information from Anders?
In the simulation, everyone kills Hope and passes the test. Even Diyoza, which, as mentioned above, seems like BS to me. Would she really kill Hope, even if she on some level knows it’s a simulation, when her end goal appears to be nothing beyond saving herself from a life of solitude? I know I said in my “The Garden” review that Diyoza’s keeping Octavia and Hope on Bardo was selfishly motivated, but this seems extreme.
(I also am not sure I buy that Echo and Octavia would relinquish the chance to take Bellamy’s killers out when they had the chance, regardless of their ability to suppress their emotions; has the story given us any indication that they value their own lives beyond their desire for autonomy and/or revenge?)
Everyone passes, except for Hope herself, who not only isn’t particularly opposed to the idea of letting Bardo burn, but she also remains devoted to her people.
And, well, why wouldn’t she be? She’s not a war veteran like the rest of them, and she doesn’t have experience compartmentalizing her emotions. She also has been given zero reasons for why she should choose to live and die as a Bardo soldier.
Hope’s WTF reaction to everything they’re made to do, and her increasing rage at the passive submission from the other three, is the only part of this storyline that rings true for me.
Ultimately her failure to comply earns her another five-year stint on Penance, but she doesn’t actually get sent there straight away, which obviously gives Clarke and co. a chance to arrive and save her from this fate.
Sheidheda in the Great Hall with a Candlestick
Let me just start by saying that I am delighted all the Sanctum faithful are dead, they were the worst. But the shock of that big massacre came about half a season too late, in my opinion. It would probably have been more effective if they had blindsided us by killing them all off in the premiere and got on with it.
But now that they’re finally out of the way and Sheidheda has made himself known, at least we can move on with the Sanctum storyline. I don’t know about you guys, but I am at my absolute limit for Murphy/Emori death fake-outs.
It’s reached the point now where I — and I cannot believe the story has driven me to feel this way — kind of wish one of them would just die already.
To clarify: I absolutely do not want Murphy or Emori to die, and shock value death is a cheap way to drive story. But something has to drive the story, and I’m desperate for anything resembling change and lasting consequence.
Because when you keep putting them in certain death situations, the stakes just shrink and shrink, to the point where it almost doesn’t matter if they live or die, if they only keep living to keep almost dying anyway. Just get it over with or let them do something more interesting.
Having said that, one part of this season that has felt genuinely worthwhile has been seeing Murphy and Emori’s devotion to each other grow and surpass their individual self-preservation instincts. In this episode, they both try (and almost fail) to save the other, which is very sweet.
But this story isn’t about Murphy and Emori. They are ultimately both puppets in a power match between two giants, Sheidheda and Indra, who have both laid claim to the Grounders and who now, presumably, have to fight for their people’s allegiance.
(Is Indra the descendant of Callie Cadogan? Would/should that change anything about her importance? I don’t think it should, but I think it would be neat if she was! Especially if she ever meets Cadogan.)
Sheidheda, apparently an actual supernatural creature, murders his flock with a candelabra. I don’t know what’s less believable: that he has the ability to do this, or that Indra didn’t foresee that he would have the ability to do this.
J.R. Bourne is very good in this role, but I can’t help but feel like this character and his shenanigans is just… too much. The 100 was subtle, once. Nuanced. No villains or heroes, just people trying to survive. Whatever is happening here is just a spectacle. Lights and colors and immortal demons.
After his slaughter, the Grounders — who bowed to Indra just a few episodes ago — bow to Sheidheda instead. Flocks gotta flock, I suppose. I wouldn’t bother trying to win over such a turncoat people.
Meanwhile Nikki and Nelson, whose world domination was short-lived, have presumably been detained, until the time at which they and their peoples can be pawns in yet another chess match. It never ends, does it?
The only real question I have is whether Indra and Sheid will have time to have an election conclave before the Bardoans arrive to collect Madi, and Sheidheda sets his sights on the Anomaly.
For your consideration
- ‘Levitt’ is lev-el E-lev-en? You’ve got to be kidding me. Octavia surely must be hallucinating this man.
- Also that is a very creepy alien-looking fetus, no???
- If they are genetically modifying babies, couldn’t they just snip the part of the brain that controls emotion?
- Wait, are the embryos clones? If so, I’m marginally more interested.
- So Cadogan went to Etherea to seek enlightenment and there were some tall, scary mountains and all the kids are now drawing pictures of it, cool. Is that what the snail shell spiral visions are all about?
- “I do love me an unwinnable war”? Diyoza girl, no you don’t, you had a time jump and your priorities changed, remember? Ffs.
- When Levitt says he wants to show them “what we’re really about, our way of life”… what do we think he means?
- Indra’s “I don’t play games” was a really great line. Indra in general was really great. Humanity really cannot function without her.
- Appreciated the little Mackson shoutout.
- Murphy was right to point out that Nikki is undoing all of her husband’s good work by executing the people he died to save. Will Nikki use her defeat as an opportunity to grow as a person?
- Wait if the faithful are dead, does this mean Madi lost her soccer buddies? I may have wished death on them all too quickly…
- One thing I liked about this episode was that there were only an A and a B story. Three are usually too many, in my opinion.
- Is anyone else really sad by the fact that Clarke went on this whole big rescue mission that included traversing the stinky insides of a space-Moby Dick to save ‘her friends,’ and said friends don’t give a sh** about where she is or how she’s doing?
There is no new episode next week: The 100 is going on a summer hiatus, and the final season will resume on August 5. Stay safe, everyone!
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