#so why would my parents deserve to die? what difference is there between cattle like pigs and cows in our world to humans in theirs?

[pawphin]

long ramble in tags tldr: kindness rules

[travllingbunny]

The 100 rewatch: 2x07 Long into an Abyss

A strong episode that moves the plot along in major ways and has some very tense scenes.

Rating: 8.5/10

It helps a lot that Finn’s storyline doesn’t get featured much, and that Finn is much more likable this time, showing actual guilt for what he’s done. The moment between him and Clarke, where she tries to comfort him: “Lincoln is saveable, and so are you” is actually touching.

This episode has one of the most effective creepy openings: starting out with an incredibly idyllic moment that feels like it’s from some other show, with a young woman enjoying the sunny, beautiful day on the outside, before turning into the horror scene of her dying of radiation burns while desperately begging people on the inside to let her back into Mount Weather. It’s a part of Dr Tsing’s and Cage’s experiment to find out if the blood treatments work – obviously, just for a short while – and they decide to let her die, so she wouldn’t tell about it to Dante, since they’re doing it behind his back. Tsing is firmly established as a completely cold evil scientist, and Cage is also OK with sacrificing their own people if need be, though he was initially uncomfortable with it. 

Cage and Dante later have a not-so-idyllic father/son moment when Cage convinces Dante to go outside courtesy of the treatment and feel for a moment what it’s like, as a part of the plan to convince him to go along with his and Tsing’s plans. Cage says "This is out world, we deserve it". He’s quite a Mountain Man supremacist. It’s that conviction that they’re entitled to the good life more than any other group of people, who aren’t even entitled to not be tortured and/or killed, that’s the main problem of the Mount Weather society. But Dante is angrily refusing to go along, because he’s apparently more moderate or more concerned with morality, or just more hypocritical: "What we've done to Outsiders has corrupted our legacy, I can't go that road any further". So, he is bothered by what they have been doing to Grounders? But he is still doing it anyway? How is that not going that same road? Because he likes the kids and doesn’t look down on them as “savages”? (The Mountain Men never considered assimilating the Grounders into the “gene pool” as they planned with the kids, did they?) Whatever, Dante.

The stakes are definitely raised as what we always could have guessed is confirmed: Cage and Tsing are planning to kill all the kids. We get the exact number of Mountain Men at the moment: 382. Tsing tells Cage they need the bone marrow and they need 8 treatment by a kid, which means that all the 47 kids will have to die. Now, if they had instead decided to not be terrible people for once and not treat other people as cattle, if they had met up with the other Arkers, offered them support and asked them to donate bone marrow, they wouldn't need to kill anyone, because there’s thousands of Arkers out there.

Other developments in Mount Weather include the 47 learning that the Arkers are alive and on the ground, and making plans how to work inside Mount Weather to free themselves – using Monty’s hacking skills and Miller’s thieving skills. Although Jasper has faith in Clarke (it’s so sad that their relationship will deteriorate so much after S2), they are not sure if she’s even alive, so they have to rely on themselves. (This is most info we’ve gotten on Miller so far: he was a thief, and he’s from the Alpha station.)

Meanwhile, poor Harper gets experimented on. Knowing now that she was first meant to die in season 1 of the hemorrhagic fever, it’s so lucky that she got a chance to survive till the end of season 5 and get such a great arc.

But most of the episode is about the tensions in Camp Jaha, where Arkers are debating what to do about the imminent Grounder attack that was threatened at the end of 2x06. Jaha and Abby find themselves on the opposite sides of the argument, which is awkward, since they both think they’re the Chancellor. Jaha advocates that they should leave and go look for the City of Light (oh, no, not a good solution), and justifies this by saying: "This is not our home, it's theirs". Urrrgh. See me roll my eyes. Not that crap, please. Everywhere they go is going to be someone’s “home”, if it’s inhabitable, nowhere is going to be “your home” since you’re refugees/exiles who have spent a century in space, but it’s not like there isn’t enough room for everyone. And hey, Jaha, you’re gonna change your mind completely come season 4! He’s just saying this because he got into his head that it’s his messianic mission to find the COL. Yes, I felt the same the first time when I had no idea what COL would turn out to be.  Abby, on the other hand, is like "I'm not ready to march our people into the desert". Again with the Biblical references.

Jaha’s better argument is that they’re going to die if they don’t leave, what with the Grounders being much more numerous, and if they live, they can fight another day and see what the best solution is then. This is basically the same argument Clarke made in her speech in 1x12, when she convinced the Delinquents to leave and try to search for Luna. But with one big difference: the Delinquents weren’t leaving anyone to die, and this time, leaving would mean giving up on the 47 in Mount Weather – so it’s a definite “no” for Clarke. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a big “no” for David Miller and the other parents of the kids trapped in MW. In one of the most tense moments of the episode, Jaha tries to stage a coup, unsuccessfully, but Miller and Byrne listen to Abby as the Chancellor instead of Jaha, and obey her order to arrest him. (I guess they’ll have to change the name of the camp soon.) Abby declares “I have faith, too, in my daughter". (But the mother/daughter relationship won’t remain that harmonious, with Clarke staging her own successful coup and showing her mom who’s really in charge in 2x11.)

The other big plot thread is Bellamy and Octavia asking Clarke to try to help save Lincoln, which Clarke can’t, but asks Abby to do. Lincoln’s friend, healer Nyko, tries to “save” him by killing him – clearly thinking that mercy kill is the only way to save a Reaper, but there’s a nice payoff to the scene a few episodes ago, when Clarke heard Anya say “Your fight is over” – it allows her to realize what Nyko is doing. But stopping the heart temporarily turns out to be part of the process of healing. And the two plot threads then become one, thanks to Clarke’s quick thinking and willingness to hope and take a huge risk: the possibility of healing Reapers is a big bargaining chip for peace and an alliance against the Mountain Men, which Clarke already tried to make happen by convincing Anya, and now she has to convince Lexa herself.

The first meeting of Clarke and Lexa starts with this exchange: “You’re the one who burned 300 of my warriors” – “You’re the one who sent them to attack our camp”. Thankfully, this is the last time Lexa mentions this, so I guess she must have realized that it’s stupid to complain about people defending themselves when you attack them, and was probably impressed by Clarke’s attitude. Grounder warrior culture respects strength, and Lexa is probably not used to people talking back to her. And this is probably why and how Clarke came to be regarded as the leader of the Arkers for the rest of season 2 – she acted like one, in her determination to save her people, so Lexa perceived her the leader and started treating her that way. Clarke then uses all her skills of persuasion and references Anya to convince Lexa to agree to an alliance against Mount Weather, with the promise of showing her the success of the Reaper treatment through Lincoln – even if she’s not sure that Abby will succeed in bringing him back. The most tense moment of the episode is the standoff that happens when Lexa and Indra come with Clarke to see Lincoln, but he appears dead, and for a moment, everyone is about to kill each other, until Clarke thinks of electro-shocking Lincoln to bring him back.

This is the beginning of the complicated relationship between Clarke and Lexa, and it pretty much sets up the parameters of it from the start: through everything that will happen between them, as allies, enemies or lovers, their dynamic will always be colored by the facts that Lexa has, at all times, the power to give orders to start killing Clarke’s people, while Clarke is determined to do her best to convince Lexa to not kill her people/not let them die.

And it gets additionally awkward when, in the big cliffhanger, Lexa tells Clarke the price of the truce: Finn’s death. I know from BTS comments that the writing staff wasn’t planning at this point to have those two romantically involved (they even didn’t give any thought to Lexa’s sexuality until the writer of 2x09 wrote the part about Costia), but once they did make that decision, this becomes kind of an awkward part of the setup for their romance. In a way, it’s nothing unusual for this show, which really loves developing romantic relationships from messed up situations (I think the only exceptions so far are Marper and Mackson), but “future love interest makes you kill your former love interest” is still high on the unpleasantness scale. What’s even odder is that it’s not even high on the list of the issues I’ll eventually have with their romance – because, in this case, Lexa is not doing anything bad, just following the law, and Finn is guilty.

Regardless of that, at this point my impressions of Lexa were predominantly positive (and remained so for 4 more episodes). She seemed reasonable, calm and controlled, which was very refreshing, since most Grounder warriors were constantly angry and talking about revenge. And Indra was one of the worst at this point. My god, I had forgotten how annoying she used to be – not only was she the Angry Black Woman stereotype, but she was the biggest warmonger at Lexa’s side and was constantly “Kill, kill, kill them all!” The only thing I liked about her was Adina Porter’s performance – she was way better than Dichen Lachman or any of the other actors playing Angry Grounder Warriors. This character has had such a huge character development.

One thing that did always bother me and still does is the fact that Lexa, Tristan, Nyko, Quint (annoying general who goes on to appear in 2x10)… all the white Grounders had such a strong fake tan. Wow, they must have great solariums in Polis! Who would think! And what about their cultural-appropriation-mishmash fashion sense? How did that happen? Did Becca tell her subjects: “I think it would be cool if you started wearing this, and this, and this…”? It makes even less sense as the distorted-English that the Grounders speak, even though it’s been less than a century since the end of the world, and that’s nowhere near enough time for a whole new language or even dialect to develop. But it’s not like anything about their culture and society is remotely realistic – however, overall it’s just a cliché of all post-apocalyptic dramas. The crap with bronzed tans and bindi and dreads etc.? That’s just idiotic and offensive. It doesn’t even make sense in the context of “Proud Warrior Race” stereotypes – I get the war paint, but why bindi and dreads, those aren’t even associated with warriors? If they wanted popular warriors/savages stereotypes, hey, how about Vikings? But nope – they were white, and the logic is “non-white cultures – savages” or something? Uuuum….

But that’s the kind of BS you get used to on this show after a while. What do you do? World-building has never been its strong suit. If I gave lower scores for episodes for that, I’ll have to give low scores to almost everyone episode from now on, so… never mind.

Body count: 1 - Keenan, the Mountain Man girl (and minor character that appeared in a couple of episodes before this) that Cage and Tsing used as an experiment.

[believerindaydreams]

a pathologic/GBU crossover

if I stopped to think about it, I wouldn’t have written it

This town needs healers. They’re not healers. 

“We should go,” Blondie says, studying the horizon out the window (a small shack, built of warped imported lumber and ill-made nails; no surprises here). No damned official interdict can stop them, if they choose to leave now; the prairie’s too wide, the routes of possible escape too many. “We should leave before they bring the army in.”

No one has said in so many words, that there are twelve days of epidemic to run before this town will be cleansed one way or the other. Nobody needs to. The knowledge of it weighs on them all like the foetid air, the stink of slaughtered cattle and diseased humans.

“It won’t work,” Tuco says, guzzling down twyrine as though he’s developed a taste for the stuff. “If we were still in New Mexico...but Blondie, my friend, we are a long way from home.”

“I saw a tumbleweed this morning, blowing in the wind. That man you killed was carrying escudos. We couldn’t have crossed the border in a single night.”

“Not that border.” The bandit grins at him, starts tearing into a dripping steak with his teeth. The platter before him is piled with fresh meat, half-cooked, barely civilised. “No.”

Tuco has a theory for what’s going on, which like many things about him is both simple and unfathomably wrong. 

Tuco thinks that they’re dead. 

And going by past experience, once his partner has an idea fixed in his head there’s no getting it out again- but not this time. 

 “Who are you trying to convince, Blondie?”

“You. Who else?”

Yourself, drifts across the conversation; and Blondie vows not to listen to it. 

“Look at you,” he argues. “Half-sozzled, eating everything you can scavenge, that doesn’t sound like any corpse I ever heard of.”

Tuco pauses, mid-chew; pries off a hunk of beef to throw at him. Its blood rolls off the table between them, staining a dark spot on the dusty toe of his boot. “You know what that man told me, before he died? That this is a place where the air itself will kill, you starve to death in a day without food. Lucky thing one of us is listening.”

“I have been listening, and haven’t heard anything that you couldn’t account for with high altitude and bad crops.” Blondie ignores the meat. If this plague does come from poisoned cattle, it’ll be safer to stick with hardtack, and at present he has no appetite anyway. “Which is another point. Everyone is talking English, except that nomadic tribe on the outskirts, so you were wrong about that-“

“Y esos bastardos no estan hablando en inglés. You hear English, I hear my mother tongue. You never heard that the devil can speak in tongues? Maybe that is what hell is,” Tuco says, suddenly contemplative. “You live here long enough, you turn into a devil yourself.“

There’s a point at which it’s easier to let his partner stay superstitious, than argue the point any longer. “We’re leaving now. Where’d you stable the horse?” Bad luck only having the one mount, after that last escapade, but if they give the beast its head and don’t go too quickly, they can still make it out of here. 

“There is no horse.“

“Someone stole it?” Horse thieves they can deal with, so long as no one’s actually ridden it out of town yet. 

“The man stole it,” Tuco returns. “So I killed him. Nothing wrong with that, they all agreed.” 

“Which they? What happened?” If they have no horse because his partner’s swapped it for a bag of magic beans, he’ll tie the next noose himself...

“People happened,” Tuco says succinctly, and belches. The edge seems off his appetite, now; he starts in on the second steak with something approaching decorum. “Hungry people. A whole mob who knew we rode in with a clean animal, no taint of plague, I didn’t have enough bullets left to shoot them all down. So we had a little sacrifice. More tender than I would have thought, but that’s a gelding for you.” 

“You mean this is our horse,” Blondie remarks, finally shoving a knife into the steak before him. Holds it up as though it’s a reward poster, to be read and understood and thrown away. “What did I do, to deserve a partner such as you?”

“It was a good trade. I got medicine powders, fruit, coffee, anything they could find to barter. Our choice of safe houses to sleep tonight. For the next twelve days we live like kings, or what passes for it in this town.”

“I would have ridden that horse straight out of here. Gone to find help, and not come back till I had it.” He would have. Tuco should have; they’re not so different as all that, in knowing when to leave a bad situation behind. “Don’t tell me it was because you worried about leaving me behind.”

“You think that would have stopped me getting out of this plague hole, if I had the choice? There was no choice. We were both already dead.”

“No....”

“So we might as well be as comfortable as possible,” Tuco concludes. “Are you going to eat that steak, or not?“

This, then, is the difference between them; that faced with the choice of saving a few lives now, or a whole town a little later, his partner has chosen to be soft now and hard later. The wrong decision, Blondie knows in his bones; he wouldn’t have made that mistake if it was up to him. 

He cannot help, though perhaps he can hinder; he cannot heal; most of all he cannot ride off into the sunsett and leave, and if anything was to make him believe all these bone-headed assurances about hell, it is the pinioned, aching fever in his very bones, as though the disease percolating through his body was itself responsible for keeping him here, pulling him downwards as firmly as any rope- 

when he falls off the table and hits the floor, the steak falls squarely across his thigh, so he knows Tuco will be along sooner or later to collect it. 

That happens. What surprises him is when, after putting the meat back on the table, Tuco is gentle with him; pulling him over to the desiccated tick, covering him with a blanket. Ripping open a packet of white powder, that stings in his mouth as though it acts by burning out infection and everything it encounters.

“If this is hell, why are you helping me?” 

(If this is hell, a fate he admittedly deserves, there should be no redemption nor relief.)

“I have a brother who wanted to be good. He cuts himself off from everyone, he doesn’t know when my parents start starving, he says rosaries in that monastery all day and never looks outside his own door. Good, you can shove that up-“ and Tuco gestures, with vicious rude intent. “The world was all hell anyway, but it was easier with a partner. You don’t die on me, Blondie, you hear? Better the devil I know...”

So it’s all self-interest, then. 

And it is that thought, the sure and safe awareness that there is a motive besides unreliable kindness to hold him and Tuco together, that comforts Blondie as the plague takes him. 

(Maybe they are in hell.)

(Maybe they aren’t.)

(Maybe it simply doesn’t matter.)