All of season 4 (and honestly most of The 100) boils down to this: who lives and who dies.
Clarke and Jaha tried to make that decision on their own; it seemed at the end of “Die All, Die Merrily” that they had succeeded. But with help from her brother, conclave champion Octavia gets the final say. She’s been an outsider her entire life, hidden away from the world she never got to be a part of. But here at the end of things, she gets to choose unity — for everyone.
Not only is it the right decision, it’s a decision her character deserves to make. Octavia has grown probably more than any other person on The 100, and she was owed the chance to be the heroine this time. Plus, it helped that she got to make up with her brother in the process!
When “The Other Side” begins, Bellamy is raging against Jaha and Clarke’s decision to seal up the bunker. Apparently, they sent people to snatch up Octavia and Kane, too, but Bellamy was the only one they could get to in time. The self-appointed Skaikru leaders tell Bellamy they won’t be opening the door again. Clarke tries to make him understand why she had to make this hard choice. “I understand that you think you did what you had to do like always,” Bellamy claps back. Preach, Bellamy, preach.
Abby enters the control room and learns what Bellamy just did: Her (other) loved one isn’t underground with her. Against Jaha’s protests, Clarke allows them to radio up to say goodbye. Bellamy is relieved to hear that Octavia is alive and that she won the conclave. She tells him of her decision as the victor to let everyone into the bunker and that each clan is selecting 100 people to live in the bunker.
Bellamy is just telling her he’ll find a way to get the door open as Jaha enters with guards (Miller, how dare you!?). They shock-baton Bellamy, and suddenly we’re back in the Ark. As Bellamy is dragged away, Jaha tells Clarke they’re doing the right thing. Abby points out that even if that’s true, at least she and her daughter feel bad about it. Seriously, when did this guy turn back into such an ass?
Knowing they need to keep Bellamy locked safely away, Clarke asks Murphy to guard the door. “You need a selfish bastard?” he asks. “I’m your man!” They walk up to the turbine room, where their prisoner is chained up. He’s screaming from the inside and bleeding against the cuffs, so Murphy calls Abby in to look at his wounds, which is exactly what Bellamy was hoping for.
Bellamy knows Abby wants to fight for Kane just as much as he does Octavia, so she helps him escape and warns him that it won’t be simple to open the doors: They’re operated from the control room, where Jaha just happens to be. Bellamy isn’t too worried, though; his motto this episode is “Open the damn door or die trying.”
And he’ll need to open the doors quickly because things above ground are starting to heat up. The other clans have been kept away because of the black rain, but if they arrive at the temple and find out Skaikru stole the bunker, all bets are off. And arriving just in time to make things worse: Echo. She says Skaikru has dishonored the Grounders yet again, but as Octavia points out, it’s she who has dishonored everyone. Octavia knows all about her conclave cheating and banishment. Indra says Azgeda shouldn’t get any spots in the bunker because of this, but O points out that it’s not fair to punish everyone for the actions of one. Instead, she tells Echo to keep this info to herself and her people will be safe.
Inside the control room, Abby gives Jaha a chance to change his mind, but when he refers to Kane in the past tense, Abby jabs him in the leg with a sedative. Bellamy sneaks in after, and she tells him how the hatch works: She’ll have to open it from the control room’s computers while he opens the actual bunker door.
He runs off to do that right as Clarke sees Murphy is knocked out and Bellamy is gone. She runs straight for the bunker door, where she finds him trying to open it. With a gun pointed at her friend’s head, Clarke tells him she’ll do whatever she has to — like always. And then he gives her the speech she desperately needs to hear: This isn’t the same as the dropship doors or the levers in Mount Weather or the City of Light. She’s not saving people; she’s letting people die.
Clarke says that they don’t know what will happen if the doors open; they could all die while fighting before the death wave even comes. But Bellamy tells her she’ll have to kill him because he’s going to do this no matter what. Through tears, Clarke lowers her gun as Bellamy opens the bunker’s hatch.
(Recap continues on page 2.)
Everyone’s favorite brother-sister duo on television, Bellamy and Octavia, reunite and hug. He tells her that he loves her and, proving how much she still trusts him, Octavia says, “I knew you’d come through.”
And it’s just in time, too. The black rain has stopped, and the other clans have arrived. She tells them all, “We are one clan.” Then she walks over to Echo and says, “Everyone except you.” Octavia may be bringing unity and salvation to the earth, but you still shouldn’t cross her!
But that’s all the tough decisions Octavia will have to make. Skaikru has 100 people just like the other clans — she says Bellamy gets one of the spots and leaves the rest to Jaha, Clarke, and Kane. They have 12 hours to decide. And they could have a few more contenders for those spots…
On Becca’s island, Raven is making plans for living her last days in space when she suffers another seizure. When she wakes up, not only is Becca there, but now Raven also sees Sinclair. Playing the angel to Becca’s devil, he tells Raven that she can’t give up. Talking through the science, he helps her see that all she needs to do is reset her brain like she would a computer. Easy!
Not easy. She’ll need to drown herself in an ice bath, then set a wired timer to shock her back to life, and then climb out of the ice bath and over to a defibrillator, where she’ll have to defibrillate herself (that might not be the right verb — I am not a doctor… or a mechanic with a chip in my brain). Becca is adamantly against this and thinks Raven is just choosing a painful existence for her last few days. “I don’t choose pain,” Raven exclaims. “I choose life.”
After a tearful goodbye to Sinclair, Raven enacts her plan. It goes off without a hitch! When her heartbeat has returned to normal, she grabs the walkie and yells, “This is Raven Reyes, and I’m alive.”
But not everyone is having such life-affirming B-plots. Over at Arkadia, Monty is pleading with the party kids to head to Polis and the bunker. He’s rigged up three hazmat suits and can take seven people in the rover so they can get there without too much exposure to the rising radiation levels. But none of them want to listen. They just want to party in their underwear. They party too hard, literally, and Riley overdoses.
After trying and failing to revive Riley, Monty has had enough. He says he’s leaving that evening whether they all go or not. As Jasper looks at Riley’s body, he has other plans. He says if they get the dose right, they all can go out the same way that evening.
Monty shows Harper the changes he made inside the rover, but she’s saying he should go without her. “I don’t love you,” she says. “You’re not enough to make me want to live.” She slams the door on the rover and cries just outside it. Recap readers, between you and me, all the Harper-Monty scenes this whole season haven’t done much for me. Monty is obviously great, but Harper is a character we’ve never been too invested in, so why would I care now? Throw in her murky motivations here, which only serve to upset Monty and make me mad, and I’m very confused.
All of the time spent on those scenes should have been spent on the truly important relationship: Jasper and Monty. Monty finds his friend looking out a window at the red moon and the approaching death wave. “For all its faults, Earth is really beautiful,” Jasper says (as I begin to cry). It takes Monty a minute to realize what’s happening. Jasper asks Monty to “say you love me,” but instead Monty sticks his fingers down his throat trying to make him throw up the drugs and fight to live. Jasper calls him unsanitary in his typical Jasper humor and begins to cry. “See you on the other side,” Jasper says as he kisses Monty’s hand before taking his last breath. “I love you, I love you,” Monty weeps as his friend dies.
Jasper was one of my favorite characters when The 100 began. No matter how serious the situation, he was always there to provide levity and grounding. Ever since Maya died at the end of season 3, we saw glimpses of that Jasper, but he never really returned. And while I’m sad we never saw that side of him again, I appreciate that he was able to have this final moment with his best friend.
Monty cries over Jasper before thinking back on one of the last things he said: “Let us go.” And then Monty realizes Harper was lying earlier (duh). He runs to find her — all the other kids have overdosed as well, but Harper didn’t. She couldn’t go through with it. “I love you,” she says as they hug.
Only two more episodes left and so many fates unknown. Will Raven, Monty, and Harper make it to the bunker in time? Even if they do, will they be selected to go into the bunker? How will they chose who lives and who dies? (I think we know one person who might die.) Based on everything we know of this show, the process surely will be easy.
100 (or just 5) extras:
- What tribe is Niylah part of? Will she get to be one of Skaikru’s 100??
- I just know Echo will find a way to survive — she’s sneaky like that.
- Sinclair!
- Riley, we all had high hopes for you at the beginning of season 4. I’m sorry you never got a better story line.
- May we meet again, Jasper Jordan.