A Negative Review: The 100 S01E01 (pilot) Sucks

Pic related: actual science-fiction

What do you get when you combine terrible science-fiction with terrible fantasy romance? The 100, apparently – it's the type of show that follows the Twilight phenomenon of turning previously niche genres into something for the masses by removing all the interesting and distinguishing characteristics of said genres; in this case, it's taking science-fiction and turning it into a high school drama. Indeed, in The 100, Earth has been ravaged by a nuclear war, and 97 years after the planet has been abandoned by its 4,000 survivors, a group of 100 delinquent teenagers is sent as a science experiment of sorts in order for the powers that be aboard the mothership/space station to find out if Earth is now habitable. In and of itself, this premise is quite interesting, but unfortunately, the show entirely fails to deliver. There is just so much wrong with this show that it would be difficult to categorically explain it all; in lieu of this, here is a list:

1. Okay, so maybe you aren't like me, and your mind doesn't immediately go to the gutter when this is the opening shot. The point, though, is that the protagonist is female. Some of her friends are female. As it appears, roughly half of the 100 is female – what? Why in the world would the scientists send down a sizable amount of healthy females in the prime of their mating years down to their deaths? Isn't the whole point of the experiment to determine if Earth is habitable, such that it might later be possible to repopulate it? Why not send older people? Why not, at the very least, only send males? The show gets around this with some pretty loopy logic – anyone over 18 that commits a crime is sentenced to a slow and horrible death by means of exposure to outer space, such that the only candidates remaining for the experiment are a group of 100 delinquents... but was that really the plan? Lock up enough teens until the need to maintain resources outweighs their usefulness, and incidentally shuttle them off to Earth? Absent the seemingly arbitrary decision to send these teens down below, which by all accounts, only occurred as a result of the life support issue, what would they have been doing on the space station, other than sitting alone in their cells? It's already indefensible that the overlords are willing to send the best breeding candidates to slaughter, especially given the one child policy aboard the station, but the whole of the manner in which these girls were selected makes absolutely no sense.

2. There are 4,000 people aboard the space station, and of the people that are below age 18, only 100 of them are troublemakers. 

3. The use of capital punishment for every crime, besides having already been done before a hundred times, is also a complete absurdity given the extremely small population size of 4,000, with the corresponding specificity of every person's role in society. That is, it is extremely unlikely that a given person is not an inexorable necessity aboard the spaceship, for whatever reason, such that the capital punishment rule would not quickly destroy the infrastructure. In fact, in this very first episode, a cardiac surgeon is sentenced to death and nearly killed before a deus ex machina is used to save her – but supposing she had died, who else among the other 3,899 people knows how to do what she does?

4. The space station can monitor every single teenager on the planet, in realtime, complete with vitals, but lacks the technology to scan for radiation – even in the 1960s, it was already possible to do this, but the future scientists still haven't figured it out, even though the wrist monitors they've placed on their teens are so advanced that they don't need any kind of transmitters or power supplies. Oh, and I guess they can't even make a simple Geiger counter for the teens to take, either.

Anyway, the list goes on. And on. And on... eventually, maybe it stops – who knows. The story is basically held together with scotch tape and elmer's glue, and the acting is on par with a high school drama. Not much else can be said, really... the whole thing is just pitifully reflective of how much science-fiction has degraded over the last 10 years. 

Expect this show to be cancelled before it finishes its first season. What a shame.