WiC Watches: The 100 season 7
By Zac Giaimo
The 100 — “Hesperides” — Image Number: HU704B_0112r.jpg — Pictured (L-R): Shelby Flannery as Hope and Tasya Teles as Echo — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW — 2020 The CW Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
Episode 704: “Hesperides”
If the previous two episodes fell short in delivering any real conflict or plot progression, “Hesperides” makes up for it. For the first time this season, the story cuts back and forth between Sanctum and Sky Ring. The opening sequence of Hope being trained by a prisoner named Dev as they prepare an attack on the people from Bardo is well done. It shows how she was able to live on without her mother or Octavia and how she makes the choice to learn to fight so she can rescue them. Set to a fitting score, the montage is executed well, including the quick cut from her as a child to her as we see her now.
That sets the pace for an episode where a lot — and I mean a lot — of time passes for certain characters. Hope, Gabriel and Echo are forced to remain on the prison planet for five years as they receive training and information on the people who use the prison. We’re only told small bits of information about their culture, but everything else is a mystery. Even when we see the three of them five years later, years pass from scene to scene, and we’re still not given a full explanation of how they are going to rescue their friends. It’s only when the time comes to spring the trap and they betray their new friend Orlando, the prisoner who helped them create this plan, that we learn their strategy.
Apparently, the plan originally involved no killing, but that is instantly changed as Hope kills one of the soldiers, something she failed to do when she and Dev first attempted this, and then Echo proceeds to kill the rest on mere speculation of their future actions. In the flashbacks, we learn that Hope’s inability to kill caused Dev to die. Gabriel seems the only one who actually cares about all of the lives being taken in this attempt to save their own.
So in the time we’ve spent with Hope, her entire life as passed, including the five extra years spent on the planet, and five years for both Echo and Gabriel. The biggest plot hole in all of this is that it’s never revealed how Orlando knows who Hope is, and why he suddenly goes from crazy person who smashes tablets to a calm and composed leader. There’s a lot of offscreen character building that we learn about through dialogue. But what we’re being told doesn’t match up with what we’re seeing. We don’t see Orlando’s slow progress to sanity; he just shows up one day, beats Echo in a fight, wins the cabin in a bet, then says he’ll teach them his culture. It’s still unknown why he wants to help and how he knew Hope from before. We are told through dialogue that the time passing is having an impact on them, but then they revert back to their old ways instantly.
Speaking of the old ways, Clarke and Sanctum are visited by some people in Bardo and told that Clarke must accompany them back to Bardo if she wants to save her friends. She and her friends find one of these Golden Masked bodies and Raven sets to figuring out how it works. It doesn’t take her long as she’s able to nearly control it completely by the end of the episode. Clarke shows remnants of her Wanheda days as she plans a sneak attack on the Golden Masks camp at Gabriel’s place. While this happens, she’s told of the events taking place on the prison planet — Penance, as the Golden Masks call it — and that her people have now killed nine of the Golden Masked people.
The 100 — “Hesperides” — Image Number: HU704B_0020r.jpg — Pictured: Chuku Modu as Gabriel — Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW — 2020 The CW Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
The negotiations go poorly, but Raven saves the day by controlling the Golden Mask body. Clarke and company find the portal stone underneath the Anomaly and the suit shows Raven how to travel to the connecting planets. There’s a really cool scene of her being shown the known galaxy and all the possible planets to travel to using these wormholes. It brings back Raven initial love for space and her old dream of space walking.
Raven and Jordan are amazed at the abilities of the suit, and rightfully so, as it’s the most advanced piece of technology they’ve seen besides the mind chips. But their joy is short-lived as they must use the suit to kill eight more Golden Masks. While entering the Anomaly, Gaia stays back but is ambushed by another Golden Mask, and the Masks close the portal as Clarke and friends become stranded on what looks like a desolate planet.
So, in this action-filled installment nearly all of the characters are displaced through either wormholes, copious amounts of time passing, or both. It does, however, justify some of the world building done in the first two episodes and seems to be moving forward with that storyline. But again, there are so many storylines, now years and lightyears apart, that a final connection between them is becoming more and more unlikely.
Each time years pass between scenes, or a character makes a rash decisions to travel into wormholes they now nothing about, it muddies the waters and makes it difficult to imagine where this show is heading. But that may be a good thing. This show has always been good at surprising us with its scope, and it is setting itself up something big indeed.