'The 100' Season 7 Episode 2 Review: Hope's connection to Octavia becomes clear as the mystery deepens
Spoilers for 'The 100' Season 7 Episode 2 'The Garden'
Some of the best stories in 'The 100' are those around how relationships are formed or broken. This week's episode is quite special and fans of the show will be absolutely thrilled to spot some of the Easter eggs that refer to episodes all the way from the first season. And as we've said before, even in Bob Morley's absence, Bellamy Blake is always present.
In last week's season premiere, we saw Gabriel Santiago (Chuku Modu), Echo (Tasya Teles) and Hope Diyoza (Shelby Flannery) walk hand-in-hand towards the anomaly. As far as groupings go, this is as odd as it can get. We have a character from the show's Earth days, one who was just introduced in the last season, and one who is completely new — and still, for all their faults, we are excited to see where their story goes.
This week's episode is a continuation of the trio's journey into the anomaly — but we also get to see what happened when Charmaine Diyoza (Ivana Miličević) and Octavia Blake (Marie Avgeropoulos) went into the anomaly the last season. While the second episode of the final season answers a lot of questions, it raises new ones as well.
Octavia and Diyoza start a family
First, let's delve into the past. Though it took Octavia only a few seconds to follow Diyoza into the anomaly when she reaches the new planet, she finds that three months have passed — still, she reached just in the nick of time. Diyoza is about to give birth — and this is the first Bellamy reference we get. When Hope starts crying, Octavia does what Bellamy did for her when she was born — she lets Hope suckle on her pinky, and as the newborn baby stops crying, Octavia says, "Thanks, Bellamy."
For a while, 'The 100' becomes a very normal show about two people co-parenting a child while living in the wilderness. Diyoza is happy — this is the first time in her life she is truly at peace and we can't blame her. Before the first nuclear apocalypse, Diyoza was an eco-terrorist. Even on Sanctum, Diyoza had to keep fighting, but here, she can just raise her child and be happy.
Octavia, however, wants to get back to Bellamy — her desperation is something that Diyoza can't understand, and while we sympathize with Diyoza wanting to live out her life happily, we wish she had understood that Octavia still had family back on Sanctum.
Eventually, Octavia writes a letter to Bellamy, detailing all that she is grateful for to him — finally understand why he had done everything he did in the name of protecting her. If you remember, the two had been at odds whenever Bellamy took extreme actions to keep Octavia safe. But now that she is "Aunty O" to Hope, she gets to see the other side of things.
Unfortunately, as sweet as that later is, Bellamy does not get it because it ends up in Bardo, where the octagonal helmet-wearing soldiers we saw in the last episode came from. They show up to take whoever is on this planet.
This is when we get the second parallel — just as Octavia was "the girl on the floor," Hope becomes "the girl in the wall," as Octavia hides the young girl so that she won't be captured as well. This is all we get for now.
This also brings us to another reminder of Bellamy. In the first season, the Ark's authorities found out about Octavia because Bellamy wanted to help her see what life on the Ark was like. This led to Octavia being arrested and their mother being floated. Now, it's Octavia's desire to communicate with her brother and give him peace that led to her and Diyoza being captured.
Hope, Gabriel and Echo try to reach Bardo
Meanwhile, in the present, or at least, the present in the show's timeline, Echo, Gabriel, and Hope show up in the exact spot Octavia had shown up in. However, since Hope spent a day on Sanctum, many years have passed since she left Skyring, the planet she named when she was three years old.
While Hope seems a little antagonistic towards Echo, she seems to get along with Gabriel well. All Echo wants to do is go after Bellamy. We wonder whether we will get to see an Echo that is outside of her commitments to the men in her life. It's clear that Hope's impression of Echo is based on what Octavia said and she confirms that Octavia did not like Echo much (the sound you heard were the Bellarke fans cheering).
While they are on the planet, they come across a crazed man. Turns out Skyring (or its more accepted name, Planet Beta) is a prison planet and the man has about five years to go before the Bardo soldiers come to take him back. The man refers to a skull doll as Hope and plays chess with dead bodies. One of those bodies has a mind drive, which Gabriel extracts to study.
Hope had earlier shown an anomaly stone in the basement of the house she grew up in. With the mind drive, Gabriel figures he can understand how to operate it.
This is when we get the second appearance of an old character (in the season premiere, we saw Roan). It's Becca Franco (Erica Cerra) who Gabriel says he had a crush on (so did we, to be honest). As Gabriel geeks out over everything he's learning, they still have the crazed man to deal with.
But just as Gabriel thinks he's cracked the code to figuring their way out of Skyring, the crazed man gets his hands on Gabriel's tablet and smashes it, muttering about serving a master. Earlier in the episode, Hope had called the soldiers, "disciples." With one religious fanatical society fallen in Sanctum (one more if you consider the destroyed Flame), are we about to get another?
Towards the end of the episode, we also see Echo and Hope warming up to each other a bit, though there's a long way to go. In some shots in the trailer, we saw an Echo and Hope that looked very different with sleek, short hairstyles. We can't help but wonder whether this group might end up being stuck on Skyring for many years. Will the people back in Sanctum finally realize their compatriots are missing?
Final thoughts
This week's episode was one of our favorites in the series. Not only did it expand the world of 'The 100', but it also beautifully paid homages to multiple arcs from the past, something we are sure that longtime fans would appreciate.
We also loved the intense focus on Octavia who had finally accepted the darkness that was inside her and has seemingly worked on that during her time with Diyoza. Seeing Octavia at peace felt good after seeing everything she has been through. We also loved seeing Gabriel geeking out — it felt like seeing a reflection of us within the show.
The mystery about Bardo deepens — we had seen the name when the title credits were released. As we knew before, the anomaly opens up so much potential for 'The 100' and we are wasting no time in exploring them. With 14 episodes left, we hope all our questions are answered and that fans are given a satisfying end.
'The 100' airs on Wednesday nights at 8/7c on The CW.