The 100 season 2 episode 2 review: Inclement Weather

This review contains spoilers.

2.2 Inclement Weather

There are currently four camps on The 100 – Mount Weather, the grounders, the hundred/adults and, now, wherever the heck Jaha has landed himself. While season one of the show was effective in its own Lord Of The Flies kind of way, pushing the characters together in a pressure cooker and watching them break and corrupt each other, this season has benefitted hugely from shaking things up.

Clarke’s separation from the group, for example, could have easily been about finding her way back to Finn and Bellamy, and in a way it is, but it’s also about her own immutable distrust and curiosity and a determination to get out of Mount Weather and help her friends. She’s still their leader, even if she’s trapped in a dystopian underground society and quickly losing support from Jasper and Monty.

And we got a glimpse into what President Dante and his subjects are up to this week, as Clarke’s hunt for something sinister about the situation leads her to a secret room filled with caged grounders.

She’s tipped off by a burns victim who seems miraculously healed half a day later, and it looks as if the mountain men have found a way to heal themselves using blood from their captured enemies. One of those enemies is Anya, who I assume will now team up with Clarke in order to expose the truth.

On the ground, Murphy has wormed his way back into the inner circle with his first-hand knowledge of where the grounders’ camp is. Abby’s plan to retrieve Clarke and the others is obviously a bad idea, and not just because we as an audience know that the grounders aren’t the evil kidnappers they’re being perceived as. As of right now, they’ve actually been taken by yet another villainous force – Reapers – which explains that monster glimpsed in the woods last week.

On any other show this may have been baddie overkill, but I get the sense that The 100 can take the chaos. The fact that we don’t know who’s ‘good’ and who’s ‘evil’ yet, including our regular characters, helps, and so does the fact that the show has spread those characters across the map in an effort to establish each faction as people we should be invested in.

The Octavia and Lincoln storyline is still the least convincing of the bunch, and that was only aggravated by the sight of Octavia apparently overpowering one of the grounders.

No matter what the logistics might have been, it just looked awkward on screen and the realisation that Lincoln had already been captured and punished by his fellow grounders came completely out of the blue. They’re just tools for exposition right now, and that’s fine if it means we get more of the Reapers next week.

Will Abby’s dream team of slightly immoral teenagers help her to find some of the people currently wandering around (and below) the woods? If they end up being the group on foot, then we might have to add another group to the list. Raven, crippled even after some gruesome surgery, is still with Kane back at the camp, so she’ll presumably be the one to deal with him once he discovers where Abby has gone.

The big cliffhanger of the first episode was how the heck a baby had been left behind on the ship with Jaha, but the answer was obvious around the 3-minute mark. That didn’t lessen the impact of the subsequent storyline, I’ll add, but teen-Wells’ reappearance wasn’t as monumentally shocking as the writers may have intended it to be.

It’s nice that Jaha hasn’t been killed off, and that he’s reached earth, but I’m also glad that we haven’t bypassed the potential of a solo survival storyline. I don’t quite know why, but I really, really want to see him lose his mind, even if it’s just an excuse to have Wells back on the show.

And how cool was that new title sequence?

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, The 48, here.

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