What happened in The 100 by Kass Morgan - Recaptains

Read a full summary of The 100 by Kass Morgan below. If you can’t remember what happened in The 100 and you need a refresher, then you’re in the right place.

 

This recap was written by Terri @ Starlight Book Reviews because a) she thought it would be fun and b) The 100 is the best show on TV right now and you should watch it.

Humans have fled the Earth because of nuclear war and radiation and are now living in three interconnected space stations. On the space station, anyone convicted of even minor crimes is executed, but minors are put into Confinement (space jail) until their 18th birthday, when they get a trial. At the start of the story, 100 juvenile delinquents are sent back to Earth to see if the radiation has abated enough that humans can live again.

 

The story is told through four points of view: Clarke, Bellamy, Wells and Glass. The first three are on the ground, while Glass escaped from the dropship and stayed on the space station, and there are lots of flashbacks that inform the back story.

• Ch 1: Clarke’s medical internship advisor tells her she’s going to Earth and puts a bracelet on her to track her vitals. (That actually was a fact which I wish they’d included in the show because Clarke does so much more patching up in the show, but unless I missed something, she has no actual training. “My mom is a doctor” doesn’t mean she knows how to do surgery or the symptoms for internal bleeding.)
• Ch 2: Wells gets himself arrested for setting fire to the tree and recounts how he became friends with Clarke in the “pre-Cataclysm library” where they keep all the real books. A virus wiped out their digital archive so I guess no one reads much on the space station.
• Ch 3: Bellamy knocks out a guard and steals his uniform, but can’t get on the dropship. He ends up rushing Chancellor Jaha and demanding to be put on the dropship or else he shoots.
• Ch 4: In the resulting scuffle, the gun goes off accidentally and Jaha is wounded. Glass escapes from the dropship during the confusion goes to find her ex-boyfriend Luke. Luke is now dating Camille and didn’t even know Glass had been confined, just that she broke up with him and never contacted him again.
• Ch 6: Clarke’s bestie from space jail, Thalia, is on the dropship. They land on Earth, but the landing is rough and there are injuries. Thalia is badly hurt and bleeding. In a flashback, Clarke finds her parents lab full of sick and dying children, and befriends one named Lilly. She realizes they’re experimenting on them.
• Ch 7: Wells and a jerk named Graham butt heads. Graham is like the Murphy of the book. The kids think Jaha sent Wells there as a spy and don’t like him “bossing them around” with his practical suggestions of going to look for water. Clarke gives Wells the cold-shoulder.
• Ch 8: Bellamy flashes back to buying rations for his mother as a 6-year-old. He returns to find her “sick” – ie in labor. Present day Octavia has a sprained ankle from the crash and Clarke has patched her up. Bellarke share a moment and it’s adorable.
• Ch 8: Glass stays over at Luke’s and he takes her to an old workshop to cut off her prison bracelet. Glass goes home to her mother, who tells her that Jaha is on life support and Rhodes “can be convinced” to pardon her and leaves to talk to him. (Translation for the adult reader: she slept with him in order to ensure that they don’t kill her daughter. Glass is oblivious to this, which annoyed me because it was SO OBVIOUS GLASS.) Glass is supposed to be an example of how space jail can straighten out bad behavior and proof that the justice system works, which people are doubting because they’ve been killing all the teens when they come up for trial.
• Ch 9: Clarke checks on Thalia and she’s getting an infection. They haven’t found the medicine chest yet and think it must have gotten lost in the wreckage in the landing. Clarke and Wells argue. Clarke had told him about what was going on in her parents’ lab and sworn him to secrecy so they don’t get executed. Wells was trying to make the experiments stop and told Jaha about them to help Clarke. Instead, it got her parents executed and she’s ticked. In a flashback, Clarke confronts her parents. They reveal that Vice-Chancellor Rhodes is forcing them to study the effects of radiation on human test subjects, and he’s threatened to kill Clarke if they refuse. (Also, she and Wells officially dated on the space station, unlike the friendship and unrequited love thing they had on the show.)
• Ch 10: Graham has taken over the supplies and is abusing his power in camp, naturally. Bellamy finds a bow and arrow and decides to go all woodsy. He apparently studied on the space station and can identity tracks. Graham makes a disgusting comment about Bellamy and Octavia and Bellamy tries to beat him up, but Graham is stronger and Wells has to rescue him. (It’s okay, y’all, TV Bellamy would have destroyed him.) In a flashback, Bellamy reveals that they hid Octavia in the closet during inspections.)
• Ch 11: Glass goes shopping with her horrible friends and finds the locket that Luke gave her before she got thrown into space jail. Luke happens across her and sees what she’s looking at. She won’t tell him why she got confined.
• Ch 12: Bellamy fetches Octavia to go hunting with him and invites Clarke to go search wreckage with him the next afternoon. Thalia defends Wells and tells Clarke she needs to forgive him and be happy.
• Ch 13: Bellamy returns with a two-headed deer. Wells has a flashback thinking about his mom dying on the space station and sitting with Clarke. Octavia giggles at Wells. They see glowing butterflies and Wells determines to make Clarke fall in love with him again.
• Ch 14: Bellamy wants to take Octavia and leave camp, away from the rules and the other people and the possibility of getting killed when the adults come to ground. He goes swimming in the river shirtless and Clarke finds him. There’s adorable flirting. Bellamy reveals that he studied a lot about Earth and survival skills so that he’d know how to keep Octavia safe.
• Ch 15: Bellarke have adorable woodsy-bonding time. Bellamy gallantly points out that he and Wells are the only ones who came to Earth by choice and maybe whatever unforgivable thing he did could be forgiven after all. They find the medicine chest and joyfully make out in celebration.
• Ch 16: Luke has solved the mystery. In a flash back, Glass reveals that she’d gotten pregnant and didn’t tell Luke to spare him from space jail. The nurse told her the baby died. Luke breaks up with Camille and he and Glass kiss again because love.
• Ch 17: Octavia flirts yet more with Wells, and I guess if we’re not going to have Lincoln, I’d be okay with this. In flashback, Wells remembers Clarke telling him that the unregistered children whose parents violated the population law are being experimented on. She makes him promise not to tell but she’s upset and crying. Book Octavia is only 14 so probably we won’t get Lincoln. They see Bellarke kissing and Wells has a sad.
• Ch 18: Clarke gives Thalia some medicine and puts the chest away until she can find a safe place for it. Octavia asks about the medicine chest and when Clarke wakes up the next morning, O and the medicine are gone. Clarke asks Bellamy where she is and then accuses (with very little proof) Octavia of taking it. Bellamy calls her a snooty ***** and storms off. Clarke runs away and cries. In FB, Lilly asks Clarke to mercy-kill her.
• Ch 19: Cranky Bellamy finds Graham interrogating his tearful sister. Wells prevents him from rescuing her because he wants answers. The compromise is to keep Octavia in the infirmary tent with Clarke. In FB, Bellamy’s mom is going crazy. She says to herself “you can’t have both” and then tells him that he can’t have a mother AND a sister.
• Ch 20: Glass’ mom doesn’t want her to be with Luke because he’s from one of the poor stations (Walden) and also because he knocked her up. In FB, Luke’s roommate Carter grabs Glass and accuses her of just slumming it with Luke to be dangerous, because Carter is a douche. Luke comes home just in time but Glass doesn’t say anything. In order to protect Luke, Glass breaks up with him and says she was just having fun, it was never real, blah blah lies blah blah. He doesn’t believe her but she leaves.
• Ch 21: Thalia is getting worse and Clarke goes to look for medicinal plants despite not really knowing anything about them. Wells tries to follow. Clarke enters a building filled with skeletons and the floor gives out. She thinks of Wells as she falls.
• Ch 22: Wells grabs her just in time. She latches onto him.
• Ch 23: In FB, Bellamy finds his mother trying to strangle Octavia and rescues her. In the real, he finds her hair ribbon tied around a tree branch and finds all the meds stashed. He confronts her and she reveals she didn’t get confined for stealing food for bullied foster kids like he thought. She developed a pill addiction in the system and can’t sleep without them. She tells him she just needs to detox and Bellamy makes her promise to tell Clarke. It starts to thunder and rain and the kids freak out which LOLOLOLOL space babies.
• Ch 24: Luke is on a maintenance spacewalk. He tells Glass there was an oxygen leak. In FB, Glass gets a note from her bestie Wells asking where she’s been lately and guards burst in to arrest her for being illegally pregnant.
• Ch 25: Clarke and Wells are sitting together and Bellamy is jealous. Octavia confesses her theft to the group and the teens want to kill her because harsh justice is all they have ever known. Wells recommends banishment for them both. METHINKS ULTERIOR MOTIVES ARE A FACTOR. Bellamy apologizes to wells for shooting Jaha. They shake.
• Ch 26: Thalia gets better and tells Clarke to go after Wells and forgive.
• Ch 27: Wells gives Clarke a flower. He kisses her and she kisses him back (BOO HISS). In FB, Wells sees her parents’ trial. Rhodes lies about the human experimentation and the Council votes to kill her parents. Clarke freaks out in the trial and Rhodes mentions that since she scanned into the lab multiple times, she’s complicit. That’s why Clarke got thrown into space jail.
• Ch 28: Glass slips down to the comet viewing party on Walden station to meet Luke. He gives her the locket, effectively proposing and she accepts.
• Ch 29: Bellamy remembers there’s a comet passing and goes off into the woods to find a place to watch it. When it’s gone, he goes back to camp and finds it on fire. Octavia is gone. In FB, Bellamy comes home and his mother has tried to kill herself with a knife. Octavia is hiding in the closet unharmed and they listen to their mom’s dying breaths.

how did it end

• Ch 30: Wells won’t let Clarke run into the burning infirmary tent to save Thalia. Clarke, grief-stricken, storms away from him with angry words. In FB, before the trial, Clarke mercy-kills Lilly with a vial of drugs that stops her heart.
• Ch 31: The partition between Walden and Phoenix locks dramatically between Luke and Glass. Glass’ mom says the space station is in trouble – it wasn’t meant to last this long and they have to preserve oxygen for the wealthy people on Phoenix station. The Council will let Walden and Arcadia stations suffocate.
• Ch 32: In FB, Wells argues with Jaha about Clarke and Rhodes. He eavesdrops on a convo between Jaha and Rhodes saying the dropships are ready. Rhodes wants to send them to Earth to see if it’s safe because the teens are expendable. Jaha wants to wait and see if they’re pardoned at their 18th birthday trials. Rhodes scoffs that no one is pardoned anymore because they don’t have the resources – confirming the corruption. Wells decides to get himself arrested so he can go to Earth with Clarke to protect her.
• Ch 33: Bellamy still can’t find Octavia and Clarke is sad because of Thalia. They hug. Clarke found O’s ribbon and thinks she may have left camp before the fire started. Bellamy flirts just a little bit. Clarke flat out says that she and Wells are done (YAY BELLARKE).
• Ch 34: Glass sneaks through an air duct to Walden, which seems like it might be a problem with the whole “seal off the other stations so the oxygen doesn’t get out” deal if the AIR DUCTS aren’t locked up. She tells Luke she’d rather die on Walden with him than live without him. He is oddly fine with this plan and argues with her for exactly one sentence. In FB, Jaha interrogates Glass about the baby’s father because he’s complicit in the illegal pregnancy. She names Carter to protect Luke. Camille shows up to ruin everything and tell that secret because Camille sucks.
• Ch 35: Bellarke see signs of a struggle in the forest and determine that Octavia may have been abducted. They find an orchard of evenly spaced, fruit-bearing apple trees and start to wonder if maybe everyone on Earth isn’t dead after all.
• Ch 36: Wells is orchestrating the construction of a wooden shelter instead of tents. (They’ll both still BURN, but okay.) In FB, Wells reveals that he compromised the airlock on the ship hoping to speed up the mass evacuation to Earth. In present day, a shadowy line of people shoots a boy in the camp and the kids realize that Earth isn’t dead after all. DUN DUN DUUUUN.

differences to the show

– No Finn, no Raven. Meh on Finn, but Raven was a totally awesome and worthy addition to the show.

– Most of the side characters are gone, like Monty and Jasper, or at least they weren’t mentioned by name in book 1, so at this point all we know is that they’re not part of the book plot.

– Book Bellamy is softer. He regrets shooting Jaha (accidentally), he’s flirty with Clarke and gentle as opposing to domineering with Octavia, though that seems more legit because she’s only 14 in the book. He doesn’t have girls in and out of his tent and doesn’t try to take charge in camp like AT ALL. There is no bracelet burning.

– Book Clarke has more medical training but ironically does less actual patching up, because they haven’t discovered any enemies yet so no one is getting stabbed.