Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

The 100: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie Review

These Are My People

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 8, 2016

The 100 met with mixed reviews when The CW network premiered it on March 19, 2014. While the production values of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series were well-received, many found its plot and characters trite and uninspired. As my colleague Kenneth Brown wrote in his review of Season One's Blu-ray set, the show "features a cast of too-gorgeous-for-reality teens getting grimier and bloodier by the minute, as if grimier and bloodier will somehow immaculately conceive compelling character arcs and gripping storylines". Certainly Season One's soap opera romances and recycled Lord of the Flies ethos did not bode well.

But by the time The 100 reached the jaw-dropping conclusion of the initial thirteen episodes, it had become clear that series creator Jason Rothenberg had much greater aspirations. Freely departing from the original novel by Kass Morgan (the first in a planned trilogy), Rothenberg used the typical CW "pretty people" formula as a Trojan Horse to smuggle onto the network a serious drama about the clash of noble ideals with unruly reality and the catastrophes that often result from the best of intentions. It's a rich subject that science fiction is especially well-suited to explore, whereas a realistic treatment in a contemporary setting risks stumbling over politically sensitive trip-wires. One of Season Two's recurring themes is how fighting for a cause in which one believes—any cause—always has a cost, usually in ways that are unforeseeable. Just as in another contemporary classic of TV science fiction, Battlestar Galactica (which Rothenberg and his writers have obviously studied), the heroes of The 100 rarely achieve victory. The best they can manage is to avoid defeat.

Season Two of The 100 premiered on October 22, 2014, and ran for sixteen episodes, three longer than Season One. When Warner Home Video declined to continue releasing the show on Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection stepped in to fill the gap (though the shift occurred so "under the radar" that many fans may not realize there's a Blu-ray set available).

Spoiler warning: The discussion below assumes familiarity with Season One. If you have not seen Season One of The 100, proceed at your own risk.

As fans already know, "the 100" of the title are the hundred children and teenagers sent to Earth's surface from an orbiting space station known as the Ark some ninety-seven years after the planet was devastated by nuclear war. Their mission is to determine whether the planet has become habitable. With a few exceptions, all of the 100 have committed crimes for which, if they were adults, the Ark's laws would require the death penalty. Part of the motive for sending them to the surface is to conserve the Ark's dwindling supplies.

Season Two picks up immediately after Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor), the group's de facto leader, awakens inside the Mount Weather facility that she and a small group tried unsuccessfully to reach in the series' pilot episode. The locked room where Clarke finds herself is pristine, and the visible technology indicates a civilization more technologically advanced than the tribal "Grounders" that she and her fellow survivors were fighting just before they were tranquilized and carried away. Whoever these "Mountain Men" are, they are obviously unlike anyone the 100 have encountered since landing on Earth.

Clarke will shortly learn that the Mountain Men have brought forty-eight members of her group to Mount Weather, including computer geeks Jasper (Devon Bostick) and Monty (Christopher Larkin). This group will come to be known as "the 48" (and later, for reasons that will require no explanation, "the 47"). Technical wizard Raven (Lindsey Morgan) and the man whom both Clarke and Raven love, Finn Collins (Thomas McDonell), remain at large, somewhere outside. Also missing from the 48 are the perpetually bickering siblings, Bellamy and Octavia Blake (Bob Morley and Marie Avgeropoulos), both of whom have found themselves thrust into unexpected positions of leadership in the fight for survival.

Outside Mount Weather, the twelve individual space stations that were fused to form the Ark have completed their perilous journey to the surface, following the desperate escape plan conceived by Chancellor Thelonius Jaha (Isaiah Washington). As anticipated, however, many of the Ark's residents did not survive the voyage. Those who did, including Clarke's mother, Dr. Abby Griffin (Paige Turco), and council member Marcus Kane (Henry Ian Kusick), begin organizing to establish a fortified camp that can be defended against the Grounders. The settlement is christened "Camp Jaha", in honor of the former Chancellor, who remained behind on the Ark, sacrificing himself to facilitate the launch of the individual stations toward Earth. But as Jaha waits resignedly for his oxygen and supplies to run out, he begins hearing and seeing signs that he may not be alone on the station as he originally thought.

The first few episodes of Season Two move at a dizzying pace, as the story struggles to keep up with activity in multiple locales, including Mount Weather, the space station, crash sites and other places on the ground where the characters have been spread far and wide by the chaos of Season One's conclusion. Gradually, though, as events reveal more about the different groups competing for the Earth—the Mountain Men led by President Dante Wallace (Raymond J. Barry); the Grounders led by warrior Anya (Dichen Lachman); and the terrifying Reapers, whose murderous frenzy doesn't seem to allow for leadership—Season Two expands into a pessimistic meditation on humanity's penchant for self-destruction.

Until the 100 landed on Earth, the Ark's inhabitants believed themselves to be the sole survivors of their species, so that all of their leaders' decisions were driven by the desire to perpetuate human existence (or at least that's how they justified the harshness of their decisions). In Season Two, the Ark survivors must adjust to the discovery that their fundamental assumption was wrong. They are now one among several factions of humanity competing for dominance of the planet, often with irreconcilable needs and objectives. Just as their former world was decimated by conflict among nations, their newly established colony is now caught in the crossfire of factions warring for dominance. Instead of starting over, they must rejoin a fray that has continued throughout their exile in space. The geo-political conflicts that were thought to have ended with nuclear devastation never went away; they just relocated into new territory.

Issues of loyalty and leadership recur throughout Season Two, along with thorny problems of diplomacy and compromise, both within Camp Jaha and outside its walls. Before the season is over, many of the characters are faced with impossible choices between equally unacceptable alternatives. The children who landed in Season One look much less like youngsters after they have been forced to make life-and-death decisions that were once the exclusive province of the Ark's leadership. And the former leaders appear far less authoritative when the organizational structure developed for space station life confronts a vast unknown that considers the "Sky Crew" to be an invading enemy (or, in some cases, a tantalizing prey).

Season Two builds to an explosive conclusion with even greater stakes and more lasting consequences than the Grounder attack that ended Season One. Both individuals and relationships are permanently altered. Meanwhile, a small party of adventurers has gone searching for a rumored paradise called "the City of Light". That quest reveals an entirely separate frontier in this brave new world, which will prove central to the story of Season Three (currently underway).

The 100: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The 100 continues to be shot digitally; the primary cinematographer in Season Two was Michael C. Blundell, a veteran of Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate Universe. The Warner Archive Collection has distributed the sixteen episodes evenly over four 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray discs that feature an image much like that of Season One, with superior detail, vivid color, strong contrast and an absence of noise, banding or other artifacts. While my colleague Kenneth Brown noted some issues in Season One's night scenes, to my eye no such problems occurred in Season Two. This may be due to subtle adjustments in the series' photography, or it may simply reflect differing expectations on the part of two reviewers. The bottom line is that Season Two of The 100 arrives on Blu-ray with an excellent image. WAC has followed their usual practice of encoding with a high average bitrate, usually around 30 Mbps for each episode.

The 100: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Season Two's 5.1 audio mix, once again encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, continues to demonstrate that TV sound can be every bit as complex and dynamic as a feature film. The mixers take full advantage of the surround array, placing both environment and specific sounds (including voices) into the rear channels for full immersion into The 100's distinctive mixture of the futuristic and the feudal. The Grounders with their battles and rituals supply much of the latter, while the former, which in Season One drew from the Ark's space operations, is deployed in the exploration of Mount Weather's mysteries, which continue to reveal new physical and sonic spaces right up until the series finale. The sound mix even returns to the space station, courtesy of an episode-long flashback. Dynamic range is broad, bass extension is deep, and the dialogue is clearly rendered. Scoring duties continue to fall to Mark Dauer and Evan Frankfort.

The 100: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1): None of these scenes have final color timing, and many are missing effects shots.
• The 48 (disc 1) (1:28)
• Many Happy Returns (disc 1) (0:40)
• Human Trials (disc 2) (1:51)
• Fog of War (disc 2) (0:59)
• Long into an Abyss (disc 2) (2:22)
• Spacewalker (disc 2) (2:27)
• Survival of the Fittest (disc 3) (2:13)
• Rubicon (disc 3) (1:26)
• Blood Must Have Blood—Part 2 (disc 4) (0:58)



• 2014 Comic-Con Panel (1080i; 1.78:1; 29:01): Hosted by Damian Holbrook of TV Guide, this panel features a wide-ranging discussion of Season 1, with a few hints about the then-upcoming Season Two. The panel consists of Executive Producer Jason Rothenberg and actors Eliza Taylor ("Clarke"), Marie Avgeropoulos ("Olivia"), Devon Bostick ("Jasper"), Isaiah Washington ("Thelonius"), Lindsey Morgan ("Raven") and Ricky Whittle ("Lincoln").



• The 100: Unlocking the Mountain (disc 4) (1080p; 1.78:1; 10:03): Cast and crew discuss the centrality of Mount Weather to the plot of Season Two and the design of The 100's conception of the facility, which was inspired by an actual government installation.



• The 100: Pre-Viz Stunts (disc 4) (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:25): A comparison between stunt sequence rehearsals and the finished product.



• Gag Reel (disc 4) (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:56).

The 100: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

When WAC picked up The 100 on Blu-ray, the prevailing wisdom was that the ratings-challenged show would probably be canceled after its third season. However, like its bloody but unbowed heros and heroines, The 100 has demonstrated unexpected stamina, and The CW has ordered yet another season. When the show returns next fall, we can look forward to Season Three on Blu-ray. Meanwhile, WAC's four-disc set of Season Two is belatedly but highly recommended.