AudienceofOne

On the one hand, nobody ever accused Oliver of being a Mensa candidate but this whole Level 2/Demon nonsense is just such obvious nonsense I can't believe he's pursuing it. Oh wait, I can. Because he's really really dumb. Let's ponder him attacking guards, getting what I assume is extra time in prison and blowing his chance of getting out to his family so he can... find Diaz from within prison. You know the one thing Diaz definitely isn't? IN PRISON. Me too. I assume it's Amell because he just so completely understands this character and he's one of the few actors left on the show with any gravitas. What made this argument so tiresome was that she didn't tell him, then when he confronted her she said 'I thought you of all people would understand!" and I'm like, "yeah, he would and you know he would so why didn't you tell him?" This is like the silly conflict generated between Felicity and Oliver last season - generated entirely for the conflict. Mirakuru was exactly what I was thinking of. But I was struggling with the right word for my problem with its portrayal. You've hit on it - lameness. Really, really lame. He's the Demon. Obvs. *sigh* Because he's the Demon. Obvs. I don't know why Diggle didn't put a bullet in his head last episode. He had the shot. Instead he just pointed his gun, stared meaningfully at him and then let him get away. I was shocked because... it's all just so dumb. We are alone and lonely but I agree. I think she's struggling and her performance is strangely one note. I felt the same thing at the end of last season. Sometimes I think I can tell when EBR isn't happy with her character's direction and I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of those circumstances. She always seems more comfortable in the role when Felicity and Oliver are working together as a team. Whenever they separate them or try to do a "Felicity goes dark" storyline, her acting seems forced. To me. I agree although again I think we're alone.

It's not like this season is worse than the last season. It's just the relentlessness of it. I've lost patience with it. It's one thing when part of the character's development was him learning to work as a team and he therefore needed a team. it's another when the team becomes their own purpose and he becomes just another character in his own show. Why is Laurel still here? Why has NTA not apologised for their appalling behaviour? Who even cares about Diaz - he's not even that compelling a villain. Why does the FBI care more about taking down Oliver than an entire city being taken over by an organised crime ring? I think it's more that I'm watching a lot of television at the moment and I have to make time for Arrow. I'm starting to wonder if it's worth it - although I admit I love every bit of Olicity and I've had a lot of fun bitching about this show the last few years too.

I think... I might... be done?? Like, I'll give it one more episode but I was just so bored for most of this. I honestly don't care about anyone except Oliver and Felicity and even the flash forward was tainted by the idea that Oliver and Felicity abandoned William (as if!). Don't get me started on what, in summary, becomes this conversation: Diggle: Why won't you let me be the Arrow? I was supposed to be the Arrow. It's so unfair! You promised! *chucks giant tantrum*. Oliver: Diggle, the one thing I ask of you while i'm in prison is being the Arrow. Diggle: Don't wanna.

Why am I still watching this silly, silly show. Every comment on this season from now on will have a OMG Laurel is still here WTF subtext

I would in fact that the rise in popularity of the superhero genre is a symptom, not a cause. The rise of militarisation and aggressive masculinity has led to a rise in narratives of good/evil, with evil being defeated by powerful men aided by sexy women. It's part of the same toxic cultural phenomena.

I have misgivings that you are right. I say 'misgivings' because these writers have thrown any sense of logic out of the airlock. It doesn't matter how advanced the technology on the ship, human technology and advancement is based on a global infrastructure of factories. The reason the Arc was failing after only 100 years is because they couldn't source a new widget made with some rare Earth element from the factory in India. Or something similar. There's no way even the most advanced technological civilisation could maintain that over 250 years without any basic production infrastructure. And there's no way they could have produced the population to have implemented it either. All their tech would have broken by now and they'd have no way to fix it. The only reason you could maybe handwave the prison ship's survival is that nobody was tinkering with the tech and they were in a vacuum for 100 years. The civilisation on the new planet should have devolved in the same way we saw in season 1. I mean, not identical but a tribal society, mostly agrarian, with a few poorly-understood pieces of technology lying around. But of course this is TV show and that would be boring so... what kind of society haven't we seen yet? It'll be that.

How this episode actually went in my head Diyoza: Clarke, kill him. He's going to kill us all Clarke shoots him in the head Clarke: Okay, then. Guess that's over. Let's talk about this Valley thing then Diyoza: I think we need we need to discuss food supply Monty: About damn time End Final Book Things that are not in my head canon Any references to Eden or serpents Anything where Kane is framed as a Jesus figure Anything that involves a countdown to the really totally final apocalypse The chosen humans ascending from hell to a new world in the sky

I'll skip my usual philosophical treatise and just say: This season was so dumb.

You don't have to apologise for liking Octavia. I can understand why you do. But as for the war and her rule of Bloodreigna, IMHO she's a typical tin-pot dictator - only in power because of the closed borders and brainwashing but not actually capable of even real strategy. I defy even her biggest fans to tell me one achievement of hers that was hers. She's never shown any real high-level strategic thinking. In fact, she's pretty well the female Bellamy - needing a Clarke to tell them what to do because they're all instinct and uniformed certainty. Doesn't mean they can't be good leaders because a good leader knows who to go to for advice. But if she stops listening to those who are smarter and more-informed than her, than she loses. And that's why dictators hate open borders.

They woke up and it was all a dream...

1950s scifi alien soft porn world is going to be an interesting addition to Russian literary realism world. I vote we depose Regina and hand control to Thursday Next.

Ah yes, Indra. Indra remains awesome even after al these years and consistently written as well. I couldn't have cared less if Octavia died in this but if Indra had I think I may have finally been free of this show. This is the character who is defined by her ability to see the forest and not the trees. And we're supposed to believe she went "Oh, you're in charge now? Ok. Whatever. I'll help you win the war instead, what do I care? Just pinky swear you won't kill us later, m'kay? I HAVE TO PROTECT MY DAUGHTER IT IS MY MAIN IMPERATIVE." Wait... do you think this season is better explained if all the humans are dead and the people in the City of Light didn't get destroyed but were downloaded into human avatars but the process went wrong. And now we're seeing androids acting out the last great battle of humanity instead of their real human progenitors but with corrupted programming?

It'll be ok because of the formula factories and wet nurses.

I hesitate to give the writers props for anything considering their fridging of Lexa and their treatment of Lincoln but... I get it. I'm actually grateful for it. There is a very fine line between portraying the reality of the harassment women are forced to undergo daily and providing titillation by seeing women sexually harassed. Harassment diminishes the victim and people get off on that (that's why they do it, after all). I don't see a way they could do that plotline without diminishing their female characters and having strong, powerful female leaders is the one thing this show actually does right. Now Ontari's rape of Murphy came on top of Lexa's fridging and Lincoln's death. It was one in a series of decision that I found really tone deaf. They probably thought it was subversive to have the show's only rape be of a man by a woman. But instead it just came off as saying that men can't be raped.

Everyone's an idiot because they're all just servicing plot. To make the season work they had to have people run around like morons, change allegiances every 10 seconds, and generally be a bunch of dicks. That's why Murphy is so amazing because he's the only one who's just being Murphy. The only other person I think is consistently written is Octavia and... whatever. I hoped she was going to sacrifice herself for Wonkru but I knew she wasn't. "Anyone could die" doesn't apply to some characters. I mean "this is all your fault, Bellamy?" Are you fricking kidding me Blood Rain? And then this show wants me to believe that Clarke "I'm always 17 moves ahead" the Mama Bear actually had an entire plan of switching allegiances to McCreary and no contingency for working with the others to secretly take him out and replace him with Diyoza again. I mean, you can still have a plan where she betrays all her old friends to "keep her daughter safe" but at least make it a decent plan. There was no guarantee McCreary would keep anyone alive. He's a violent criminal. This is like last season where Clarke spent all her time trying to get them to open the bunker and then an entire episode trying to stop Bellamy from opening the bunker. Because... it was in the script? Maybe? And then she changes her mind about it after a full minute of talking to Madi. So, I guess she wasn't really sold on this whole thing anyway???? One thing I did like was Echo judging Clarke over the death count and her betrayal of Bellamny and Clarke going, "Are you kidding me now?".

In the Garden of Eden with a little bit of the devil inside. Kill me now.

All I can think of during the whole Abby-ex-machina scene was "Dear God, even if the future has no underwires at least button the shirt". No doctor going about their normal business dresses like that. It's ridiculous. I'm completely embarrassed about just how many words I expended on philosophical musings about this season and about this show. I'm just going to enjoy how bad it is from now on.

I just accept that this show is officially trash at this point. Case in point, did this scene really need this much boob?

Today on the 100, people run around for an hour doing stuff for seemingly no reason. I hope this show gets cancelled and the final scene is them all dead.

That was my interpretation as well and I thought it was a nice touch by the actor/director. It had a subtlety the rest of the show often lacks.

I used to like Clarke but they have no idea what to do with her this season. She's in some sort of narrative holding pattern. I've also never had much of a problem with her acting but she's terrible this season. I think that's because the actor doesn't know WTH her character is doing anything either.

We had quite a detailed conversation about this at the beginning of this season in terms of trying to quantify the bunker's population. It's never been stated, but we speculate all the Arkers have some kind of implanted birth control that can get removed when they want to have a child. Something like a futuristic Implanon. If they didn't, there'd be way more accidents than just Bellamy's mother. Contraceptive implants make the most sense.

Hey, Wonkru are cannibals. Nobody saw that coming! This episode just made me bang my head against the wall. Instead of milking the season for this "shocking" "reveal" in episode 11, they should have had all of this in the first two. Forget the flashbacks that help us understand characters at the end of the season - show us who they are at the beginning of the season and then we won't spent 10 episodes eye-rolling them. This goes especially for Abby. Everything she said to Octavia in this episode was absolutely right. Her assessment was correct, her recommendations were right. That doesn't make it any less horrific and that's the point. We could have had 11 episodes where we can see the psychological impact these decisions have even when they're technically the right decisions. Instead it's been "Abby's a junkie now, isn't she terrible!" Also, by spending some time on each of the three groups before they got back into each other's spheres would have stopped this: When Bellamy says "I'm trying to get back to my family", who does he mean? Oh, he means Spacekru. He may have had six years with these people and only a few months on the surface with the others. But we haven't. We've had four years of him with the others and two minutes with these new relationships. If they'd put this "reveal" in episode 2, I would have been much more forgiving of her behaviour. I still think she's a perpetual teen playing dictator but at least I'd understand why she was so determined to get to the valley and away from the horror of the bunker. This is one of the few things this show has said that didn't bother me. They went into the bunker in a hurry. They had no time for serious planning. All their protein would have to be plant based and I doubt they had a lot of available protein crops on hand. I can't remember where they got the algae but I thought that either Monty took it with him to space or it was already there. This makes perfect sense to me and I agree with Abby. It's brutal and horrific but she was right. Watching their friends and families starve to death would be shockingly demoralising and by the end their bodies would be so emaciated and so degraded they couldn't be harvested. If they're choosing to die anyway, then they should die now so they can be eaten. Brutal but 100% right.

I would have thought that a decent arc for Regina would have involved her realising that being the Queen of Everything wasn't her happy ending. I mean, wasn't the entire point of the whole Robin thing (at the beginning) that she had a choice between happiness and power but chose power and that was the wrong choice? Just like Rumple kept choosing power instead of his own happy ending? Why is ultimate power suddenly the desired end of her arc? I mean, say what you will about Rumple as a character or about Rumpbelle as an OTP, but at least his arc made sense. Henry remained pretty much pointless in both iterations of the show - you can't create a narrative around a character created solely to be a plot contrivance - but how they wrote Hook was great. I mean, both Hook and Whook chose family and friendship over revenge in both versions of the show. I think that's great.

No wonder the writers got rid of all the antagonists at the halfway mark. There was no one around to ask for an explanation. My main takeaway from this season was that Hook remains my favourite character and giving him a daughter was a stroke of brilliance. I'm actually glad Emma left, not because she wasn't my favourite character, but because she would have been just as sidelined and marginalised if she was there. At least she was sidelined and marginalised because she wasn't in the show anymore. I thought the season wasn't that bad (despite it not making any sense) right up until the weird slapped-on Regina love-in at the end. That was just awful.