The 100: Chapter Four (Good Guy Guard)

Okayyyy, so, this is the first Glass chapter. She's the last (and final, hopefully, oh my God) main character (or main character with POV chapters) and like, oh man, I really want to like her. I went into this all hopeful and shit like "there's probably a very logical reason why they cut her from the show, it's probably not at all that she's a horrible character and I will probably like her just fine." I can hear you laughing. Shut up, I already know.

So, it starts out relatively exciting. Glass is a delinquent, on the dropship with the rest of the 100, and this is where we find out that time keeps moving even when we ghost-jump out of one person's head and into another, so it picks up right at where we left off, with Bellamy holding a gun to the Chancellor's head and threatening to shoot if they don't let him get on the metal death trap that's about to nosedive down into a nuclear wasteland. I mean honestly guys, the Ark is dying, you clearly want to get rid of your undesirables, is there a reason he can't go?? Sounds like he's making things easier on you, tbh, I don't really see why this is such an issue.

Then half the guards knelt down and raised their guns to their shoulders, giving Glass an unobstructed view. The Chancellor was being held hostage. 

"Everyone back up," the captor yelled, his voice shaking. He wore a uniform, but he clearly wasn't a guard. His hair was far longer than regulation length, his jacket fit badly, and his awkward grip on the gun showed that he'd never been trained to use one.

You should know right now this is the only part of the chapter I found exciting because holy fuck, Bellamy in my head is Bellamy from the show, of course, half-Filipino sex god with ripped biceps who looks closer to 30 than he does to 20. But apparently he's supposed to be a boy, since Glass keeps calling him that in her head, and I already knew he wasn't a former guard cadet in the book, but that he's supposed to be all fumbly and nervous with the gun is a surprise.

Not that that makes me love him any less, if anything it makes this whole situation much worse, god fucking damn it. HIS VOICE IS SHAKING WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS.

Anyway so apparently Glass and Wells are "best friends" even though this is the first time I've even seen her name in print, so clearly Wells wasn't too preoccupied with her or anything. But we do get this little observation, because the first half of this chapter, Glass is pretty much just a pair of eyes and not much else:

Glass glanced at the back of the dropship and froze, momentarily stunned by the sight of her best friend's face. Of course, she'd heard the ridiculous rumors that Wells had been Confined, but hadn't given them a second thought. What was he doing here? As she stared at Wells's gray eyes, which were trained intently on his father, the answer came to her: He must have tried to follow Clarke. Wells would do anything to protect the people he cared about, most of all Clarke.

You know, I have never actually seen a real live human being with gray eyes before in my life? Does that actually exist or is it purely a "you're probably in a YA novel" thing?

Anyway, so right after that, the gun goes off (ooh, but who got shot?!?!?! Suspense!!!!) and Glass takes the opportunity to nope the fuck out while everybody's watching the drama go down (good on you, girl) and there's a pretty drawn out passage where she runs away from the guards and somehow manages to escape, with a lot of boring sentences like "something in her snapped" and "her breath came in ragged gasps." Someday, someone, somewhere, will write a chase scene in a book that is actually as exciting as a chase scene in a movie. This is not that day, and this is not that book.

The whole time she's running she's just thinking about some dude named Luke, who is apparently the guard mentioned in Bellamy's chapter, as the Good Guy Guard. That is absolutely what I'll be calling him, by the way.

"'Glass'? And that's your real name?"

Basically, she was dating this dude and then went to jail and it's sad. I'm already bored, especially when Morgan writes sentences like this:

Luke, the boy she loved, who she'd been forced to abandon all those months ago. Who she'd spent every night in Confinement thinking about, so desperate for his touch that she'd almost felt the pressure of his arms around her.

*loud fart noise*

Yeah so, the page and a half of her escaping is boring, so we'll skip to after the section break to the next interesting part: Ark history! Fuck yeah!

Glass shimmies through a vent or something and ends up in a part of the ship that's been quarantined, with some uber creepy/chilling/cool messages on the walls from the people who had died there, and why aren't Glass' chapters about this instead of her boring love story with Good Guy Guard?

She was on the quarantine deck, the oldest section of Walden. As nuclear and biological war threatened to destroy Earth, space had been the only option for those lucky enough to survive the first stages of the Cataclysm. But some infected survivors fought their way onto the transport pods--only to find themselves barred from Phoenix, left to die on Walden. Now, whenever there was the slightest threat of illness, anyone infected was quarantined, kept far away from the rest of the Colony's vulnerable population--the last of the human race

WHOA, NOW. Information dump. Okay, so this tells us a lot of things: that the apocalypse was definitely manmade, and involved both nuclear war and biological weapons, aka the two things every American has secret nightmares about, even if they don't admit it. Second, that the Ark seems to be a collection of deliberately chosen people - hence, why some undesirables had to fight their way in. Third, that Walden is clearly the bottom of the bottom, even from the beginning, and that the current class structure on the Ark has been in place from its inception three hundred years ago.

It's fucking scary as fuck, especially since Morgan makes sure to include some of the messages that Glass sees - especially "from the stars to the heavens" which is just absolutely horrible. It's a goddamn shame Glass is too focused on getting to Good Guy Cop to slow down and pay attention, because this is super interesting and I want to know everything.

But of course, she's desperate for Good Guy D, so it's off again, with another flashback in annoying different-font. I'm quoting this for Ark culture detail, by the way, because the entire thing is so fucking boring. I had to read it twice because my attention span kept wandering. 

Glass glanced over her shoulder and then slipped out the door. She didn't think anyone had seen her, but she had to be careful. It was incredibly rude to leave a Partnering Ceremony before the final blessing, but Glass didn't think she'd be able to spend another minute sitting next to Cassius, with his dirty mind and even fouler breath. His wandering hands reminded Glass of Carter, Luke's two-faced roommate whose creepiness only slitered out of the darkness when Luke was out on guard duty.

So, two things: 1) guards are dicks, always remember guards are dicks (except for Luke), and 2) partnering ceremony? I mean, I'm not necessarily complaining about dropping the term "marriage," but it still seems to have religious connotations with the mention of a "blessing" so I'm not sure what the fuck the point is there. Maybe a more inclusive term, for same-sex couples, which would make sense if there were any queer people in this book whatsofuckingever.

Also at some point I'm gonna do a run down on people's names. Not right now. I'm just trying to get through this. But, you know, head's up.

So blah blah blah, Glass made herself a pretty dress out of a tarp, blah blah blah, Luke shows up and is boring, blah blah, Glass' mother disapproves of Luke and wants to know why she didn't "snatch up" Wells instead, because God forbid we don't have at least one "snobby society-climbing mother" character somewhere. Also this great sentence, because so far this chapter's only been good when Glass is giving us unintentional observations of things unrelated to her own plot:

No matter how many times Glass explained that she didn't have those types of feelings for him, her mother sighed and muttered about not letting some badly dressed scientist girl steal him away. But Glass was happy that Wells had fallen for the beautiful if slightly over-serious Clarke Griffin.

Clarke Griffin: badly dressed, over-serious, scientist, punk rock.

get used to this picture. this will not be the last time i use it.

So yeah, I guess whatever, Luke shows up and thinks Glass is pretty in her recycled dress, blah blah, they flirt and are totally in love, I'm bored. The only other interesting thing in this flashback is that Luke does an imitation of a "terrible, fake Phoenix accent," which...HOLY SHIT, IS THIS MULTICULTURALISM?? OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I THINK KASS MORGAN IS TRYING TO DO MULTICULTURALISM.

If you follow me on tumblr at all you know my intense frustration with language on the show, and how Rothenberg thinks it's totally not offensive at all to say that after a century in space everybody just becomes American. (Right, because American is the default, right? Because people wouldn't make an effort to preserve their cultures after an apocalypse? Go fuck yourself.) So this is good. I'm happy about this. Maybe Phoenix is supposed to be Space Britain, and that's why she keeps spelling words with extra u's and stuff. I mean, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since she's writing in limited 3rd person and not first, so the narration is part of the fourth wall and she should actually just be using whatever stylistic conventions are appropriate for her book's audience, which is teenagers in the US, but...okay. I'm just. I'm gonna let this go for now and just be happy with the fact that at least the stations have different accents. AT LEAST. WE HAVE THIS, AT LEAST.

Anyway, the rest of this chapter blows fucking chunks. Back in the present, Glass shows up at Luke's apartment - or flat, sorry, we're in Space Britain, I forgot - and there's a lot of stuff about how desperate Glass was to see him, blah blah, and for the first two seconds of their interaction, she just stands there and cries and whispers his name like a big weirdo. 

"Luke," she breathed, all the emotion of the past nine months threatening to break through. She was desperate to tell him what had happened, why she'd broken up with him and then disappeared. That she'd spent every minute of the nightmarish last six months thinking of him. That she never stopped loving him. "Luke," she said again, a tear sliding down her cheek. After the countless times she'd broken down in her cell, whispering his name in between sobs, it felt surreal to say it to him.

Oh my God, stab me in my face.

Yeah, so in a brilliant idea that no other writer has ever come up with before ever, just before Luke is about to reply, another girl shows up from behind his shoulder, and they've obviously been banging like a screen door in a hurricane.

Glass tired to smile at Camille, Luke's childhood friend, a girl who'd been as close to him as Glass was to Wells. And now she was here...in Luke's flat. Of course, Glass thought with a strained kind of bitterness. She'd always wondered if there was more to their relationship than Luke had admitted.

I'm sorry, does nobody remember that Glass is literally a fugitive right now? She just escaped from scary death space mission, maybe we could do this inside?

"Would you like to come in?" Camille asked with exaggerated politeness. She wrapped her hand around Luke's, but Glass felt as if Camille's fingers had plunged into her heart instead. While Glass had spent months in Confinement pining for Luke until his absence felt like a physical ache, he'd moved on to someone else.

We know they're totally doing it because Camille grabs his hand. What a whore, am I right? 

Yeah, so I'm super bored with this so I'm gonna quit quoting. Basically Luke's pissed off because apparently Glass dumped him and didn't explain why, and he didn't even know she'd been arrested, which makes zero fucking sense considering he's a guard, and the Ark can't be that big. Plus, you know, they were dating. You'd think he would've like, Facebook creeped her or something. 

So Glass tries to play it cool like "lol no big, just thought I'd stop by, even though there's a bunch of guards chasing me and I'm wearing sweaty prison clothes and this creepy wrist thing embedded in my arm, anyway so how are you?" only that doesn't work because Luke gets a message on his Google Glass and catches onto the fact that she's just escaped from jail, because in addition to being a Good Guy Guard he's also pretty unobservant, apparently.

So he pulls her inside and we get this fucking stupid as shit sentence: 

Being Luke's ex-girlfriend somehow felt odder than being an escaped convict.

Really? Reeeeeeally???

And blah blah, Glass tells him what's going on, and the chapter ends when Luke asks her why she was Confined and she's all like "no, I can't talk about it, it's a secret, this book's main theme is about secrets, you feel" and then he acts like a whiny cry baby and snaps at her about it while Camille, like, idk, sits quietly in the corner or something because Morgan forgot she was there.

It's not my favorite so far, by any means. If the rest of Glass' chapters follow the same vein, where she's much more interested in her dumb boyfriend drama than, oh I don't know, being a fucking fugitive, then I can see why they cut her from the show. I mean, come on, you managed to make a daring, exciting escape into the worst episode of Dawson's Creek ever. Kass Morgan, come the fuck on, I know you can do better. 

The 100: Chapter Three (Guards are Dicks)

Just as an aside, thought you might like to know: I was working on this at work today, and on my lunch, right after I finished this section, I walked into the break room to find a bunch of my coworkers sitting around making fun of a rerun of "My Sister's Keeper" that was playing on TV 2. It was like the universe's way of telling me either: "you're doing a good thing, here, meg" or "just shut the fuck up already, clearly nobody cares," I'm not too sure yet. I'll let you know, probably. 

So, Bellamy Blake! What a surprise to absolutely nobody that I love the shit out of this idiot.

So this one is kind of a flash in the pan. Interesting stuff, but very quick: it’s only eight pages, and cuts off a little too soon, for the sake of a cheap cliffhanger, but whatever. Bellamy Blake. What an asshole. I love him.

We start off with some heavy physical description, heavier than we’ve seen in either Wells’ or Clarke’s chapters. Presumably, because Bellamy is more observant, is my guess, but I’m still not sure if Morgan’s doing this on purpose or not.

So: Bellamy Blake. Is in a storeroom with a bunch of interesting stuff, meeting somebody named Colton, who of course is a giant dickhead. Anyone named Colton is automatically a dickhead, this is a law of the universe. I say that having a very dear friend named Colton, even, whom I’ve known since I was fourteen, and is a very kind, nice person, even if he does way too many drugs and lives in a trailer park, but I think he’d agree that “Colton” is the ultimate dickhead name, which is why he’s gone exclusively by the nickname “Shorty” since 2010. 

(“But Colton Haynes!” comes the inevitable comment—let me explain to you the blackface incidents of the past two years’ Halloweens, friend. He’s a problematic fave, okay.)

exhibit A: a dickhead. if it helps u can picture all the Ark guards as guests at this horrible party

So Colton insults the girls who live on Walden, which is where Bellamy and Octavia are from, because apparently they’re all ugly. Bellamy responds by thinking that Colton is no prize horse himself, which is the moment that I said to myself, “yup. No worries. You’re still gonna love this douche.”

The guard smirked, and Bellamy felt something in his chest tighten. He’d been bribing Colton for information about Octavia about her arrest, and the idiot always seemed to find twisted pleasure in delivering bad news.

Guards are dicks. This will be a common theme, and a surprisingly insightful, subtle detail about how oppressive societies work. I don’t know this for sure, of course, but I’m confident about it all the same.

“They’re sending them off today.” The words landed with a thud in Bellamy’s chest.

Another “words hurt” description. I’m not saying I haven’t used that exact sentence before in fanfiction, but I’ve used that exact sentence before in fanfiction, and Kass Morgan absolutely, one hundred percent, used to write fanfiction.

“They got one of the old dropships on G deck working.” He held out his hand again. “Now come on. This mission’s top secret and I’m risking my ass for you. I’m done messing around.”

Bellamy’s stomach twisted as a series of images flashed before his eyes: his little sister strapped into an ancient metal cage, hurtling through space at a thousand kilometers an hour. Her face turning purple as she struggled to breathe the toxic air. Her crumpled body lying just as still as—

Then Bellamy punches the guy in the face and steals his uniform. A coincidence, that Clarke also punches a dude out in her intro chapter? NOPE. TRUE LOVE, TBH. They’re punk rock soulmates.

since i've already cast paul newman as clarke, of course i'm gonna go with my girl joanne woodward as bellamy, because look at this epic bitch face. it's a match made in heaven, tbh

Also: so we use kilometers on the Ark, but we use the North American spelling of it? Okay. Sure. 

A super abrupt transition (the first section break of the book!) and suddenly we’re at the dropship launch. Bellamy has some Strong Opinions about this whole thing, calling it “completely sick” (you’re tellin’ me, dude). Then for some reason, he feels the need to re-explain the thing about how juvenile delinquents get a retrial on their eighteenth birthday, but lately they’ve just been killing everybody. 

So Bellamy’s hanging out, trying to seem inconspicuous, and listening to Jaha’s speech to the delinquents, which of course is full of crap.

“You have been given an unprecedented opportunity to put the past behind you,” the Chancellor was saying. “The mission on which you’re about to embark is dangerous, but your bravery will be rewarded. If you succeed, you infractions will be forgiven, and you’ll be able to start new lives on Earth.”

Bellamy barely suppressed a snort. The Chancellor had some nerve to stand there, spewing whatever bullshit helped him sleep at night.

*clutches Bellamy close to my chest* you little shit, I love you so much

“We’ll be monitoring your progress very closely, in order to keep you safe,” the Chancellor continued

How the fuck are you gonna do that, Jaha?? You didn’t even have a ship to send these kids down until you “managed” to get one working. You are literally so full of it.

…as the next ten prisoners filed down the ramp, accompanied by a guard who gave the Chancellor a crisp salute before depositing his charges in the dropship and retreating back up to stand in the hallway. Bellamy searched the crowd for Luke, the only Waldenite who hadn’t turned into a total prick after becoming a guard.

See? Guards are dicks. This is some pretty obvious commentary on the effects of a police state on regular people. You give a guy a gun and full license to use it without consequences, what do you think he’s gonna do? 

I’d apologize for getting political but that won’t be the last time. Deal with it, I guess. I don't care about your budgets that much.

But there were fewer than a dozen guards on the launch deck; the Council had clearly decided that secrecy was more important than security.

Couple things here: Morgan’s used “council members” with no capital, implying that the “Council” is definitely more of a concept, a unified governing body with a distinct personality. A dickhead personality, clearly. Also: secrets! Yes, this is great. Totally above board. Completely normal.

Okay, then there’s some more devastating stuff about Bellamy thinking about how they’re totally gonna murder the shit out of him if he gets caught, and a paragraph of him worrying about Octavia that makes me want to bury myself in a hole. Then, in some more backstory exposition, Bellamy explains that after their mother’s “accident,” he and Octavia had gone into the Ark-version of foster care, implying that Aurora died much earlier than she did on the show.

There was no precedent for what to do with siblings—with the strict population laws, a couple was never allowed to have more than one child, and sometimes, they weren’t permitted to have any at all—and so no one in the Colony understood what it meant to have a brother or sister.

This is the most interesting aspect of Bellamy and Octavia’s backstory, tbh, and the show really needs to take much more advantage of it than they have. The idea of siblings being such a foreign concept, and that pressure contributing to Bellamy and Octavia’s relationship, making it that much more intense? Come on. They’re the only siblings on the Ark. When they say: “you wouldn’t understand,” they mean that literally, and not how I use that word, in the Cher Horowitz sense of “this is literally so boring.” Nah, they’re just stating a fact, there.

Bellamy and Octavia lived in different group homes for a number of years, but Bellamy had always looked out for her, sneaking her extra rations whenever he “wandered” into one of the restricted storage facilities, confronting the tough-talking older girls who thought it’d be fun to pick on the chubby-cheeked orphan with the big blue eyes.

Did I write that sentence? That is a fanfiction sentence if I’ve ever seen one. The rambling, list-style with overly detailed items? Romanticized language in “tough-talking older girls” and “chubby-cheeked orphan”, how it wanders off into nothing like a lost child in the wilderness instead of actually ending. I mean, seriously, Kass Morgan, what was your username? Were you on LJ? I bet you were on LJ.

The kid was special, and he’d do anything to give her a chance at a different life. Anything to make up for what she’d had to endure.

NO.

So more shit that rips my heart out: Bellamy watches her walk down the ramp into the dropship, noticing that she looks better than she did before, and she’s leading her guard along like a puppy on a leash, because of course book!Octavia is a bad ass, and Bellamy is proud of her, oh my God, I love this relationship so so much. 

Octavia catches sight of him while Jaha is spewing some more noise-garbage, and they do a sibling telepath thing where she’s all like “bro!! what the fuck!! Don’t do anything dumb!!” and then we get this absolute GEM:

But Bellamy had been doing stupid things his whole life, and he had no intention of stopping now.

I mean, God bless. God bless that line. That line makes everything worth it.

So the stupid thing he’s referring to here is his plan to steal a guard’s gun and grab Jaha in a headlock so he can blackmail his way onto the dropship. Which of course he does, because he’s a boss, only the chapter ends before we find out whether he actually gets on the ship or not, because blah blah cheap cliffhanger.

Some things: 

• Bellamy curses a lot. I love him.
• He hates guards. There’s tons of stuff in the chapter, in addition to the lines I already quoted, about what dicks they are. I’m positive this is intentional.
• There’s a mention of a woman, who “whispers” something to Jaha (while smiling) that makes him scowl and look away. This will most definitely come up later.
• Jaha was a soldier, once, which is common enough knowledge that Bellamy knows about it and observes it in the way he "holds himself." This is...weird, and sort of fucked up, whY THE FUCK DOES THE ARK NEEDS SOLDIERS, OH MY GOD. Are guards not good enough?? WERE THERE SPACE WARS????????
• Bellamy never intends to actually shoot Jaha, which I’m sure will be important later as well. Especially if Clarke’s gonna fall in love with him, clearly he must be a Good Person in order to justify it. I’m weary of how this is all gonna go down already, I can tell.

The 100: Chapter Two (My Punk Rock Girlfriend)

So, chapter two is a Wells chapter, and let me tell you right now: I doubt this book is going to help my Wells-related bitterness at all, because I’ve only read ten pages from his perspective and I’m already in fucking love.

The quality of the writing is much better than in the first chapter, which makes me think Morgan did make an attempt to change tone for each character’s POV. Or...I hope. The descriptions are more elegant, the conversation between Wells and his father is much less artificial than the one between Clarke and Lahiri. Either she’s got a better grip on Wells’ characterization, or she wants us to think Wells is smarter, I’m not sure. I’m very attached already to this vision of punk rock rebel Clarke, which this chapter only reinforces—but we’ll get to that. 

So we open on Wells and Jaha, who looks super old now apparently, because his son followed Clarke down the path of punk rock rebellion for burning down the Eden Tree (another mythological/historical reference), the only living tree brought from Earth, and gave him a bunch of wrinkles and white hair.

“Was it a dare? Were you trying to show off for your friends?” The Chancellor spoke in the same low, steady tone he used during Council hearings, then raised an eyebrow to indicate it was Wells’s turn to talk.

“No, sir.”

“Were you overcome by some temporary bout of insanity? Were you on drugs?” There was a faint note of hopefulness in his voice that, in another situation, Wells might’ve found amusing. But there was nothing humorous about the look in his father’s eyes, a combination of weariness and confusion that Wells hadn’t seen since his mother’s funeral.

I’m already far more invested in this relationship than is probably healthy. Just from this short interaction you can already see the characters forming into people—the leader, who believes so purely in the righteousness of his government that any deviation or resistance genuinely confuses him as much as it angers him (a classic character profile in dystopias) and his wayward son, regretful for the hurt he’s caused his father, but not the hurt he’s caused his leader. The split there, between duty to state and duty to family, between love and righteousness. 

It hurts already. Oh God, I’m not ready.

Wells felt a fleeting urge to touch his father’s arm, but something other than the handcuffs shackling his wrists kept him from reaching across the desk. Even as they had gathered around the release portal, saying their final, silent good-byes to Wells’s mother, they’d never bridged the six inches of space between their shoulders. It was as if Wells and his father were two magnets, the charge of their grief repelling them apart.

HOLY SHIT. This is like an entirely new Kass Morgan. That paragraph rips my heart out and makes me intensely jealous, because fuck, those are some well-formed sentences. 

I mean, it goes on like this for the entire next page. I’d quote the whole thing if I could, because Wells’ description of his arrest and his father’s desperate attempts to understand it, is some damn good writing. Very smoothly done, and with enough emotion in it to make you want to understand as well, and feel for both Wells and Jaha at the same time, without overdoing the sympathy for each. 

It’s incredibly jarring, because the first chapter made me think I was in for a robotically written novel from an author who has very obviously spent most of her career in editing. But now, here she is with this shit, I’m thrown. I’m adrift. I’m excited, and also fearful. Holy fuck, I hope Bellamy’s chapters are like this.

So, some things: Wells burned down the Eden Tree because he knew that his father would be able to cover up any less visible crime, which tells you a few things about the machinations of the Council and the power of the Chancellor, as well as Wells’ political savviness. Also, they call the move onto the Ark from Earth the “Exodus.” Another Bible reference. They think a bit much of themselves, eh?

Also, Kass Morgan denotes flashbacks by switching to a different font, which is fuckin’ dumb. I mean, stylistic choice, whatever. But I think it’s annoying, therefore in the world of this recap, it’s fuckin’ dumb.

this is going to annoy the fuck out of me for the next thirty chapters

The hospital door closed behind him but Wells’s smile stayed frozen in place, as if the force it had taken to lift the corners of his mouth had permanently damaged the muscles in his face. Through the haze of drugs, his mother had probably thought his grin looked real, which was all that mattered. She’d held Wells’s hand as the lies poured out of him, bitter but harmless. Yes, Dad and I are doing fine. She didn’t need to know that they’d barely exchanged more than a few words in weeks. When you’re better, we’ll finish Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They both knew that she’d never make it to the final volume.

UM. Okay, rude. You guys had me under the impression that book!Wells was boring. Y’all have failed me, because this is horrible and awful and I want to rip my heart out and die, I love this guy so much already. 

So, this flashback is pretty elegantly done as well, managing exposition in a way that intrigues you and makes you curious to learn more by casually explaining things along the way—another far cry from the clunky stuff in chapter one. We learn about the “Exchange,” for instance, a capital letter word where people apparently spend a lot of time at, and now I really wanna know what it is. We learn about the library, and the rules about keeping books safe in their airtight cases, and that only certain people have access to it, and that most of the digital archives brought from Earth were wiped out by a “virus” (how much you wanna bet that was the Council’s doing? I could use some extra cash). You learn that email is called “message queue” because Kass Morgan really wants to be British, and people have some kind of creepy Google Glass thing where they can IM their friends by moving their eyes around a lot in the middle of conversations.

All of which, I might add, is super fucking cool future sci-fi detail that the show contains approximately NONE OF WHATSOEVER. Because, haha, I don’t know. Rothenberg. 

So Wells explains all this with impressive eloquence (my favorite, about the library: “The enormous room was hidden away from the circadian lights, in a state of perpetual twilight.” What the fuck, maybe she wrote the first chapter for her Creative Writing class and then the rest of it ten years later or something? That is a goddamn good sentence.) and tells the story of his and Clarke’s first meeting, in the library when Wells is feeling really crappy about his mom and Clarke shows up to impress him with her punk rock rebelliousness.

“I think you should take it now.” Wells’s jaw tightened, but when he said nothing, she continued. “I used to see you here with your mother. You should bring it to her.”

“Just because my father’s in charge of the Council doesn’t mean I get to break a three-hundred-year rule,” he said, allowing just a shade of condescension to darken his tone.

“The book will be fine for a few hours. They exaggerate the effects of the air.”

*rebel girl by bikini kill starts playing*

Wells raised an eyebrow. “And do they exaggerate the power of the exit scanner?” There were scanners over most public doors on Phoenix that could be programmed to any specifications. In the library, it monitored the molecular composition of every person who exited, to make sure no one left with a book in their hands or hidden in their clothes.

A smile flickered across her face. “I figured that out a long time ago.” She glanced over her shoulder down the shadowy aisle between the bookcases, reached into her pocket, and extracted a piece of gray cloth. “It keeps the scanner from recognizing the cellulose in the paper.” She held it out to him. “Here. Take it.”

Hot damn, girl. I love punk rock Clarke. I love her so much, and I especially love this suspicious, sad Wells, who instantly falls in love with her, because shit, who wouldn’t? I just did. She’s got magical book-hiding shit in her pocket. She probably bought it on the Ark black market. Because she’s punk rock.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“So you know to whom you’ll be eternally indebted?”

“So I know who to blame when I’m arrested.”

The girl tucked the book under her arm and then extended her hand. “Clarke.”

“Wells,” he said, reaching forward to shake it. He smiled, and this time it didn’t hurt.

I MEAN, two things, one: Kass Morgan definitely used to write fanfiction, and two: I am SO INTO THIS. She’s clearly his cool, hot, exciting love interest. I kept waiting for her to pull a cigarette out from behind her ear and ask Wells what a nice boy like him was doing in a bar like this. She’s Danny to his Sandy, okay, the Tony to his Maria, they’re gender-flipped Mandy Moore and Shane West. She’s gonna ask him not to give up on her at some point, I can just feel it. 

Anyway, so then it’s back to the present in the office with Jaha, who is clearly flummoxed by these weird things called “emotions,” and is still trying to understand why his son has shamed the family name, or whatever.

“Some of the council members wanted to execute you on the spot, juvenile or not, you know. I was only able to spare you by getting them to agree to send you to Earth.”

Wells exhaled with relief. There were fewer than 150 kids in Confinement, so he had assumed they’d take all the older teens, but until this moment he hadn’t been sure he would be sent on the mission.

His father’s eyes widened with surprise and understanding as he stared at Wells. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Wells nodded.

The Chancellor grimaced. “Had I known you were this desperate to see Earth, I could have easily arranged for you to join the second expedition. Once we determined it was safe.”

Yeah. Because your first thought when your son has committed an extremely public, extremely taboo crime is “gee, he must want to go on that trip real bad.” Get real.

It’s a very telling character moment, because Jaha so far is portrayed as incredibly clueless when it comes to essentially human things—the grief being what drives he and Wells apart, confusion over his son’s motives, lack of empathy, et cetera. It’s a nice touch in a character that otherwise would be impossible to sympathize with, and so far the book’s doing a much better job at making me understand and see his point of view than the show, tbh.

So Wells finally lets on that Clarke’s the reason he did it, and also insinuates to another mysterious reason for guilt that will be explained during the emotional climax of the novel, because “everyone has ~~secrets~~” is going to be a major theme in this book, I can already tell. He also explains that his mother was a romantic and would’ve been proud of him, at the same time that Jaha clearly thinks his son is a gigantic freak:

His father stared at him. “Are you telling me this whole debacle is because of that girl?”

STRONG TONY AND MARIA VIBES.

Wells nodded slowly. “It’s my fault she’s being sent down there like some lab rat. I’m going to make sure she has the best chance of making it out alive.”

I really admire that Morgan isn’t holding back on the lab rat allusion there. The show could use a bit more of that honesty. 

Blah blah, Jaha lords the wristbands over Wells’ head, because adults explaining things they wouldn’t actually feel a need to explain is Morgan’s favorite method of exposition, and the chapter ends on this heartwrenching interaction:

“Good luck, son,” Wells’s father said, assuming his trademark brusqueness. “If anyone can make this mission a success, it’s you.”

He extended his arm to shake Wells’s hand, but then let it fall to his side when he realized his mistake. His only child’s arms were still shackled behind him.

Well, fuck. 

I’m not denying that the writing is melodramatic—that’s what I was warned about, by the multiple people who reviewed this book for me when I first got into this show. But the difference between the first chapter and the second is that Morgan uses it effectively in the latter. There isn’t anything inherently bad about melodrama, especially in the YA genre. Teenagers are melodramatic. That’s a fact. When you’re writing about teens, for teens, melodrama is practically required.

But look at the difference between the two chapters, here:

She heard voices everywhere. They called to her from the corners of her dark cell. They filled the silence between her heartbeats. They screamed from the deepest recesses of her mind.

And:

He extended his arm to shake Wells’s hand, but then let it fall to his side when he realized his mistake. His only child’s arms were still shackled behind him.

To use the creative writing class jargon: the first is telling. The second is showing. You get the same result from both: they’re in a bad place. Clarke is hurting, driven to the edge of sanity by her isolation and anguish. Wells is hurting as well, torn between loyalties, and his father doesn’t know how to breach the gap. But the first just straight up tells you that, and the second shows it through body language, through a specific example. 

Good writing, in my opinion, is writing that allows the reader to put the dots together. You get a lot more out of a sentence like the one about Wells and his father, because it lets you make the conclusion yourself, lets you imagine the scene and read in-between the lines, fill in the gaps with the details about Wells’ and his dad’s relationship that are just hinted at.

Clarke’s chapter on the other hand—all it does is just explain it to you. Lahiri and her father were friends. Her parents are dead. Clarke feels guilty. She thinks the guard must be from Walden or Arcadia, and here’s why. It’s boring, for that reason. It doesn’t give the reader any room to breathe. 

Other stuff: Jaha mentions that the Ark is planning on “colonizing” Earth, and the word choice there is pretty deliberate. I’m so pleased that I’m not supposed to actually like the Ark Council in this book. It’s a nice change from the show.

Jaha also has the preserved skeleton of an eagle in his office, as well as “the few paintings that had survived the burning of the Louvre, and the photos of the beautiful dead cities whose names never ceased to send chills down Wells’s spine.”

So that tells us: there’s an intense fascination with nature on the Ark, which is understandable, considering their situation. The mention of the Louvre “burning” implies that the Cataclysm was probably nuclear war or strife of some kind (why call it a “burning” if the apocalypse that drove them into space was a natural disaster? It implies that it was deliberately done, maliciously). The mention of “dead, beautiful cities” is also cast as ominous, giving Wells chills, another hint that the Cataclysm was the fault of the societies that lived on Earth before, that it was something humanity did to themselves. Something they clearly took with them into space.

Also: it’s been three hundred years since the Ark launched, which makes the timeframe so much more logical than the show’s. I mean, not totally logical, but not totally ludicrous, either.  God bless.

And finally: Wells mentions that Jaha arbitrarily “decided” that Earth was safe enough to send the 100 down. Which is absolutely chilling and terrible and oh my God this seems like such a shitty society to be born into, I am horrified.

Next chapter is Bellamy’s. Please, please, please let it be as enjoyable as this one; I really really want to like book!Bellamy. Really. Don’t let me down, Kass Morgan, I have so much more faith in you than I did twenty pages ago.

The 100: Chapter One (Show, Don't Tell)

So, I’ve heard a lot of things about this novel. That it’s a quick read, that it’s melodramatic, that Wells is boring, that the whole thing is one long piece of Bellarke fanfiction. The conclusion I’ve drawn from it is that it’s a big hot mess, so naturally I forked out twelve bucks and bought it so I could live blog the whole thing. 

So, for your convenience, this is: a recap of The 100, by Kass Morgan! Read this, so you don’t have to fork out twelve bucks, too. I care about your budgets.

One thing I should let everyone know before I begin: I own the “TV” version of this book, meaning it’s the edition released after the show came out, with the actors and CW logo and everything. And guess what: Finn is on the cover of this book. He is not a character in this book. He has prime territory, too – right in the middle, behind Clarke. Bellamy and Wells, who actually exist, and are main characters, are hanging out on the edges (of the cover and also society!!! Get it. Ha.) because, I don’t know, whoever designed this cover is stupid.

IN CASE YOU CANNOT TELL, THAT IS WELLS UP THERE IN THE CORNER. BECAUSE THEY MAKE IT SORT OF DIFFICULT.

Like, you can’t even see Wells’ entire head. Just like, part of his face, and the rest of it is cut off by the top right corner. He only has one eye. I’m just – so disgruntled about this. It’s not enough that you kill him off for no reason but you can’t even give him enough room to have a complete profile? He’s a main character. Fuck off with this bullshit. What the hell. It’s a small thing but it isn’t, you know.

*sighs heavily*

I'm so weary of this kind of shit already I'm just going to assume that you all know my intense feelings of "this is fucking bullshit" and move on.

Chapter one opens with one of the most “creative writing class prompt” lines I’ve ever seen in a book:

The door slid open, and Clarke knew it was time to die.

Can’t you just see that on a list of sentences handed out by a twelfth grade English teacher? “Use them as a starting point,” they probably said, “a way to jumpstart your story,” and Kass Morgan nods, thinking, yes. This is good. What an amazing way to capture people’s attention. What door? Where? Why is she going to die? How does she know for certain? Is Clarke a man’s name or a woman’s? So many good questions. A+, Kass!

Like, the first sentence of your story is fucking hard to come up with, I know that better than anyone, but seriously. Come on.

So, we’re in a prison, we find that out fairly quickly, mostly due to Morgan’s exposition, and actually you know what, Clarke comes off as way more bad ass in the first three paragraphs of this book than she did in the entire first episode of the show. She’s been transferred to solitary for attacking a guard, for example, and also, she seems to be having hallucinations, and this apparently happens regularly enough that this is like, ho hum, old hat, just a regular old day:

She heard voices everywhere. They called to her from the corners of her dark cell. They filled the silence between her heartbeats. They screamed from the deepest recesses of her mind. It wasn’t death she craved, but if that was the only way to silence the voices, then she was prepared to die.

Heavy, dude. I’m a little concerned about Clarke’s health considering she can a) hear her own heartbeats and b) there’s enough time in-between them that she has enough time to get bored apparently, but whatever. She’s a teenager in prison, wracked with guilt for a mysterious reason, I’m assuming that this is a character choice and not Morgan writing her novel like a MySpace post of a scene kid in the suburbs. It’s only chapter one, I’m keeping an open mind. 

Also, hallucinations. Hallucinations. She hears voices!! This is very concerning to me. Not just because hey, I’m worried about you Clarke, do you need medical assistance? but also—keeping someone in solitary confinement to the point where they become touch starved (Clarke thinks about how she hasn’t been touched by another human in months, a couple paragraphs from now) and start hearing voices is definitely against the Geneva Convention, I’m thinking. Yup, totally healthy society, here. I have no problems with this at all.  

So Morgan explains that Clarke’s been Confined (capital, so we know it’s important and official and ominous) for treason, but that’s not her real crime, her real crime is something much worse and much more mysterious that we won’t find out until the emotional climax of the novel, probably, because “her memories are more oppressive than any cell walls,” okay, sure. Her visitor is a guard, whom Clarke deducts is probably from the Walden or Arcadia colonies (the wrong side of the Ark tracks) because…he’s thin and people there are starving. Also he seems like he feels bad for her. Maybe he just has a conscience? You don’t have to be poor and oppressed to feel weird about condemning children to death, Clarke. Just a thought. 

So the guard handcuffs Clarke, regretfully, which we know because his tone is brusque but also sympathetic, which is a description that made my brain short out the longer I tried to imagine what that sounds like exactly, and reminds Clarke of Thalia, her old cell mate who I’m assuming will show up later. Clarke assumes that he’s there to kill her, and then it’s more exposition, explaining that adults are killed instantly upon conviction, and juveniles are Confined according to Colony law (everything Important and Official is in Capital Letters) and given one last chance to make their case. But lately, they’ve just been killing everybody, even for crimes that would have been pardoned before (because the Ark is dying, but we’re not supposed to know that yet. I think).

Blah blah, some stuff about how she’d been hoping to walk past the hospital one last time where she’d done her apprenticeship because this is very tragic, all this would’ve been more interesting if I hadn’t seen the show first, probably. 

Another mention of Thalia, and another former cell mate Lise, who we know is going to be bad because Clarke remembers that she’d been “hard-faced” and smiled in malicious glee when they’d carted Clarke off to solitary. The malicious glee part is mine, by the way – I’m just connecting dots, man, just connecting dots.

Then in comes Dr. Lahiri, and then it’s more exposition. He’s the Council’s chief medical advisor (North American spelling there, as opposed to “adviser,” which is more common in the UK, hmm, should’ve used a Britspeak beta, Morgan), and he was friends with her dad, and Clarke worked with him closely during her apprenticeship. People were jealous of her, because she’s the main character, and accused her of nepotism since Lahiri was friends with her dad, who apparently was executed, along with her mother.

Another thing: in the book, they give people a lethal injection to kill them, then dump their body into space. This seems infinitely less cruel than the TV show, where your family members get to watch your face from behind a glass wall as you get sucked out of an airlock fully conscious. Yup, that makes sense. This society isn’t inhuman and severely messed up at all.

I already don’t like this doctor guy. His conversation with Clarke reads like the quintessential scene in every “main character wakes up in a hospital and is told their entire plot has been a hallucination” episode, where the doctor sits down and is nice and condescending and tells Buffy Summers or Elizabeth Weir that she’s hurting herself and her family by continuing to live in a fantasy world. I’m on guard immediately. He’s not a friend, Clarke! He’s a Replicator! The apocalypse is coming, you need to wake up!

“You’re still seventeen, Clarke,” Dr. Lahiri said in the calm, slow manner he usually reserved for patients waking up from surgery. “You’ve been in solitary for three months.”

“Then what are you doing here?” she asked, unable to quell the panic creeping into her voice. “The law says you have to wait until I’m eighteen.”

“There’s been a change of plans. That’s all I’m authorized to say.”

“So you’re authorized to execute me but not to talk to me?”

YEAH, fight the Man, Clarke. I’m into this.

She remembered watching Dr. Lahiri during her parents’ trial. At the time, she’d read his grim face as an expression of his disapproval with the proceedings, but now she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t spoken up in their defense. No one had. He’d simply sat there mutely as the Council found her parents—two of Phoenix’s most brilliant scientists—to be in violation of the Gaia Doctrine, the rules established after the Cataclysm to ensure the survival of the human race. “What about my parents? Did you kill them too?”

Dr. Lahiri closed his eyes, as if Clarke’s words had transformed from sounds into something visible. Something grotesque.

lol what, that is the laziest way of using that stylistic trope ever. “Something visible. Something grotesque.” You know, the thing about using this method of giving physical descriptions to words in order to describe their emotional impact? Is that you have to actually pick a physical description. You can’t just be like: “it was gross-looking.” The creative writing class must have covered “show, don’t tell,” right?

“Clarke’s words had transformed from sounds into something visible. Something like Wells’s mutilated face, scrunched into the corner of the book cover in favour of the white dude who isn’t even in this story. Like mild racism, they made Dr. Lahiri recoil in pained disgust.” There, see? Done.

Also the British spelling is throwing me off—“defense,” and in an earlier paragraph, a reference to Clarke’s family’s “flat.” Is this an effort to demonstrate a blended, multicultural society or did Kass Morgan become one of those annoying Anglophiles when she was at Oxford and decided to write her book like an English person? I’m an American living in New Zealand, and I understand picking up local patterns of speaking, but they don’t become so ingrained that you accidentally use them in a novel years after you’ve moved home. Come on, now.

Anyway, so Dr. Lahiri keeps up the condescending “teenagers are friends, not food” act and proceeds to give her a fucking panic attack, because his generosity doesn’t extend to explaining what he’s going to do to her before he does it, even though he’s aware she thinks he’s there to murder her.

Dr. Lahiri reached into his coat pocket and produced a cloth that smelled of antiseptic. Clarke shivered as he swept it along the inside of her arm. “Don’t worry. This isn’t going to hurt.”

Clarke closed her eyes.

She remembered the anguished look Wells had given her as the guards were escorting her out of the Council chambers. While the anger that had threatened to consume her during the trial had long since burned out, thinking about Wells sent a new wave of heat pulsing through her body, like a dying star emitting one final flash of light before it faded into nothingness.

Her parents were dead, and it was all his fault.

Clarke is striking me as something she really isn’t in the show: wronged. I’m on page seven and I’m feeling more self-righteous, justified anger and bitterness about what the Ark did to her family than I did in the entire first season of the show. I like this Clarke much better, tbh, she feels much more human than show!Clarke, who’s got a serious case of ‘main character syndrome’—namely, she’s bland. She’s Zoey in Zoey 101. She’s special because she’s the lead, duh, why do you need any other reason? (Well, yeah. Some kind of reason I don’t have to dig between the lines for would be nice.)

So Lahiri doesn’t kill her, of course, he just puts the wristband on her. Because of course, how else would you go about it, when your traumatized former protégé thinks you’re there to inject her with poison, other than to act like you’re about to give her an injection? Good job, Doctor.

“Just relax,” he said with infuriating coolness. “It’s a vital transponder. It will track your breathing and blood composition, and gather all sorts of useful information.”

“Useful information for who?” Clarke asked, although she could already feel the shape of his answer in the growing mass of dread in her stomach.

That makes it sound like she might have a tumor of some kind. I have a feeling from these descriptions that Kass Morgan used to write fanfiction. Or maybe Clarke did. It’s too early to tell.

Also: the wristbands apparently stay on through tiny needles that stay injected into the skin, which sounds absolutely fucking horrifying, and throws that scene where Bellamy is holding Clarke over the edge of the pit by her wristband-hand into a really painful light. Shit, that must’ve hurt a lot.

“There’ve been some exciting developments,” Dr. Lahiri said, sounding like a hollow imitation of Wells’s father, Chancellor Jaha, making one of his Remembrance Day speeches. “You should be very proud. It’s all because of your parents.”

If Morgan’s intention is to make me think that the Ark is some horrifying future space-version of Stepford, then congrats, because this is some creepy ass shit. Citizens who hollowly imitate their leader’s propaganda when asked direct, challenging questions is definitely a sign of a healthy society.

“My parents were executed for treason.”

Dr. Lahiri gave her a disapproving look.

GO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE, LAHIRI.

“Don’t ruin this, Clarke. You have a chance to do the right thing, to make up for your parents’ appalling crime.”

Punch this fucker in the face, Clarke. Do it.

There was a dull crack as Clarke’s fist made contact with the doctor’s face, followed by a thud as his head slammed against the wall.

awww yeeeeah. You are the voice of the people, Clarke. I definitely like you better than your show counterpart.

Anyway, the guard obviously feels the same because he takes his sweet time to pop his head in and say “yo doc, u dead?” so clearly this guy is a revolutionary in disguise. Who else but a master of deception can manage to sound brusque and sympathetic at the same time? Maybe he’s the Mockingjay.

Anyway, Lahiri is an ass and does that gross thing that dudes do when they get hit by women, where they’re pissed off but also amused, because haha, ladies don’t hit people, you silly lady, you’re so silly. Then he makes a crack about Clarke fitting in with the other delinquents and tells her that she’s going to Earth (while smirking; super professional), because apparently when he told Clarke three pages ago that he wasn’t authorized to tell her anything, he was totes lying because he’s a sick fuck who gets off on giving teenagers near death experiences. He’s clearly a serial killer, okay.

Anyway, the chapter ends here. I think my recap is actually longer than the chapter itself. I’m strangely at peace with that.

So interesting things we learned: the Gaia Doctrine is what they call their Constitution, which sorta fucks up my headcanon of Bellamy and Clarke naming their daughter that, boo. The station that Clarke is from is called Phoenix, and this version of the Ark seems to be a lot more attached to philosophy and rhetoric, since all three of the stations that have been named so far have a lot of literary/mythological connotations. Phoenix is obvious, of course, and I think most people know Gaia was a Greek Earth goddess, but Walden is probably a reference to the book by Henry David Thoreau, which is the favored manifesto of every hipster anti-capitalist Christopher McCandless “nature solves your problems” devotee, and Arcadia is a Greek province and the dryest fucking thing I've ever read, a book by Sir Philip Sidney called The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Don't talk to me about that book, I had to write a forty-page paper on it when I was nineteen, I still have fucking nightmares. 

Anyway all you need to know is that Arcadia is another word for utopia, and specifically, a pastoral one. It's where Pan lived. Virgil’s Eclogues are set there. Walden is the American wild paradise, and Arcadia is the ye olden day version of it, so pairing these two names together, for the pair of oppressed colonies, is no accident.

(A 16th century Italian explorer named the northeastern North American coast "Acadia." Walden is about Thoreau’s mental health vacation at Walden Pond, in Massachusetts. Kass Morgan went to Brown in Rhode Island, and the show’s setting is in future, post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania. Lurking somewhere in here is a lit paper on the American transcendentalism influences and the intersection between “utopia” and “dystopia” in this book, but someone else can take that on.)

They’re good references—historical-based allusions to the natural world, an ironic juxtaposition of the novel’s two settings (and concepts) Earth and Space, but not too heavy-handed, especially for a YA novel, whose target audience wouldn’t necessarily recognize them right off the bat. I actually like the detail, there, even if the show’s version of the Ark colony names—naming them after their trade, after what they can contribute to society—fits a bit better with the characterization of the Ark culture.

Furthermore the stylistic detail of using capitonyms, which is when you capitalize a word to change its meaning as Morgan does with words such as “Confined,” and “Colony,” is characteristic of religious and philosophical texts, which is pretty telling as well. The end result is that Ark culture is beginning to feel a lot like a cult, which is probably intentional. Kass Morgan was probably an English major, I’m thinking. 

Also, an interesting tidbit nobody but me cares about, probably—Clarke mentions her father’s habit of forgetting to program the “circadian lights” in their “flat” and then staying up too late working. Also they use 24-hour time. This is more detail about the mundane aspects of living in space than we ever got on the show, which is the main reason I’m reading this book, so that’s a good.