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“The 100” recap (2.14): Bodyguard of lies

OK, guys. I know we all want to talk about a certain scene in particular that has many, if not all, of us very excited. But you can’t just skip to dessert. You have to eat your vegetables first in the form of some of these other plot lines (some of which I admit, if I could feed to my dog, I would).

So, let’s get started.

Jaha and his crew are in still in the desert. Still wandering. Still looking miserable. All that stuff. Then we’re taught a very valuable lesson which is-if you make bad jokes, you’re probably going to step on a land mind and explode.

Or at least that’s what I got out of that scene.

In the alliance camp, Clarke is fretting about strategy. Lexa reads her pretty well in this moment and tells her it’s no good to focus on plans that will go to hell five minutes into the battle. Clarke is worried over Bellamy and, again, Lexa is fairly unconcerned, willing to let Bellamy die for the cause. She tells Clarke she has the makings of the kind of leader whose people will die for her, and none of that appeals to Clarke at all.

“You were born for this, Clarke. Same as me.”

Octavia is very warrior chic today with added face paint. She’s figured out that Clarke knew the missile was going to hit Ton-DC. I’m kind of glad the writer’s went with this. Octavia isn’t stupid. It’s asking a lot for her to not put this kind of stuff together. So she has and she’s not happy about it. Clarke tries to tell Octavia that it was all for the greater good, and that includes keeping Bellamy safe. Octavia seems to think Bellamy would have found another way.

And, uh, okay Octavia. I get that he’s your brother and you idolize him, but he was pretty brutal in the first season, remember? I’m just saying. I don’t think he’d have objected to Lexa’s plan with the missile as hard as Octavia thinks he would have.

Lexa sends Octavia off to stand watch and then, because Lexa knows Octavia knows about the missile, Lexa asks her new bodyguard to kill Octavia.

Yeah, this should go over well with Clarke.

In Mount Bloodletting, Bellamy is on the run. The mountain men have FINALLY caught on to his guard schtick and his passkey isn’t working anymore. He narrowly avoids capture and runs into Maya’s dad and the rest of the resistance. They help Bellamy plan a new way to get into the area that holds the acid fog machine.

Back in Camp Jaha, Raven and Kyle are busy coming up with plans to take out the acid fog. Plans that Bellamy will put into motion once, you know, Raven and Kyle actually come up with a plan. Bellamy manages to uses a torch to get his way into the air ducts and then into the acid fog area.

No sweat!

Clarke brings Lexa’s bodyguard back to Lexa at gun point, having stopped him from murdering Octavia. Clarke is pissed. Lexa dismisses her bodyguard after telling him, OK, fine, don’t kill Octavia.

“You can’t kill everyone you don’t trust,” Clarke says to which Lexa basically shrugs.

Clarke finally calls Lexa out on her “I don’t do feelings” bullshit. She backs her up against a table and shouts at her, calls her a liar. Lexa obviously has felt things for people and continues to feel things and is just hiding behind a mask of “nope, not me” to make things easier for herself. Clarke knows Lexa felt something when she let those people burn. Lexa didn’t let Clarke burn, though. And she says as much and Clarke reads this for what it is, an admission of the feelings Lexa had been trying so hard to say she didn’t have. Lexa is definitely battling internally here and Clarke isn’t unsympathetic to that, but also uses it to her advantage. If Lexa cared about her, she’d trust her about Octavia. And if Lexa does hurt Octavia, Clarke says she’ll tell everyone about the missile.

That was quite a scene. It was pretty charged, and particularly well acted. And hot. Did I mention hot? I mean. When Clarke backed Lexa up against that table?

Ahem.

Anyway-Raven and her nerdy new love interest are still trying to sort out what to do about the acid fog.

Bellamy, who cut through metal and crawled through air ducts to get to the acid fog machine, would like to just blow the thing up please, thank you.

I feel you, Bellamy. I really do. Because while Raven and Kyle are adorable, swapping mechanical factoids and chemical compound names, I mostly just want this plot line to end already.

Raven and Kyle manage to figure out what to do and Bellamy puts his explosive tendencies away and follows through for them. Raven hugs Kyle in relief and then awkwardly rushes off to send up a flare and tell Clarke the acid fog has been neutralized.

Lexa promises to leave Octavia alone. She does trust Clarke. Lexa says she knows Clarke thinks Lexa and her people are harsh, but this is how they survive. Clarke says life should be more about that.

And, OK: Before we get to the “Yay, they kissed!” thing, I have to admit that line from Clarke kind of bothered me.

Has Clarke been on the ground so long she’s forgotten what survival drives people to? It’s easy for me to see how trust, or even love, could be a privilege for Lexa and her people. For Clarke to say life shouldn’t be about just surviving is all well and good, but for decades upon decades that has been all it was for the grounders. Maybe things will change if this alliance holds and the mountain men are conquered, but Clarke shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the grounder philosophy of life as one that’s lacking. I think the grounders may often be cruel, but they also have proven-in Lincoln’s actions towards Octavia and Indra’s towards Octavia and Lexa’s towards Clarke-that they can be loving and forgiving and affectionate. Clarke still views them, the grounders, as too different from herself and the truth is-they’re not. Just because they don’t express every emotion they have in ways Clarke is used to or approves of certainly doesn’t mean they don’t have them. They clearly do.

Anywa, minor sticking point for me. We can move on to the fun stuff now:

Holy crap they kissed! Everyone can exhale just a little. We’re not doomed to be queerbaited for the rest of the show! I had high hopes here, but even I didn’t anticipate this. It was a pretty nice kiss, too. Clarke certainly seemed into it. At first.

When Lexa goes in for another kiss Clarke says she’s just not ready. Not yet.

I’m pretty OK with this reaction. Clarke didn’t seem bothered or upset by the kiss. She’s just not ready. Finn hasn’t been dead for very long, after all, and it would be a bit weird if Clarke just forgot about him and fell right into a relationship with Lexa. The important thing is she seems open to it and Lexa practically has hearts in her eyes. Also-I enjoyed the non-reaction reaction to the kiss on the part of Clarke. She probably would have had the exact same “I’m not ready” if a boy had kissed her. Maybe it really doesn’t matter in this universe who you’re attracted to. We’ll have to see.

It was kind of great to get that scene with Clarke saying she’s not ready right next to Raven-uh. Well, she went the other way.

It becomes pretty clear that even though Raven dove lips first into Kyle, she wasn’t quite ready to move on from Finn either. We can’t blame Raven. I think both Raven’s response and Clarke’s are normal reactions, here. Which is why it was so nice to get them both? It was like saying: hey, both of these things can happen. Neither of these girls are okay right now. But they will be.

It gets a little extra complicated in that while Raven was rolling around in bed with Kyle, Bellamy realized the Mountain Men played him and the acid fog isn’t down after all. Bellamy, unable to get Raven on the radio and knowing that Clarke and Lexa and their grounder army are in danger, gives into his baser instincts and blows things up. It’s pretty satisfying. I may have laughed. A lot.

So the acid fog is down and the army is marching on Mount Weather. Clarke tries to make nice with Octavia, but she’s not having it. And it turns out Indra too knows that Clarke and Lexa knew about the missile. And she’s okay with it. She tells Octavia that this is war. This is what happens. Thank you, Indra. Please don’t die in the war. I like you.

You’ll notice I didn’t say much about Jaha and John and their biblical desert trek.

And that’s because it’s stupid and I refuse. REFUSE.

Maybe next week.

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