“Blood Must Have Blood” in The 100 Season 2 Finale

The second season of The 100 has come to a close, and what a season it was. Numerous characters, including the main male love interest, were killed, Clarke became the CW’s first bisexual lead, and the Grounders and the Skypeople formed an uneasy truce and went to war with the Mountain Men. The entire second season was fun, exciting, and filled with twists and turns. Unfortunately, the last episode wasn’t as strong as it could have been. It wasn’t a bad episode by any means, but there were plenty of things about it that made little to no sense—and I’d already suspected the twist ending involving Jaha and Murphy episodes ago.

Spoilers after the jump.

The season finale was a two-part episode called “Blood Must Have Blood”. This is a Grounder phrase. Grounders believe that those who commit crimes, specifically crimes that involve bloodshed, must pay for it with their own blood. This is why Lexa and the others refused to form a truce with the Skypeople until they could execute Finn. Finn murdered nineteen people, so the Grounders wanted him to feel the pain of nineteen deaths.

Knowing that the Mountain Men had been kidnapping and murdering hundreds of their own people for over ninety years, I was fully expecting the Grounders to wreck some serious havoc. The plan they formed with the Skypeople would have allowed them to kill all the Mountain Men, except the children and the people who had gone out of their way to help them over the years. Before the battle, they even chant the words “blood must have blood”. So why would I expect anything less?

But then the Grounders did something completely out of character. When the Mountain Men realize that they cannot stop the Grounder-Skypeople army from invading the mountain, they opt to make a deal with the Grounders—they’ll let all the Grounder captives they have go, in exchange for the Grounders backing out of this war. Lexa, for some reason, agrees. She tells Clarke that she’s only doing what’s best for her own people, but this decision makes no tactical sense. The Grounders have an army of thousands, as well as a second army—the captives—already inside the mountain and ready to attack. And she and her people believe blood must pay for blood almost religiously. Then, she turns around and betrays her allies, when the Mountain Men clearly wouldn’t have been able to stop either of the armies. And though this action saves some of her people’s lives, Lexa has already shown us that she was willing to sacrifice 250 people to win this war, and then she said their deaths would be avenged. In fact, all Lexa did was hurt her own people by this betrayal.

One of the stipulations behind the original truce was that the Skypeople would use their medical technology to help the Reapers. The Reapers, we find out, are Grounders that the Mountain Men have altered and turned into cannibals with drugs. The withdrawal symptoms of these drugs are so powerful that every Reaper the Grounders have tried to save has died. The Grounders needed the Skypeople to cure the Reapers, which now won’t happen because of Lexa’s betrayal. Right after she and the Grounders leave, the Mountain Men capture Abby, the Skypeople’s head medical expert and the only one who can save the Reapers. But even if Abby had escaped, she and the other Skypeople only agreed to the truce and saving the Reapers if the Grounders helped them take on the Mountain Men.

At first I thought that Lexa was putting on an act for some reason and that she and the Grounders were still going to attack, but I was wrong. Lexa and the Grounders made the decision to leave the war for what appears to be no reason other than that the show wanted Clarke and her friends to defeat the Mountain Men on their own. Clarke and Bellamy succeed in this by flooding the Mountain with radiation. While this saves the remaining One-Hundred and the other captive Skypeople, it unfortunately kills all the Mountain Men, including everyone who helped Clarke and her friends in the past.

Though the Skypeople make it back to their home for better or for worse, Clarke doesn’t return with them. She tells Bellamy that she can’t forgive herself and that she bears all her burdens so no one else will have to. Bellamy is unable to convince her to stay, and the two part ways.

After that, we finally see what’s going on with Jaha and Murphy. When Jaha made it to the ground, a family of Grounders told him about a place called the City of Lights, which many Grounders who are born disfigured journey to so they won’t be killed. Jaha, now no longer the chancellor, wants to find this city and deliver his people to it. He drags Murphy along with him—and as I knew the Mountain Men threat would be completed this episode and that the season had to end on a cliffhanger of some kind, I also knew that this City of Lights was probably bad news.

I was right. The city isn’t so much a city as it is a bunker filled with food and a mansion on top. People reach it by taking rowboats across a giant lake, and though there are hundreds of boats on the shore and we’ve meet numerous Grounders looking for the city, Jaha and Murphy appear to be the only people there. While Jaha heads to the mansion, Murphy goes to the bunker. There, he finds a video of a guy about to commit suicide. At the mansion, Jaha meets a computer AI that takes the form of a woman. She tells Jaha that she’s been waiting for him ever since he made it to the ground. She somehow has acquired the craft he came down in—which has a nuclear symbol on the side—and says she appreciates this gift and is eager to make it work.

So right now, as far as I’m concerned, this AI set off the nuclear apocalypse over ninety years ago, and as the Grounders who have gone to her are nowhere to be seen, they’re probably dead. What is interesting about this ending, though, is that Murphy and Jaha are far away from all the other characters, so they probably won’t be able to get word back to them for help very easily. The distance they had to go to reach their destination ended up killing numerous people traveling with them. They are completely removed and on their own from here on out.

Though the Grounder betrayal made little to no sense to me, this was still a fun episode that leaves our characters in exciting situations. We don’t know what’s going to happen between the Grounders and Skypeople now, let alone what’s going to happen between Clarke and Lexa, or even where Clarke is going. Lexa at one point invites Clarke to go to their capitol with her, which probably won’t happen now, and we know that the Grounder society is a lot more complex than what we’ve seen thus far. How Clarke and Lexa handle everything next season and move forward is something I’m really excited to see.

The 100 has been growing continuously better over the course of the past two seasons, with only the occasional weak episode here and there, and I have all the hope in the world that that will also be true for the third season. It is one of the better shows I’ve ever been able to watch, and I already wish it were time for the Season 3 premiere.

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