The 100 and the Problem of Evil By Edwardo Pérez One of the interesting narrative dilemmas for post-apocalyptic fiction is deciding what happens after the world is destroyed. How does society get rebuilt? What does that society value? What are its morals, beliefs, religions, and laws? Of course, not many such stories really show this.…
Eternal Return in The 100 Edwardo Pérez We have to let our children fail, make mistakes, fall down … don’t we? It doesn’t matter what we try to teach them, in the end, they have to learn on their own. We can guide them, offer advice, help them as best we can but we can’t…
Finding The Better Angels Of Our Nature in The 100 Edwardo Pérez There are two things we need to survive: pain and fear. When they work right, they motivate us to preserve ourselves. But, if we let pain and fear overtake us, then the opposite happens and instead of fighting to live we convince ourselves…
Unnatural Selection in The 100 Edwardo Pérez Death is a fate we all share. And yet, we do whatever we can to give ourselves and our children an advantage over death, anything to increase the odds of survival to cheat death and prolong life, because most of us aren’t willing to accept its inevitability.…
The Gift of Death in The 100 Edwardo Pérez How do we want to die? It’s not a question most of us want to contemplate. We don’t want to think about the end of our lives much less plan them. End-of-life planning is something we put off or don’t do (or we buy stock in…
Choosing Humanity in The 100 Edwardo Pérez How do we define humanity? Borrowing from feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (who suggested that women are made, not born), we might ask: are we born with our humanity or is it something that society creates for us? If it’s the former, why is it so difficult to…
The Aesthetics of Survival in The 100 Edwardo Pérez About five minutes into “We Will Rise,” the sixth episode of The 100’s fourth season that aired on March 15th, we see Clarke sitting on the edge of her bed gazing at a drawing she made of Lexa. When the camera pans out, we see several…
A Day Without The 100’s Women Edwardo Pérez Those of us who expected a new episode of The 100 on March 8th were more than disappointed when we realized that we were going to have to wait another week. It’s unknown if this “one week hiatus” was designed to coincide with the international “A Day…
The Rhetoric of War in The 100 Edwardo Pérez “War is here,” sputters a barely alive Octavia to Clarke toward the beginning of Season Four’s fifth episode “The Tinder Box.” Unfazed (just another day on the ground), Clarke begins ordering people around like the seasoned general she’s become – focused, slightly emotionally detached, and always…
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series 