Review: The 100 Season 7 Episode 10, “A Little Sacrifice”

Shedheda reminds everyone why they should fear him, while Clarke and the people on Bardo hatch a plan to escape.

On the heels of the massacre of the Faithful in Sanctum, Indra and John try everything in their power to stop the rise of Shedheda. “A Little Sacrifice” opens with Shedheda confronting Maddie and forcing her to bend the knee to him, as she’s the only one with a claim to the Commander position. Shedheda is covered in blood, and his eerie calm when delivering promises to murder those who Maddie loves is surprisingly frightening. Though they are overused on most occasions, the Dutch angles in this scene work well.

After the talk with Maddie is done, Shedheda goes on to nearly take over the city, and forces Indra to challenge him to single combat. After a well-choreographed sword fight, Indra is saved by Maddie right before Shedheda can deliver the killing blow. Indra returns the favor when she offers to bend the knee if Maddie’s life is spared. Maddie then escapes offscreen, and we see her and the remaining Faithful sheltering in the nuclear reactor bay with John and Emori. The idea that John is a “cockroach” because he somehow survives everything is borne out here, as it’s his idea to hide. Again he survives, and this time rescues a few others along the way.

Clarke is not convinced her friends are brainless Disciples, and when she figures out the one clue left behind — the lie that the Flame is still in her head — she rallies them all together.

While they search the halls for the undercover Disciples, Gabriel and Bill have lunch, eating foods from hundreds of years ago; being immortal, they have a taste for this stuff. Their conversation is the best written dialogue of the season. So far we’ve hated the Shepard — we hated him before we even met him, and when we did meet him in the backdoor pilot for the prequel series, he was the definition of a one-dimensional bad guy. But the guy having tense but pleasant lunch with Gabriel is hard not to like. His charm and charisma are so apparent it’s almost believable that a cult would follow this man. His kindness seems so genuine that when Gabriel leaves and the guards come in to give Bill news, his sudden coldness is shocking.

The news is that Clarke and everyone else are attempting to escape before giving the aid they promised. But when Clarke discovers that Echo is hatching a plan to destroy everyone on Bardo with the bioweapon that killed the planet’s original inhabitants, she and the others go back to stop her. Of course, they reach her just in time and convince her to stop with a heart-to-heart conversation.

Then, literally out of nowhere and in contradiction of everything we know about her, Hope steals the weapon from the Bardo guard, slits his throat, and drops the weapon into the water system, although Diyoza acts fast and catches the liquid before it hits the water. But her sacrifice though is overshadowed by the absurdity of Hope’s actions. She’d already grown past the place where she was overreacting to everything, so to see that here — years after her supposed character development — is very off-putting. Diyoza, her own mother, just died saving innocents from a terrorist attack, completing a great arc for her character, but only had to do it because her daughter did exactly what she knows now not to do. It’s such a jarring ending you forget the rest of the episode was really good.

Either way, I think Bellamy comes back next episode, so I guess I called it.

Grade: B-

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels