I just suffered through the first episode of “the 100” on the CW. Worse, my wife wants to give the next episode a chance, despite the rampant stupidity in the first one.
Brief synopsis: there was a nuclear war, and a space station with the last of humanity is suffering from life-support problems, so they exile 100 teenage criminals to Earth to see if it’s safe to go back. Not a terrible premise, aside from the deliberate decision to make it extremely teen-centric, even if (as usual) all the teenagers are played by people in their 20’s.
Of the teenagers, only 3 have visible intelligence, and I’m none too sure about one of those. They’re stranded in a wilderness with no food and no technology beyond a very bare-bones lander, and only two teenagers have any desire to secure the supplies that were landed ahead of them. Because starving is so much fun.
Of the teenage characters, the female lead and her bad boy love interest are tolerable, the intelligent supervillain practically twirls his mustache, and I want all of the others to die. I was very disappointed when the extremely attractive but unpleasant illegal girl was not eaten by the giant eel, as she should have been. I was not surprised when the dorky guy did get killed, since he was the least attractive in the little expedition.
Not that the adults are any prizes either. They have put health telemetry bands on every prisoner, with some sort of magical technology that’s readable from orbit. Their #1 concern is whether there’s radiation. But they’re too stupid to put radiation detectors on these bands, so they repeatedly argue about whether so-and-so’s telemetry going out means they died of radiation. Not to mention that apparently the telemetry bands can’t tell the difference between “band removed / destroyed” and “band perfectly functional but subject dead.”
Some fairly predictable bad science, free fall continuing even though the lander’s experiencing heavy deceleration from atmospheric braking, a lander that would never stand up to reentry, viable mutations like giant eels and two-headed deer in just 97 years, putting a tourniquet above a scrape that is barely oozing, a space station that looks like the designers had infinite room, etc.
The whole thing is really sad, because “how do we build survive and build a civilization with almost no tools” is an interesting premise, but they’re not going there at all, they’re dwelling on pointless teenage rebellion instead.