Fridge / The 100

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• Map and the lake:
  • It might seem strange at first that Clarke was surprised by the body of water the group found, considering that she's holding a map of the area. Once you remember that nobody has been down to Earth in almost a hundred years and that The Ark has no way of seeing what's happening on the surface, this makes sense: That map is probably out of date by ninety-seven years.
  • Since they had lived on a space station their whole lives, they've never seen a large body of water before, beyond pictures and videos.
  • Living on a space station all their lives wouldn't give them any real opportunity to learn how to navigate over open ground, map or no map. Perhaps Clarke thought they were somewhere else, nowhere near any bodies of water.
• The names which were obviously derived from science fiction authors (Bellamy, Clarke, Wells) might have been inspired by living in space, which was of course a common sci-fi plot. Not to mention most astronauts (like the original station crew) were geeks and nerds.
• Octavia's tendency to run about and leave the group seems like an Idiot Ball, until we see in episode six she spent sixteen years living in a room no bigger then a garage. Of course she's the first to step out of the drop ship, she's been imprisoned in one form or another ninety nine percent of her life. Which explains her tendency to go on walkabout and follow butterflies. She has a lot of catching up to do.
• When the 100 are hit with a virus from the grounders, Lincoln says that certain people are immune. Who ends up not being affected at all? Finn and Octavia, the two people who want peace with the grounders the most. This may also have to do with violent intent and blood pressure. The disease causes blood to pour out the victim's body, which may be caused by higher blood pressure. Raven gets hit only when she's setting up the bomb and many high-strung or violent people are early victims.
• On an Earth where blending in and stealth seem a way of life, the Reapers and their bright red colors stand out like a sore thumb. The brilliance comes in when you realize that they are a bunch of Axe-Crazy roaming cannibals. They consider themselves on top of the food chain, everything else is prey. They don't hide, you hide from them. Furthermore, they're probably the reason the Grounders had to learn to be stealthy in the first place.
  • Even then with the reveal that Mount Weather created them, they were probably using the Grounders fear of them to keep them from finding the other entrance to the facility which is located in the Reapers' cave which was once a mine.
• The one child per family policy makes no sense for a species trying to survive, until you find out there's only room for seven hundred people to go down to Earth. They were supposed to have a couple more generations to breed down to that number without a culling.
• In the heat of the moment, it's very easy to wonder why Lexa didn't just charge the Mountain the moment their captives were released. It's a pretty stark turnaround from Jus drein jus daun to meekly cooperating with whatever the Mountain Men ask. Then you realize that, as Heda, Lexa absolutely cannot afford to have even one example of a time when she negotiated a truce, and then went back on her word the moment she got what she wanted. Her credibility would be gone, and she would never be able to maintain control of the tribes. Especially true as Lexa seems to have built her reputation on being a Reasonable Authority Figure; see her negotiations with Clarke and her very calm, quietly mournful approach to executions when they're necessary. It's not idealism; this world has no UN, no centralized government, no way to enforce contracts on a large scale. If she gets a reputation as a liar, the coalition dissolves and her people suffer. It doesn't matter how much she hates Cage—he negotiated with her as an enemy leader, and she agreed to his terms.
  • But of course she still ends up losing credibility with her people for not charging the mountain as her people still wanted revenge against them and it got worse because of the fact that Clarke took them all out with a switch which ends up giving her a reputation among the Grounders and making them consider Lexa a coward for retreating.
  • Not to mention that she IS STILL going back on her word by betraying Clarke. She told Clarke that they would unite their forces and fight Mount Weather to free both groups, but then Lexa leaves the Skaikru out to die the moment she gets what she wants. Her credibility as a negotiator in any sense would be shot. It's likely due to the fact that she betrayed Sky People rather than Grounders that publicly lying and betraying an ally didn't affect her rulership.
• At first listen, the Conlang used by the Grounders seems like guttural, consonant-heavy nonsense. However as the show continues and you hear more of it, you realize that it is more of a pidgin language based on English that sometimes makes basic sense to the audience ("Be quiet" in Grounder sounds very much like "Shut up"). The basis on English might then be a source of frustration, since we have no reason to believe the 100 and those that follow crashed anywhere near an English-speaking country... Until the presence of the Lincoln Memorial is revealed, and you realize why the Grounders call their home "Tondc".
  • Also, Mount Weather is a real place in Virginia.
  • With the revelation of the password to opening the Flame being in Latin, it is possible that their language is also based on that.
    • The title "Blodreina," "red queen," shows this with the word "reina," or "queen," that is similar to the Latin word "regina"
• Lexa vehemently insisting on fighting the single combat herself could be construed as a necessary gamble to cement her own authority in Polis, but seeing as the Queen of the Ice Nation would very likely be present meant that she could finally get revenge for Costia's death.
• Emerson not being killed by the Ice Nation makes sense in that in a way they were honoring the deal Lexa made with the Mountain Men and of course Queen Nia knowing that one day the Sky People would move into Mount Weather and that his knowledge of the facility would be useful.

Fridge Horror

• If the 100 made it to Mount Weather in the first episode like they were supposed to, they would never have escaped the bone marrow treatments. It would've been before they'd become hardened killers, before they'd become more ruthless, cautious and resilient. They wouldn't have the unity that comes from being Fire-Forged Friends. In short, they would still be a bunch of foolish, naive teenagers, and would be picked off easily as a result.
  • But there are a couple more factors to consider for this logic:
    • Dante the Mount Weather president didn't want to do the experiments on them and they only ended up being done because Tsing and Cage went behind his back and eventually Cage took over the presidency with the help of other guards who also wanted to do the experiments to cure their families. Even then there were also other people who didn't agree with any of the experiments including the ones on the Grounders and they even tried to help the members of the 100 who were in Mount Weather and most likely would have tried to help them under the different circumstance.
    • Another one is that if things played out differently in the first episode there would have been 101 instead of 48 members of the group in Mount Weather which is a factor because the whole reason Tsing was taking so much bone marrow from each individual is so that she can mass produce the cure to the whole population of her people and possibly would have ended up taking less if all the original 100 was in the facility and the experiments would have been less fatal to them.
    • Then also having all the 100 in the facility would also mean that they would have Bellamy who would probably have tried to sabotage them the moment he got in because of his fear of the Ark coming down and punishing him for what he did to Jaha and there are the others like for example Murphy who would have gave the residents and the guards of Mount Weather a hard time with their teenage rebelling and also Bellamy and Murphy and a few others already knew how to fight and use weapons before coming to the ground and there are the few others including Clarke and Wells who paid attention in Earth Skills class and Clarke could have still ended up being their leader like she did outside because of being more level headed.
    • Then there is the wristbands and why the 100 were supposed to end up in Mount Weather in the first place to let the Ark know that the ground is survivable and Dante most likely would have wanted the Ark residents to come down so that his original plan of integrating them with his people to breed their immunity into his people's gene pool and because of this would have possibly contacted the Ark and even would have stopped the signal that caused their ships to crash in the first place.
    • In general they also would have avoided all the actions and misunderstandings that caused a conflict with the Grounders in the first place and if the experiments ended up going down the same way it did before with Clarke or one or some of the others escaping they could have had a easier time forming an alliance with them as there would have been less animosity between them.
• Lexa and Cage:
  • The reason Lexa agreed to Cage's Sadistic Choice. Only shortly before she returns and orders her people to stand down, Monty tells Bellamy that Cage sent a large number of guards to converge on the Grounders in the harvesting room. The Grounders who are weak, nearly naked, defenseless—some can barely walk. It wasn't a question of "Pull your people back and we'll release yours without a fight, just leave us the 44." Lexa's choice was "Pull your people out, or we slaughter the ones you came to rescue." As Clarke said—this was a rescue mission. Lexa couldn't order her warriors to die for the Sky People in full knowledge that their own would never be rescued. She truly, honestly did not have a choice.
  • And the fact that she doesn't explain anything lends credibility to this. Lexa has been genuinely falling for Clarke since they met. She doesn't try to justify herself because she knew when she made the deal that she was choosing her duty to the captive Grounders over what she knew was right—as she said, it was a logical choice, not an emotional one. Heda Lexa, who claims love is weakness and emotions make you vulnerable, can't even explain her decision because she's ashamed of herself.
  • Another bit of potential horror arising from Lexa's choice: If the Mountain Men had succeeded in harvesting the Arkers' bone marrow, they would no longer need the Grounders for blood transfusions and would be able to freely venture out of their shelter. If things had turned out that way, Lexa's separate peace would have bought only a short reprieve before the next conflict, which (given the Mountain Men's general view of Grounders) could very easily be a war of extermination.
    • But this most likely would have ended in the extermination of the Mountain People because of the Grounders greatly outnumbering them and Mount Weather's two best weapons against them which was the acid fog and the missile and well the missile was used on the village and they didn't have any others and their acid fog machine was destroyed by Raven and Wick. This pretty much means the only advantage they would have in a war would be to stay in the facility and still be kept from going outside out of fear of the grounders. So because of this it would have been in Mount Weather's best interest to maintain the peace and it was Dante's intention for this to happen when he suggested making the deal so that his people could go outside without worrying about getting killed by the Grounders.
• When Jaha gets back to Arkadia, Abby asks what happened to the other 12 people in his group. Many of them were killed, but about half turned around partway through the journey. So either Abby didn't hear about them returning, or they didn't survive the trip back.
• Raven has been procrastinating on further medical treatment because she still remembers Abby operating on her.
• Season 4, episode 12, the debate about who from Skaikru gets to remain in the bunker is solved by Jaha and Kane gassing the Arkadians and choosing for themselves who will stay and who will die. The horror comes in when you think about what will happen when the Arkadians wake up and find themselves either condemned to death outside the bunker or, like Miller, inside the bunker while someone you love is outside.
  • A bit of Fridge Logic too: if they chose their survivors from Clarke's list, do the names that were drawn for the lottery stand? Or did those people just get their hopes up only to wake up and find they will die anyway?
    • Clarke, Bellamy, and Raven did not stay in the bunker despite being on the list, opening up their spots to three others. Octavia let Niylah in, and aside from Miller, two others got their names drawn in the lottery. It's possible they were given the extra spots.
• Season Five, some of the Grounders of Wonkru are sometimes seen sharing food, while uttering the prayer-like oath, "All of me for all of us." You might think at first that the words are symbolic of someone sharing what they had with their friends...until "The Dark Year," when it turns out "All of me for all of us" is meant to mean exactly that. Literally.

Fridge Logic

On the headscratchers page.