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.