We pick up right where we left off-amidst the rubble of Ton-DC. Clarke is watching, numb, as a white horse on fire runs past her and a Grounder holding their own severed arm falls down in front of her.
Lexa snaps Clarke out of her daze and reminds her, “Victory stands on the back of sacrifice.” All well and good, but Clarke is out for immediate revenge and sets her sights on the Mountain Man spotter-turned-sniper who is taking out survivors in Ton-DC. Clarke’s become quite the bloodthirsty creature, hasn’t she?
In Ton-DC everyone is hiding from the sniper. Indra is hit and when Lincoln reaches out to help her, she hisses and calls him a reaper. Nice. Octavia wants to reach her mentor, but is pinned down with some of Indra’s other Seconds behind some rubble. One of them tells Octavia that her people are “the bringers of death.” Well. That’s not wrong.
Octavia and the Medicine Man are able to get over to Indra. She tells Octavia that as Second, it’s now up to her to lead the people in Ton-DC. Octavia isn’t optimistic anyone will listen to her, but she’ll have to try anyway since Indra passes out from her bullet wound and is down for the count. I really love the relationship growing between Indra and Octavia. Octavia needed a mentor beyond Lincoln and her brother, and Indra isn’t always the kindest of people, but she’ll help Octavia become the warrior she wants to be.
Abby is crawling through rubble. Of course she is. She follows the sound of someone banging on metal and finds Kane. His leg is pinned under a huge rock, because that’s what the TV Tropes website demands happen any time there’s a building collapse. Abby promises Kane she’ll get him out, but I don’t know, that seems like an awful lot to promise.
In Mount Bloodletting, the soldiers are attacking the 47. They’ve created a barricade out of chairs-take this moment to get that Les Mis song out of your system-and grabbed makeshift weapons. Jasper has an axe. Which didn’t strike me as a great idea.
But then this happened:
Never mind. Jasper can keep the axe.
The 47 manage to kill most of the guards and chase the rest away, but the guards still grab one of them, a girl, and drag her off to their bone marrow basement, or whatever we’re calling that place.
Bellamy, still in uniform, rescues her and brings her to Maya who leads them both back to her house. Maya’s dad isn’t thrilled Maya brought these people to his house but Maya puts her foot down. Finally-FINALLY-we get some great backstory on Maya. We find out her mother was part of an underground resistance in the mountain that was against the grounder blood treatments. Maya’s mom was ill and refused the treatments that would save her and she died. Maya’s driven by political purpose inherited from her mother and, suddenly, I like Maya. I kind of wish this moment had come earlier because I’d been pretty dismissive of her previously, but we probably had to wait until this point in the story to get that information. So. I can’t be that mad.
Maya and Bellamy make a plan to get some weapons to the 47, but along the way guards grab Maya. She reappears some time later in the radiation-contaminated hallway to the 47’s bunk. She’s wearing a hazmat suit, but there’s a limited amount of oxygen in there for her and Smarmy Son radios the 47 to tell them that if they surrender, he’ll save Maya. Jasper tells Maya he won’t let her die. Maya tells Jasper she won’t let him surrender. This might be a problem.
There’s been a second cave-in at Ton-DC and Abby wakes up pinned by rubble and somehow dirtier and bloodier than before. Kane is also still pinned and not doing so hot. Abby apologizes to Kane and tells him that all this is, somehow, Abby’s fault. Because Clarke is her daughter and Clarke knew this was going to happen.
Just as I’m about to totally lose patience with Abby and her self-imposed martyrdom, Kane hands her a dose of reality. Kane reminds her that Clarke is just a product of her upbringing. “She grew up on the Arc,” Kane says. Where, you know, they tossed people out the airlock for stealing food. Abby remembers then that she betrayed her own husband to save her people. She’s not unfamiliar with this kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Which is what made her previous willful ignorance of the situation and condemnation of Clarke so damn frustrating. Well. Hopefully this means the end of that. Or I’ll go back to hoping a heavy rock falls on her.
Lexa and Clarke are still going after the sniper and Lincoln joins them. They manage to track the sniper down, but he pins them all behind a boulder. Clarke draws his fire as Lincoln takes a run at the sniper. Lincoln has the upper hand for a while, but then the Mountain Man paralyzes him with that device they use to control the Reapers. Clarke and Lexa arrive to the sniper holding a knife to Lincoln’s neck.
“Let him kill me,” Lincoln says. “Your people need you.”
“You are my people,” Clarke says before shooting the sniper dead center in the chest.
Lincoln’s impressed. Lexa, less so. She asks Clarke if she feels better now, having killed the sniper. Clarke says no.
In Mount Bloodletting, the guards take another run at the 47’s bunk. When they get inside, though, they find an empty room.
The 47 have escaped down a garbage chute and they’ve taken Maya with them. Everyone’s okay and they meet up with Maya’s dad, who has changed his tune, and a group of other anti-blood treatment Mountain Men. The 47 are to be divided up and hidden among the rebels where they’ll sit and wait for Clarke and war.
Underground, Abby manages to free herself from the rubble and make her way to an unconscious Kane. She gets a tourniquet around his leg but who knows if that’s enough to save him at this point.
Above her, Octavia and the grounders are working frantically to dig through the rubble. They stop when they hear the sound of Lincoln’s horn and realize the sniper has been taken out. Octavia goes in to double-time, giving orders, acting like quite the leader-in-training. They find Abby and Kane and shortly after that, Lincoln, Clarke, and Lexa arrive back at Ton-DC.
Lexa recognizes this opportunity to rally her troops and seizes it. She stands among the rubble and shouts to her people that “the mountain will fall. The dead will be avenged.” There are cries of support that Abby quickly cuts short because she is a perpetual fun-killer.
Indra is alive, but weak. She is very proud of Octavia. “Today you saved lives,” she says. “Tomorrow you’ll take them.” I don’t know if watching this show is making me more bloodthirsty but something about that line was incredibly uplifting. Maybe I was just feeling what Octavia was in that moment-pride. Indra also hugs Lincoln, so clearly she’s moved past that Reaper thing.
Abby and Clarke seem to reach détente. Kane will live and Clarke says she’s readied a caravan to take him and Abby back to Camp Jaha. Good. Abby’s place right now is far away from Clarke. Abby seems to finally understand that and hopes Clarke moves swiftly to save her friends. She tells Clarke not to forget she’s one of the good guys. Which. Isn’t helpful. But it’s not out and out condemnation either, and so likely the best we can hope for-and gee isn’t that just like a parent-child relationship?
Clarke and her muddy, bloody group of Grounders head out towards Mount Bloodletting. In the next episode we’ll very likely, finally, get our war.
We got plenty of Clarke and Lexa in this episode, and I look forward to seeing how that continues to develop when the war does happen. “With our people working together, we’ll win this war Clarke,” is what Lexa said. I think up to this point we’ve seen how Clarke and Lexa operate independently and together. I don’t think we’re supposed to side completely with either one of them. Clarke still has her fits of morality and Lexa’s often too cold-but somewhere between the two of them is a happy medium that can, hopefully, achieve long-lasting piece.
