The 100 season 3 episode 2 review: Wanheda Part 2

This review contains spoilers.

3.2 Wanheda Part 2

A lot of The 100‘s narrative energy last year came from several concurrent journeys home, whether that meant characters trying to get back to parents or children, prisoners of one camp trying to escape to another, or just the folks at Mount Weather wishing and hoping they’d one day get to walk outside again.

That works, because it keeps things moving at an often exhausting pace and, although we all wish to see certain characters interacting with each other more often, the constant shifting and changing of location eases the frustration. It’s the same tactic employed by shows like The Walking Dead (at its best) and Game Of Thrones, but I’d argue that The 100 does it more successfully than at least the former.

So keeping Clarke separate from Bellamy and the rest of her people, but still giving us wonderful moments like that reunion with Lexa, is smart on the writers’ part because, with everyone moving along different paths at the same time, it elongates the tension whilst never feeling like the show is treading water.

Until Murphy and Jaha’s storyline progresses a little, it seems that the Ice Nation are our go-to villains this year, but that also might change when the lost contingent of Sky People, led by Pike, inevitably turn against our protagonists. They’re extremists in the same way the Grounders were shown to be in the first season, tarring all ‘others’ with the same brush after a tragic run-in with Ice Nation when they first landed.

It’s an interesting idea to bring these guys into the show, not just to provide an excuse for new characters, but also to introduce a potential threat that doesn’t originate on Earth. Our heroes aren’t necessarily better than them just because they’ve managed to form alliances in order to keep the bloodshed down, they were simply handed a different set of circumstances when they came down from the Ark.

And that alliance may soon be over anyway, after Abby and Lincoln make the call to take Nyko to Mount Weather in order to heal his wounds. There’s a whole world of resources and supplies the group can’t be seen using for fear of outside perception, but it’s a choice they would have been forced to make sooner or later. If not them, someone else would have figured out there was an entire city running beneath them.

Clarke spends much of the episode trying to evade Roan’s capture but, after seeing him threaten Bellamy, she agrees to go with him to Lexa. Roan himself gets some motivation, telling Clarke that capturing her is the only way for him to get back to his own people. He’s just like everyone else, doing what he has to in order to get what he needs, and that allows him to judge Clarke for her actions in the way a token villain couldn’t have.

And we should talk about the City of Light, which this week appeared to confirm the popular theory that it’s simply a virtual reality invented to save humanity. As we see in the episode, it’s also a place where injury and even death seem to be erased. We saw Emori kill Gideon, and yet he popped up in the City of Light regardless.

If that is the case, and people can be reunited even after the tragedy that has befallen them since descending from the Ark, it would be a fascinating direction for the show to go in. The 100 is sci-fi at its core, after all, so introducing futuristic tech into these otherwise primitive surroundings would be weird in the most wonderful way. Right now, it’s hard to know who to be most afraid of, and that’s a place I very much like being in with this show.

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, Wanheda Part 1, here.