#one of my favorite bits about this story is how Sinclair's and Lamb's stories never directly touch but influence each other

[vvatchword]

Ch. 26: From on High

Dr. Lamb’s first speech came that afternoon without preparation at all. She had just stepped outside the office to stretch her legs when a shout went up down the street. Down the block came a vanguard of children shouting insults and throwing rocks; just behind the children, a group of overall-clad workmen surrounded by Sinclairs wielding shotguns; far behind marched a shifting, shivering horde of disgruntled humanity. Men, women, children, all ages, in washed-out clothing that flapped loosely on their limbs, sometimes holding brooms or pokers or chair legs.

The rumble was like that of thunder.

Soon the group had swallowed up her street, as well as the line that crushed itself against her building.

“I’m very sorry; what’s going on?” Dr. Lamb called out into the crowd.

“They’re knocking down our apartment!” a man in black called back. “They’re knocking it down and they’re not paying us back for the leases or nothing!”

“Perhaps I can help,” she said, holding her door open for an entering janitor. “When are they going down?”

“This minute! Now!”

She stepped off her stoop. “I will be back directly. All of you will be seen to.”

The line outside her door stared mutely; no doubt they hadn’t heard her.

Some watched, wondering.

She stepped out into the crowd and it swept her down the block. A group of young men blocked up the space around her without saying a word; she was aware of their eyes, although she never caught them looking at her.

She was never jostled. She was never touched.

In this way, she pushed toward the front of the line, where a square opened organically into a bare patch of raw stone and dumped cement. Men with saws and sledgehammers were arguing with a throng of inhabitants clustered outside one of the Drop’s most cherished rarities—a professionally-built building once used as a flophouse for the construction crews of years past, long since converted to a tenement. Its front door had already been removed from its hinges.

Dr. Lamb broke through the head of the throng, lifting her arms and her voice.

“Quiet, please!” she called out.

Perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she reminded one strongly of Sunday school teachers, perhaps because she stood out—prim and proper in a pencil skirt down to her calves, a high collar, pale and lavender and gray against the yellow, the black, the earth—the different sides settled.

The Sinclairs alone moved; although they kept the muzzles down, they slowly lifted their shotguns against their shoulders.

“I come unarmed,” said Dr. Lamb to the Sinclairs, “and am but a single woman. Do you mean to solve your problems with violence instead of reason?”

The crowd muttered, but the Sinclairs burst into laughter.

“This ain’t your place, sister,” said the Sinclair captain, who wore a peaked cap with a brass star. “Why don’t you head back and yak at those hobos instead of bothering honest workers?”

“Violence here would no doubt stretch to the place where I ‘yak,’” said Dr. Lamb. “This is purely self-interest. Please, allow me to help.”

The crowd shifted around behind her. Were the edges of it beginning to press inward?

“We don’t need no help,” said the captain. “Get outta here.”

“I am told you are tearing down this building,” said Dr. Lamb. “This would impact well over a hundred citizens. Who has made this decision?”

“Sinclair Solutions,” said a worker whose nametag read, “Mitchell.” “Take it up with them.”

“Sinclair Solutions owns this site?”

“Well, yeah,” Mitchell said. “What don’t they own down here?”

From the side streets swaggered more brown-jackets, rifles in their arms. Dr. Lamb saw them. 

Dr. Lamb did not express anything other than unsurprised indifference.

“It seems strange that the company would not give these people notice,” she said.

Mitchell shrugged. “Not uncommon down here, ma’am.”

She blinked and stood back. “I beg your pardon?”

“Not uncommon to build or take down a building without letting anyone know,” he said. “Happens all the time.”

“You would throw whole families on the street. Working families, no less.”

“Just doing my job, ma’am.”

Brown-jackets were slipping through the crowd toward her.

Dr. Lamb lifted her voice. “Part of our ‘job’ is understanding and defending the philosophy. And by the philosophy, this is the behavior of a tyrant.”

Silence fell on the square. A brown-jacket had just begun to reach for her out of the crowd. He recoiled.

“This is the behavior of a tyrant!” she said, a woman—a schoolmarm—shining white. “You have every right to defend yourselves.”

The acoustics of the square had been accidental; now they flung up Dr. Lamb’s voice like an end-time trumpet. The crowd had been building up as she spoke. It trembled, edged forward. Too late did the brownjacks and the sledgehammers realize that it was perhaps 300 strong and still growing.

The captain’s jaw tightened. “All right. You had your chat. We’ve got work to do. You get your scum out of the way so we can get it done.”

But Dr. Lamb no longer addressed him. She turned her back on him and faced the crowd shivering but feet away. It seemed suddenly that she towered above them; they shrank, small and earthy and crawling, staring up with eyes like hunted animals.

“You have worked fairly for your bread, have you not?” Dr. Lamb called out. “You have paid for your housing? Your children’s educations? You have signed the papers they asked for? And once they are done with you, they throw you aside; they will find others who will pay because they must. And you have paid and you have paid and you have paid! Where are your returns? Do you not deserve them as much as Sinclair? Are you not as much a man as he?”

The rumble went up. The Sinclair captain’s shotgun shivered; in a moment he might snap it to eye level; in a moment she might lose her head before an army.

Her army. An army he could see trembling at the brink.

“The philosophy should speak for every man,” Dr. Lamb said. “Not merely the strongest. There is strength in variety and death in monoculture.” She whirled on the Sinclairs. “You—shotguns! Take this back to Augustus Sinclair: without these people, the Drop will never heal, and by extension, the whole of Rapture lies dying of a seeping wound.”

A ragged cheer rose up, then swelled high, and hands waved hats. The edges of the crowd bunched up around her, swallowed her up, then crept step by shuddering step, hundreds upon hundreds of feet, shod and unshod, the herd lowering its horns before the lions.

The Sinclair captain met Dr. Lamb’s eyes. He lowered his shotgun. He flicked his hand back over his shoulder. Slowly, the group of workmen and their brownjacks backed away across the square, eyes on the crowd, as it lifted up a deep rumble of discontent.

Dr. Lamb followed their retreat—slowly, enveloped by the crowd, tall, straight-backed, untouchable, shining. She and the Sinclair captain kept their eyes locked on the entire slog down the street toward the train station.

It was he who, red-faced, would stand before his boss and say, without reserve: “Sir, there is something unnatural about that woman.”

It was she who would watch them depart by train, then walk back to her white building, the crowd leaping around her. The young tossed their hats and shook her hand; the older inclined their heads and doffed their caps. She nodded to those whose hands she shook, but no expression passed her face; later, those who had met her would describe her visage as everything from noble to proud to world-weary.

She stepped into her office for the one o’clock appointment.

**

The letter arrived at Dr. Lamb's Family Consultation Center by special courier early that evening. Dr. Lamb had just set her files aside for the secretary. A line still wound out the door, quiet lined faces staring through the glass; most of them would remain overnight, waiting for openings in her schedule. She had not put up bars, even when the plumber had suggested it.

"No," she had said. "It would say we did not have faith in our own cause."

"It would stop a Sinclair from torching the place," he had said, but never brought it up again.

The letter was two pages long. The first piece of paper was printed with the city council's letterhead, crowned by a chain motif clenched between two straining fists.

She scanned it, hand clenching in her lap, digging one nail into her palm at a time. She set the page down.

The second page was from Andrew Ryan.

Her brow knotted. For a moment only her eyes moved. She must have finished at some point, for she sat staring, unmoving, for a few minutes.

Then her brow smoothed. Her lips loosed. She leaned back. She took both pages, folded them neatly, tucked them back in their envelope.

The secretary poked her head around the corner. She was a homely girl, stout, missing her right leg below the knee. Her face was white. Her eyes lit on the envelope, its neatly torn slit.

“What did they say?” she asked.

Dr. Lamb met her eyes. Pinching it between thumb and index finger, she dropped it in the wastebasket.

“It is nothing worth worrying about,” she said. “I will see you tomorrow.”

**

Dr. Lamb stepped through the front door, a bag of groceries in one arm. Almost as soon as she did, Eleanor bowled into her.

“Eleanor,” she said, “what did I tell you about…”

“Mum!” said Eleanor, flapping up a newspaper. “Do you know Johnny Topside?”

“I… Eleanor, do not change the topic,” she said. “Remember, exce…”

“Excessive-emotion-clouds-logic-yes-I-know-but-do-you-know-Johnny-Topside?” Eleanor jumped up, held the newspaper straight out.

Dr. Lamb frowned, took it out of her hand. It was a full-page ad. A man, frowning, staring down as if in thought; his stance wide open, like someone poised for a fight; cigarette clamped between index and middle fingers, a stream of smoke floating up; jacket flared open, thumb smearing something dark from his lip. Behind him, the slouching humps of Neptune’s Bounty.

“It’s Always Time for Nico-Time!” said the copy.

“That’s Johnny Topside,” said Eleanor, and stared at her expectantly.

Dr. Lamb lowered the paper, squinting down at her daughter like she had just been given a toad.

“Why are you showing me this picture?” she asked slowly.

“Do you know him?” asked Eleanor. “Did you meet him in Japan?”

“Of course not,” said Dr. Lamb. “Why, he was probably…” She looked at the ad again. “He might have only been in his teens at that time. Oh, Eleanor. We were at war, and Japan was not a friendly place to outsiders. Why on Earth would you ask such a thing?”

Eleanor’s smile fell. “I just… I just thought…”

“Did he give an interview?” Dr. Lamb paled. “Is Ryan trying to connect us?” She flipped the paper closed, glanced over the front page.

“N-no,” Eleanor said, twisting her hands. “I just thought maybe you…”

She leaned against the wall, took her glasses off, rubbed her forehead. “Oh, Eleanor. I…”

For a moment, both of them stood very quietly. Far away, a minute hand ticked. Dr. Lamb pushed the heel of her hand into one eye, then the other.

No, no, she could not. She would not.

She took a deep and shuddering breath.

“Today was very difficult for me, Eleanor,” she said at last. “I know better than to give in to emotional excess.”

“It’s okay,” Eleanor said solemnly, wrapping her arms around Dr. Lamb’s legs. “You’re only human.”

Dr. Lamb laughed. It was a colorless fluttering sound. Eleanor gazed up and laughed with her as loudly as she could.

UPRISING: BLACK SCRAPBOOK HUB

[travllingbunny]

The 100:  6x09 What You Take With You

How amazing was this episode? It is, so far, one of the two best episodes of the season (alongside 6x07) and probably in my top 10 favorite The 100 episodes of all time.

It benefited from its focus on just three storylines and a limited number of characters, which allowed it to properly focus on the characters and their psychological and emotional journeys.

The title seems to be a reference to the Dagobah cave scene in The Empire Strikes Back, or rather, the dialogue right before it:

Luke: There is something not right here. I feel cold, death.

Yoda: That place… is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.

Luke: What’s in there?

Yoda: Only what you take with you.

Luke ends up having a hallucination of fighting Darth Vader in the cave and killing him, only to take off his helmet and see his own face, in possibly the most famous movie scene of a character confronting their “Shadow” self.

So, when the episode titles for season 6 of The 100 were released, it wasn’t hard to guess that this episode would contain scenes of a character “facing their demons” in a fantasy sequence (and which character it would be, especially as we had seen glimpses of Octavia fighting the Blodreina version of herself in the trailer). As a fan of psychological character exploration through trippy fantasy sequences, I had high expectations from this episode regarding Octavia’s story – and they were completely fulfilled and maybe exceeded. I wasn’t expecting to see Charles Pike in Octavia’s hallucination soul-searching, and his appearance and how he was used was brilliant.

The other two, equally important storylines, were:

the continuation of the saga about the Bellamy/Clarke relationship through the story about the fight between Josephine and Clarke for control of Clarke’s body, and Bellamy’s attempts to save Clarke from real and certain death;

and the conclusion of the opposite storyline - about Abby crossing a lot of ethical lines to work with the Primes and use bodysnatching to resurrect Kane in another body. This was the final death of Marcus Kane, a tragic end of Kabby romance, but it also a fitting ending for Kane, with him asserting his own integrity and morality by choosing to die and refuse to be complicit in the practices of the Primes, but to instead start a fight against them. It will also probably be the turning point in Abby’s character arc. The resolution of this storyline has caused a lot of controversy and anger, which I don’t understand, since Kane’s decision was obvious and in-character, so much that I predicted it last week, because it was the only thing that made sense narratively and for Kane’s characterization.

More thoughts under the cut.

Octavia vs Blodreina

The fact we still don’t know what happened to Diyoza or to Octavia in the Anomaly makes me think that this is a plot that will carry over to season 7, after the bodysnatching business is wrapped up. And the more they postpone the resolution, the more hopeful I am for Diyoza to survive season 6.

Choosing the angry, violent red box instead of the calm green box is such an Octavia thing to do. But maybe it was the right thing in this case, as it let her face her demons head on and figure things out for herself.

The red butterflies scene was one of the many callbacks to season 1.

Pike’s role made sense because Octavia’s descent into darkness was not just prompted by the trauma of Lincoln’s death at Pike’s hands, but also because it started when she decided to murder Pike for revenge, making herself judge, jury and executioner. That was the first time she committed actual murder, as opposed to killing people in fight. She probably thought at the time, as a big portion of the fandom did, that Pike was a bad guy and had it coming. But one could now say the same thing about Octavia herself, and she is obviously aware of it. If Pike deserved to die, doesn’t she, too? Using the same standards, shouldn’t she be murdered for revenge by someone like James (the Wonkru guy from 6x02, who lost his mother in the gorge and blames Octavia fori t)? In fact, Octavia tried to get him to kill her, because, on some level, she thought she deserved death, too, even while she was pretending that she didn’t feel any guilt and trying to justify all her actions. Why should Bellamy ever forgive her for throwing him into the fighting pit to die? I can see many similarities between Octavia and Pike: both of them are fighters by nature, both were driven by the desire to save and protect people, both were angry and traumatized by what had been done to their people, and both were also prone to black-and-white thinking and harsh judgment of their enemies. As Octavia’s mind version of Pike pointed out, we are products of what we have done, and what has been done to us. Pike is an embodiment of both for Octavia. And Pike himself was a product of what the Ice Nation under Queen Nia had done to him – killing almost all of the people he grew up with, many right in front of him (including 15 children), which made him go into the woods to fight for months. Pike started pre-emptively seeing Grounders as enemies even when they were not, and eventually, as a Chancellor, started acting as a dictator and hunting for traitors in his camp. Octavia started by proclaiming everyone (or almost everyone – Echo didn’t count) her people, One people, but that eventually turned into tyranny and seeing enemies in everyone who disagreed or refused to do everything she asked of them. Pike condemned Lincoln to death and execute him for the same reasons Octavia as Blodreina condemned Bellamy, Indra and Gaia to the fighting pit: to maintain authority and show that rebellion is not allowed and will be punished by death. We may not have seen this put into words, but Octavia’s vision of Blodreina in Pike’s role, condemning/executing Pike the way he had Lincoln, showed her realization about herself. „Pike“ even reminded Octavia that he was trying to earn his redemption by doing good when she killed him. Of course, since Pike was really an enbodiment of a part of Octavia’s own mind, it is really something she has been thinking about and that she’s telling herself. It’s a level of self-reflection that I never expected to see from Octavia of the earlier seasons, and shows how much she’s grown.

So does she deserve redemption? As „Pike“ pointed out, it is not about deserving. You just need to make the decision to go and do good, and not be Blodreina anymore, shown by her symbolic killing of „Blodreina“. She is still to actually start her redemption arc, but getting into the right frame of mind and realizing she wants to change and do better was the necessary first step.

Kane’s goodbye

I’ve already written quite a bit about Abby’s emotional and ethical downfall and the tragic development of the Kabby relationship in seasons 5-6 here and I predicted that the storyline would end with Kane’s death by his own choice (and that Henry Ian Cusick would return to play Kane in a vision for his last scene), even though I didn’t guess when or how it would happen.

Unlike some other fans, I find this to be a very fitting ending for Marcus Kane. I don’t think of what he did as suicide, but as a sacrifice, or, more than anything, a refusal to legitimize and benefit from an evil practice that involves brainwashing people so they could be lambs easily led to slaughter, and then murdering them as lesser and disposable, so you could prolong your own life. He couldn’t fight against it, speak against it, while being in a stolen body himself. (There is a reason why Gabriel is ashamed to admit to his followers that he lives in a host body.) Everything about it was wrong to him, and went against everything he believes in. (Meeting Gavin’s widow and realizing that the Primes are lying to their people also played a role. As Gabriel confirmed in this episode, and as Kane 2.0 and the other Primes, no doubt, are aware, there is no trace of the host mind after the transfer – unless the transfer fails.)

Indra has finally been woken up! But is she staying on the ship now, and if so, when do we see her again? I’m glad she got to say goodbye to her friend before his death. I like the fact that Indra pointed out that both the Arkers and the Grouders had some disturbing practices of their own, but Kane gave the logical answer (something I was hoping someone would point out at any point) – the fact we did bad things in the past, doesn’t mean we should let evil things happen. That’s not how morality (or common sense) works.

The show loves angst, so of course, Kane’s death had to be exactly like Jake Griffin’s death (which we saw in the flashbacks in 1x03), and Abby had to witness it. But, as Raven pointed out, it is better for her if she gets to say goodbye. (Raven would know, since she never got to say goodbye to Finn or Shaw. Or Sinclair.) Kabby has been one of my favorite ships on the show – because it is one of the very few romantic relationships that was well developed, way before Kane and Abby got together. Their chemistry was obvious since season 1. And while Greyston Holt did a great job playing Kane 2.0, it only made sense that Henry Ian Cusick return to play Kane in that last scene, when Kane appeared to Abby the way she saw him in her mind-eye - which also made him feel like real Kane to the audience.  The scene was truly beautiful and sad, with Abby’s heartbreak, and Indra and Raven reciting the Ark prayer (with Indra adding the Grounder “Your fight is over”). I don’t think that Kane would really do the same to bring Abby back – or that Abby would have done it if she had been in a healthier state of mind, but I can see why he told Abby that. While he disagreed with her decision and couldn’t accept it, he showed understanding, empathy and love to her, while urging her to let him go and continue her life.

All in all, considering the tricky actor availability situation due to Cusick’s role on another show, I think that the writing staff have found a good way to give Kane a proper sendoff, and make it meaningful and highly relevant to this season’s themes and main plot.

In a way, it’s more Abby’s tragedy than Kane’s – he made the decision that was the only right one, one of the most in-character things he’s ever done, but Abby is still lost and needs to let go off Kane, really recover from addiction, and find her own sense of morality again.

The Kane/Abby storyline and relationship this season is juxtaposed to the Josephine/Gabriel story – and the Clarke/Bellamy story. We have seen bodysnatching as something people (Gabriel, Russell and Simone with Josephine, Abby with Kane) resort to in order to resurrect someone they love. But while Josephine couldn’t be happier about it – because she’s selfish and, let’s say, morally challenged, Kane, with his deep sense of morality, could never accept that. We’ve also seen a storyline about Bellamy doing everything to save Clarke – but while all of those are motivated by love, the big difference between what Bellamy is doing and what Abby has done (and what Gabriel initially did when he resurrected Josephine, at the expense of 40+ of the people he had raised from embryos) is that Bellamy is fighting against an evil act, to right a wrong, as opposed to doing evil or enabling evil.

Bellarkephine

Bellarke has always been the central relationship on the show, but it’s never been as front and center as it is this season. In 6x07, Clarke gave up on living at the moment when Josephine managed to convince her that Bellamy had given up on her and moved on and that he and everyone are better off without her, and the last few been about Bellamy being willing to do everything to get Clarke back. The show is being really obvious about Bellamy’s and Clarke’s feelings for other other, even more so than it was in the previous seasons (and I happen to think it was already quite obvious). It’s not the first time that other characters have called out those two on their feelings for each other (from Lexa noticing in season 2 that Clarke cares for Bellamy and worries about him more than about her other people, to ALIE!Raven in season 3, taunting Bellamy over being more devoted to Clarke than his girlfriend Gina, to Octavia calling out Bellamy in season 5 and calling Clarke another traitor who he loves), but now it is an integral part of the main story, the way it was not before.

I’ll say one thing, though – while it is undeniable, seeing his behavior over the previous few episodes. that Bellamy cares for Clarke more than anyone else at this point, as Josephine points out (and that statement implies that he cares for her more than his girlfriend, Echo), I think one should be fair and acknowledge that Clarke is in danger of certain and definite death, after a definite and short period of time, while the others back in Sanctum are only in danger of potential death, so I don’t think it would be fair if they begrudged Bellamy going off to save Clarke.

This dynamic was weird, because Bellamy was simultaneously not fond of (to put it mildly) of Josephine, but was incredibly tender and caring with her body, because it was Clarke’s body, and Clarke is still in there somewhere. The way he gently wiped JoClarke’s black blood and put his own, so the Children of Gabriel wouldn’t know she was a Nightblood, reminds me of Bellamy cutting himself to fool the Ark guards, so they wouldn’t know the blood belonged to Octavia, when she would accidentally cut herself.

Josephine said that love was the reason why Sanctum would be destroyed – implying not just that her father put everything in danger for his love for her (by putting her in Clarke’s body), but also that Bellamy’s love for Clarke and his determination to save would be the cause of Sanctum’s destruction. It’s the 3rd time that the word “love” has been used on the show to describe Bellamy’s and Clarke’s feelings for each other: the first time was in season 2 when Clarke said she was being weak when she tried to keep Bellamy from going to Mount Weather, because love is weakness; the second time was in season 5, when Octavia called out Bellamy on pleading for the life of a traitor who you love; and this is the third time.

The moment when Bellamy looked at Clarkephine when he knew Clarke could hear him, and paused before saying “I won’t let you die”, was one of those moments where Bellamy or Clarke seem to want to say more, or are saying a lot more, through or instead of a statement like “Hurry” or “Don’t feel bad about leaving me here”. Those two have always had their own way of saying ILY.

Bellamy replying “Tell me about it” when Josephine called the “weird” relationship between him and Clarke “exhausting” has to be one of the best meta moments on the show.

(BTW, I don’t think Bellamy actually wanted to kill Clarke in 1x02 – the first moment he could have let her die, he saved her. But maybe she thought so, or maybe Josephine saw her memories and drew that conclusion. Also, the show Josie is misusing the word “genocide” and should look up the definition.)

But after a while, what was Josephine trying to taunt Bellamy, turned into Josephine being moved by Bellamy’s love for Clarke – not because she’s a compassionate person (she’s not), but because it reminds her of Gabriel’s love she had and lost. We got her explicit confirmation that she has really been in love with him, since they got to the planet (which may have been the first time they met). And while we know, from his reactions in 6x08, that he is still in love with her (but she may not know that), he has still been trying to kill her for the last 70 years – because she is a villain and is largely responsible for maintaining a terrible system of oppression and murder. This is the main difference between Gabriel/Josephine and Bellarke: Clarke is actually not a villain, she is a hero. Josephine is the villain that some of the characters and a part of the fandom imagines Clarke to be, because they are not paying attention to the actual story.

I love the fact that Clarke used the Morse code, for the second time, but now to both mock Josephine with “Boohoo” and try to make Bellamy laugh, while confirming that she was able to hear them both.

It’s really amazing just how Bellarke-heavy this episode was, even though Clarke and Bellamy weren’t able to directly interact most of the time – and haven’t been since 6x04. The one moment when they did get a chance to interact, for some 10 seconds, was when Clarke temporarily took control over her body because Josephine realized she sucked at defending herself and had to let Clarke do it. And it was amazing – the way Eliza changed her expression, voice and demeanor and the way she looked at Bellamy, the way Bellamy immediately knew she was Clarke, the chemistry that was suddenly there again in full force when it was Bellamy and Clarke interacting, rather than Bellamy and Josephine. Clarke is determined to never leave Bellamy again (as we saw in 5x13, when she was not willing to leave him behind even while they were seconds away from missiles hitting), but this time, he was right that literally staying there would have killed her, so she did the smart thing and sneaked him the keys – allowing him to save himself, while he let her go to save herself.

My judgement of the Children of Gabriel after 6x03 still stands: morally ambiguous group, the right goal, but too murder-happy.

Josephine may be a 200+ old narcissistic, evil Prime that I want to die, but her interactions with Clarke are really fun. It was great to see Clarke get the upper hand, at least for a while, and be in control again. And I loved the fact that Clarke rubbed it into Josephine’s face that she had stolen some skills from her – and calling her out on the irony of Josephine complaining about it, while living in Clarke’s stolen body.

I can’t wait to see Josephine and Gabriel reunited, and Octavia and Clarke and Bellamy reunited – but I’m also looking forward to more of the Clarke/Josephine fight for control in the mindspace.

Rating: 10/10