Review: The 100 Season 7 Episode 15, “The Dying of the Light”

The penultimate episode of The 100 has strong performances and heartbreaking scenes, but still has some of the issues that have nagged the show all season.

Clarke and Octavia go to Bardo to save Maddie while everyone back on Old Earth deals with the aftermath of the bomb.

Of course, John “The Cockroach” Murphy survived a literal cave-in. The same cannot be said for Emori, whom he finds impaled by a metal pole, though still breathing. With the help of Raven and Jackson, he works quickly to try and save her life. They saw her out of the rubble, cauterize her wounds, and hammer away at the cement floor to get to the TravelingStone to bring her back to Sanctum for surgery.

This sequence has plenty of action and tension, but it’s the moments of intimacy between Emori and her friends that really stick out. It’s easy to forget that Emori is not one of the original 100, because that’s the way she’s treated. Seeing her this close to death is a punch to the gut.

They eventually do manage to extricate Emori from the stone. The last we see of this group, they’re running through the portal while Jackson performs CPR on Emori.

No matter how many characters come and go, the focus of the show has always been Clarke. She makes the decisions for everyone and has always put herself on the front lines. Now that Maddie has done that, Clarke realizes how her own mother must have felt all those times when she would go off to save the day. So it’s no surprise when Clarke acts as her mother would and blindly runs into danger to save Maddie. She and Octavia are immediately captured by the Bardoians. When they escape, they find a brain-dead Maddie.

Clarke has a truly heart-wrenching reaction. We get close-up shots of her and Maddie, each seen through the eyes of the other. The contrast is stark. Maddie’s eyes are glazed and lifeless while Clarke’s are alive and in pain. These performances carry the scene.

Plot-wise, it’s like we’re back in the early days of the show when nobody was truly safe. It’s as though the person Clarke used to be after she lost Finn returns when she learns that Maddie can never be truly healed.

The downside to all this is that Maddie’s brain-death renders Bellamy’s death a couple episodes back even more meaningless. That’s been a problem all season: except for Diyoza’s death, none of the major deaths have landed the way they should. And given the incredible growth and change some of these characters have gone through, that’s disappointing.

But hey, maybe that’s what the writers are trying to say, that no matter how important you are or how far you’ve come, death awaits us all.

Grade: B+

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