The 100 (pilot)

I noticed The 100 (the television show) had made it to Netflix here in Canada and watched the pilot on Thursday.

dvd/blu-ray | on demand

The concept is intriguing: Earth was devastated by a nuclear holocaust and the only surviving humans live on The Ark, a space station made up of other, smaller space stations that have banded together (literally and figuratively) for survival. 97 years after the devastation, The Ark is sending a hundred people back to Earth to see if they survive.

Unfortunately, the concept falls apart completely within the firsts several minutes of the show.  Those hundred being sent?  They're all convicts, and they're all teenagers in the 16 to 17 year-old range.  None have had the least training in survival.  And most remarkable of all (despite, sometimes, supposed years in solitary confinement, rough treatment from the guards, and the unexpected crash landing of their pod) all of them are impeccably coiffed, plucked, and made-up — and reasonably sane.  No, seriously: one of the main characters is a girl who spent the first sixteen years of her life being hidden in the floor of her house because, under the Ark's one-child policy, her very existence was a crime.  When she was discovered, her mother was immediately executed and she was placed in solitary confinement for a solid year.  Yet she's still entirely lucid, pretty gregarious, and happily chasing boys within ten minutes of crash landing.

The main premise is that on this space station of about 2,400 people (I think?) — the very last of the human race — laws have gotten positively draconian, and the breaking of any rule, no matter how minor, results in imprisonment for minors and execution for adults.  There is no mercy.  The kids we meet are in for growing pot, taking a space walk, knowing a secret, or simply being born and most of them, it seems, have had one or both parents executed for being complicit in their various crimes.

And this is where any believability just gets stretched just a little too thin; people would not be hanging out all chill in a ruthless, authoritarian society where their fellows are executed and their children imprisoned and tortured for petty crimes.  Especially in a strictly one-child society.  Sure, in a giant faceless bureaucracy, all kinds of people fall through the cracks but — and this frequently irritates me in post-apocalyptic fiction — when there are so few people left, the idea that all they do is turn so viciously on each other, killing one another left and right and allowing the un-charismatic psychopaths among them to rule the roost, instead of, you know, cooperating, seems more a product of modern narcissism and individualistic exceptionalism than it does a product of a tiny band of humans on the brink of extinction.

There are a lot of problems along this line in the show.  If resources are so tight that there is a one-child rule and you can get stuck in prison for going on a spacewalk on a lark, then why are so many useless prisoners tolerated, you know, up to the point they pick out a hundred of them (how many are there, anyway?) and decide to shoot them at the Earth?  In the pilot alone, we see a gifted doctor condemned to death for giving an injured patient more than the "allowed amount" of blood during a surgery.  And this makes no sense: a community like this needs its surgeons.  They are expensive to train, have specialist knowledge, and are not disposable.  And really, this would be such a no-brainer to solve: a rule like this would be enforced by a petty (and far more disposable) bean-counter who was the only one able to dole out the valued resource and the only one held responsible if the allowed amount was exceeded.  A sane society (that is, one that had managed to survive 97 years in space after a nuclear holocaust) would take the decision to even violate the law out of the hands of the high-value and expensively-trained member of society and put it in the hands of someone whose only value was in controlling the flow of that resource.  (To anyone who grew up experiencing HMOs in the U.S., this sort of bureaucrat-induced health care rationing seems like it would be second nature.)

Irrationality is at every turn: At one point the pro tempore chancellor of the space station, a man made out to be both short-sighted and evil, takes his underling aside to explain that friendships are useless, mean nothing, and can have no sway on decisions.  So how does someone so unlikable and stupid get to such a position of power (let alone remain un-murdered) if not for the many friends who benefit from his position?

Oh, and this one might be a bit too nit-picky (feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph) but here it goes: these chosen Hundred are supposed to have been shot down to Earth somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains near Mount Weather, Virginia.  Why then are these kids running amok through (what looks to me) a Pacific Northwest rain forest?  Maybe that kind of observation is only possible to someone who grew up in one region or the other, but it's pretty glaring if you did.  (I suspect this show was filmed in Washington state or British Columbia, and that's why, but it looks silly, especially when they have shots of ragged snow-capped peaks instead of the gently rolling Blue Ridge Mountains.)  Sorry, I had to get that out there.  These instances were just one more thing piled onto the many other problems that made me turn to the person watching this with me and go, "Muh?"

And you know, all that might still be forgivable — from "not a one of our writers seems to know a thing about group dynamics" to "we have no idea what the Appalachian Mountains look like" — if the dialogue weren't mind-numbingly hackneyed.  All the scripting says to me is "Teen survival drama is hot right now, right?  We cranked this out as fast as we could.  Tweens won't know the difference!"  The actors do as best they can with the dialogue — I mean, they look as serious as possible when uttering lines that make them seem like the remains of humankind were educated solely by watching TV melodramas and action flicks — but it soon grates on the ear.

There are twelve more episodes in season one, and the thing got sixteen episodes for season two, but the whole of the pilot just couldn't give me a good enough reason to stick it out and see where it goes.