A review by Nalini Haynes
Last episode was called ‘Earth Skills’, a reference to a class the teenagers took at school on the ark. This episode is ‘Earth Kills’, a reference to the many ways in which people will die in this series.
Clarke races to find a cure for Jasper based on the poultice the Grounders (native Earthers) put on his spear wound.
A couple who wandered away from camp are trapped in a toxic yellow mist and never return.
Bellamy’s hunting party and Clarke’s medicine gathering party are trapped separately by the yellow fog randomly roving the surface. The hunting party — or most of the party — find shelter in caves.
The gathering party find an overturned car before sighting the fog so they race back to it and shelter within. Thus we have the future-people-meet-past-artifacts trope, right down to the conversation about whether to drink the booze because ‘it’s toxic’.
At first I assumed boozy choices are explained in the flashbacks: video relics of the past shown on TV, a football game to be precise, could easily have been expanded to the wealth of human entertainment saved to computer systems before the war. Thus it’s possible these teens would know about bootleg liquor. In later episodes we learn there’s hooch on the station so their naivety seems misplaced.
Life and death hang in the balance on Earth; likewise a grudge versus forgiveness are swinging on the scales, giving us a measure of Clarke’s character.
Bellamy showed himself to be ‘nice’ in the first episode, sacrificing his life on the ark to accompany his sister. (His puppy moment?) Since then he’s been a total douche — up until this episode where he attains depth and some degree of likeablility.
The end of this episode is foreshadowed so it wasn’t a surprise but it was creepy.
This episode is not as successful passing the Bechdel Test but it ticks all the boxes for racial diversity. So far the only sexual attractions seem to be heterosexual but I’m anticipating THAT character coming out sometime soon.
I’m still enjoying The 100 although I would enjoy sitting with friends being the peanut gallery. It’d be easy to take the piss — because I’m Australian. 
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Director: Dean White
Writers: Jason Rothenberg, Kass Morgan (novel), Sarah Fain, Elizabeth Craft
Stars: Eliza Taylor, Paige Turco, Thomas McDonell
Watch this if you enjoyed: Stargate SG1
