Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, TV | Tagged: entertainment, the 100, tv

The Teenage Apocalypses Of The 100 – Look! It Moves by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

In this era of Apocalyptic Young Adult fiction almost neck-and-neck with superheroes in movies and TV, The 100 might be the darkest of them all.

The show is in keeping with the dystopias of The Hunger Games and Divergent series, but what surprises me is that it's even nastier and more ruthlessly violent as either of those movie series. They're PG-13 and tone down the violence while as a CW network show, The 100 goes to gory places you'd expect from an R-rated movie. Its themes are also much more pessimistic. Its nuances are also deeper.

For those of you who don't watch it, the show is adapts the novel series by Kass Morgan but is even more ambitious than the books. It takes place 97 years after the Earth was devastated by nukes and the remainder of civilisation escaped to live in space stations in orbit. When the stations start to fail, their rulers sent 100 teenage juvenile offenders back to Earth as canaries to determine if was habitable again. These kids are left to fend for themselves, facing mutant creatures, cannibal tribes, warring factions and a hostile environment out to kill them. Among them, Clark Griffin emerges as their leader, the one who's willing to make the hard decisions to keep them alive, even if it means sacrificing the few to save the many. And lots of the kids get killed – usually bloodily – during the course of the show, which rather reduces them from the 100 of the title. It's almost a black comedy about which pretty teenager is going to die horribly next.

The show is a virtual checklist of teen angst and YA conventions: outsider heroine, a hostile world that's out to get them, fascistic authority figures, moral dilemmas, war, the agony of doomed romance and lots of violence. There's even class warfare in the form of the rich elite in the mountain bunker who torture the 100 kids for their bone marrow because they're immune to the radiation levels of the outside world. It may feel calculated, a show in keeping with the current neocon era of a world at constant war, where everything's up for grabs, no one is safe and heroism fails time and again. The situations are teenage angst cranked to apocalyptic levels of intensity: Do I have what it takes to make it? Will my friends forgive me if I make some horrible decisions? How can we fight these rich adults who are out to exploit and kill us? Can I be friends with these Mad Max coplayers?

It's like high school without the classes and teachers.

And at the end of this season, the heroine kills hundreds of men, women and children by flooding their bunker with radiation in order to save her people. This seems to be the new trend in Science Fiction and YA fiction. It seemed to start with the new Battlestar Galactica (not YA but its influence has been far and wide) and continues with shows like 12 Monkeys and The 100. In these shows, the heroes all do horrible things, pushed to situations where there are no good decision, only the least evil one, and then they and the audience feel bad. Then come back next week to feel bad all over again, because feeling bad in fiction is supposed to be fun. Much better to feel bad in dystopian fantasy than in real life. In shows like these, every decision really is life or death, which is how teen life feels, hence its appeal.

It's just a new thing that the heroine has to commit war crimes. Neither the heroines of The Hunger Games or the Divergent series did that. I don't think she does it in the origina novel either, so this is a story decision by the showrunners. Now, the writers would just say they were creating the maximum amount of drama in order to keep the viewers hooked, but I wonder about the trend to be as nasty and ruthless as possible. Are they unconsciously responding to and addressing the current global mood of pessimism? Does the audience feel theh show reflects their own feelings of anxiety and horror at the way the world is going, and identify with Clark as an avatar of the tragic antihero who comes to shoulder the burden of the world? Does a heroine who's forced to commit atrocities give the audience catharsis and help them feel better about their own lives? The 100 is a hit on the CW, one of the network's newer shows that's a hit without being an adaptation of a DC Comic., so it must be tapping the zeitgeist in the way Battlestar Galactica did, even if it's not getting as much mainstream media attention.

Maybe in season three, Clark will nuke an orphanage and an animal shelter.

The -20 at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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