Pike on The 100: The Problem With a Redemption That Comes Too Late

Pike from The 100 explained: the problem with the redemption story

For most of season 3, The 100 splits its antagonist role between two men. Bellamy Blake, who follows Pike’s orders in the middle of the season, and Pike himself are both the problem. Viewers who disliked Ontari and Titus found them easy to hate for a few episodes, and the audience cheered when Octavia beat her brother up and when the Grounders dragged Pike away from Arkadia. By the time “Join or Die” arrives, Bellamy is already on the road to forgiveness. Pike is not, and that gap is the subject of this piece.

One of the best things about the series is its gray morality. Characters who start as enemies become heroes, and characters who start as heroes slide toward villainy. Kane, Bellamy, Lexa, Murphy and Indra all began in some version of the antagonist role and grew into figures the audience loves. Jaha, Jasper, Pike and, to a degree, Clarke moved in the other direction. Every one of them acts on partial information, which makes each decision risky.

Pike fits that pattern at first. When he arrives, he is a wrecking ball, but a comprehensible one. He is a leader who wants to protect his people, and the show gives the audience just enough to understand that without giving enough to sympathize with him. In some ways he looks like Kane in season 1, a man making hard decisions for the group he is responsible for.

The difference is what comes after. Kane carried the weight of the Culling and, in time, expressed remorse. Pike never does. He is also directly responsible for the death of a beloved character, Lincoln, whom he shoots in “Stealing Fire.” That is a hard thing to come back from, and the show does not try to make it easy. The audience can respect the conviction behind Pike’s choices and still refuse to like him.

What “Join or Die” adds

“Join or Die” is the thirteenth episode of season 3 and the 42nd overall. In the present, Kane and Pike are captives in Polis, which is under the control of A.L.I.E., and Indra tortures Pike as revenge until Murphy persuades her that the greater need is to unite against A.L.I.E.’s followers. Elsewhere, Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia and Jasper reach the ocean, and Jaha threatens Abby’s life to force Kane to take the chip.

Alongside that, the episode gives Pike a backstory. Flashbacks show him on the Ark teaching The 100 an Earth Skills course in the two weeks before the pilot. When he fails to persuade Jaha to let him go to the ground, he beats Murphy in front of the class to push the teenagers toward the fight for survival that awaits them. This is the fullest portrait of Pike the show has produced.

Why the flashbacks do not help

The Pike in the flashbacks understands the cost of speaking out against leadership. He knows what happens to people who object, and he still bends the rules for what he thinks is right. Then, once he has power on the ground, he does the thing he once resisted. He silences dissent and hides the truth, and it ruins him. The idea is sound as tragedy.

The comparison with the rest of the cast is revealing. The 100 has always used flashbacks to Ark life to explain its characters, and the best of them arrive early enough to shape how the audience reads the person in the present. Bellamy, Clarke and Murphy all had that treatment while the audience was still deciding what to make of them. Pike from The 100 gets his only at the point when the audience has finished deciding.

The execution is the problem. Pike taught a class about togetherness, beyond friends and beyond a single station, as human beings, and then took power by putting Farm Station first. A teacher who preaches unity and practices tribalism is hard to feel for. The show could have made that contradiction the point, but it arrives late and without time to develop.

The better Pike was the one without a past

There are real mitigating factors. Nobody on the Ark expected the Grounders. Nobody expected the violence Ice Nation would bring against the Sky People, and life in a sealed station is very different from the ground. Those pressures explain why Pike would lead the way he did.

That is also why the character worked better without a past. A man leading people toward death, fighting daily and watching them starve made harsh choices that were understandable. The flashbacks add a Pike who knows rules can be broken, who sees differences in people and wants them to cooperate anyway. That version is more sympathetic and less coherent, and the audience is left with two characters in one body.

Pike’s arc in season 3, in order

• Arrival. Pike and the Farm Station survivors join Arkadia in “Wanheda: Part Two.”
• The massacre. In “Hakeldama,” Pike and his followers slay a Grounder army.
• The execution. In “Stealing Fire,” Pike shoots Lincoln after he surrenders to save other prisoners.
• The fall. The Grounders drag Pike away from Arkadia.
• The flashbacks. “Join or Die” shows his Earth Skills class and his clash with Jaha.
• The end. Octavia kills Pike in “Perverse Instantiation – Part Two,” the season finale.

Verdict: why Pike from The 100 needed a different arc

The central complaint is timing. If the writers wanted Pike to be a tragic figure, the flashbacks and the sense of struggle should have been spread across the season. Seen earlier, the audience might have understood why he trusted no one and why he would sacrifice another group for his own. Seen in episode 13, they feel like an apology for a character the audience has already judged.

By the time “Join or Die” aired, the hatred was already set in stone. There is little remorse in Pike for what he did, and the show does not ask him for it. The writers chose a smaller kind of rehabilitation: he is a broken man, not an evil one. That is true, and it is not enough.

The practical conclusion is that Pike from The 100 is more interesting as the antagonist the series built than as the victim it tried to build late. The audience needs him alive, as even Murphy recognizes, because humanity has a larger threat to face in A.L.I.E. Needing a character does not mean liking him, and the episode does not change that.

There is also a fairness point. Pike is hardly the only character on the show who commits terrible acts for a cause, and the series has spent years asking viewers to forgive people who did worse by their own standards. What sets him apart is the missing groundwork. A viewer who has spent three seasons watching Kane and Bellamy earn their way back can accept the next case. A viewer who has seen Pike for a few episodes, all of them destructive, cannot.

One structural comparison is worth making. Season 3 spends a great deal of time on A.L.I.E. and the City of Light, which gives the Pike storyline less room than it needs. The writers have two big ideas competing for the same episodes, and Pike’s humanity loses. Had the season run slightly leaner on the artificial-intelligence plot, the flashbacks might have arrived with room to breathe. As it is, they are squeezed into an already crowded episode.

The question the episode leaves open is what the writers wanted viewers to feel. If the aim was sympathy, the effort comes across as thin. If the aim was complication, a reminder that even a hated leader once had hopes for the people he led, the scene with Murphy and the beating on the Ark do the job in a few minutes. The second reading is kinder to the episode, and it is probably closer to what the writers meant. It still does not change the problem of timing.

For viewers rewatching the season, the best way to approach Pike is to watch him through the lens the show originally offered: a man with a clear purpose, a limited view of the world and no capacity to see his own cruelty. The flashbacks can be treated as a footnote.

Sources

• The 100 (TV series), Wikipedia — season 3 cast, characters and episode list