What Happened to Lexa in The 100? The Commander Was Never Weak

Lexa in The 100 explained: the leader hiding in plain sight

Season three of The 100 has divided fans across the internet, and for good reason. The show has always moved at a breakneck pace, and the third season turned the boosters up to eleven. It can feel as if pivotal scenes are missing, such as the massacre at Mount Weather and the three-month time jump. The season is really about the characters and what it reveals about who they are.

That includes Lexa, played by Alycia Debnam-Carey. She draws a significant amount of hate from fans, from Skaikru and from the Grounders themselves. She is called weak, ruthless, selfish, and lovestruck, sometimes in the same breath. Looking closer, it is hard to find any of those traits that hold up. Anyone searching for lexa the 100 usually wants one answer: whether her mercy is a change or the truth about her all along.

In the episode Hakeldama, she proclaims that blood will not have blood, and in Bitter Harvest she makes good on it. On the surface the motto seems a sharp change from the Lexa viewers have known, and some, such as Titus, believe she is acting on Clarke's behalf. The better reading is that this is the Lexa the show has always presented and that viewers refused to see.

Lexa is not a character of many words, and the audience knows little of her background. What it does know comes from other people. She commands respect and loyalty from the Grounders, and especially from Indra, a powerful figure who could fend off enemies without blinking and yet obeys Lexa's final word.

The word that fits Lexa best is deliberate. Nothing she does in these episodes is accidental, and nothing is done for love alone. Even her soft moments with Clarke are teaching moments, and her mercy toward the other clans is an investment in a coalition. Seen that way, the Lexa of season three is the same woman who first met the hundred, only now the audience has enough information to read her correctly.

Indra, the poisoning and the sword

Of all the Grounders, Indra challenges Lexa the most, questioning her decisions against Grounder ways, but in the end she bows to the commander because she trusts the Heda's judgment. Indra probably assumes the recent changes come from Clarke. Even at their first meeting, though, Indra regards her commander as merciful.

When Skaikru is believed to have tried to poison Lexa, she takes only Raven to be killed, and only after Indra admits she would have killed them all. When Lexa learns the truth about the poisoning, she passes sentence and swings the sword herself, in a very Ned Stark fashion. She could have killed everyone in the room. She had Skaikru's leadership imprisoned and could have sent the rest of Arkadia scattering to Mount Weather or the wilderness. She did not, because she recognized the value of a treaty for both peoples.

Sacrifice the few for the many

Her pattern is consistent. Lexa follows the notion of sacrificing the few for the many. At TonDC, when it looked as if she and Clarke had left hundreds to die, she was not thinking about what was lost. She was thinking of the hundreds and thousands more waiting to be saved in Mount Weather, and in her mind she was saving future generations from imprisonment and torture.

When Nia challenges Lexa in Polis and calls for a vote of no confidence, Titus urges Lexa to kill the traitors and be done. She does not. Instead of killing twelve ambassadors, she kills one. One for many, at great personal risk, and despite protests from everyone it works in her favor. It is the calm, well-considered style of a leader who thinks beyond the next hour.

Lexa, Kane and the question of tradition

This calm is why Lexa resembles Kane. Both respect the tradition of their people, and both admit when tradition is not enough or goes too far. They will change their cultures for the sake of their people even when met with resistance, and both learn everything they can about an enemy and humanize them.

Clarke is not yet a leader. Lexa and Kane both see her in a transitional stage between warrior and leader. Over three seasons the audience has watched her make hard decisions and carry guilt over the deaths she has caused and the ones she has lost. That is why Lexa keeps giving Clarke so much say in their actions. There is sexual tension between them, but Lexa is a leader bred and born who knows how to separate work from play. She sees Clarke as a younger version of herself, and she helps train her by letting her make the hard calls.

The counterargument: Mount Weather

The strongest case against Lexa is the season 2 betrayal. She and the Grounders pulled back from the siege of Mount Weather and left Clarke, Bellamy and Monty in a security room, watching their friends chained to beds and drained for bone marrow. The three were left to make the choice that ended with the mountain irradiated. Skaikru has not forgiven it, and neither have many viewers.

The reading offered here does not erase that. It explains it. Lexa made a cold calculation about the survival of her own people, and she was willing to pay a price in trust to protect them. That is exactly what a leader who sacrifices the few for the many would do, and it fits the pattern in every other example. Whether the audience can accept it is a different question from whether the character is consistent.

Bitter Harvest and the lesson Clarke missed

The relationship plays out in Bitter Harvest, where Lexa gives Clarke autonomy over what happens to Emerson. When Clarke agrees with Titus's suggestion to kill him, Lexa's face falls. Clarke still does not understand what it means to decide outside the moment, a lesson she and Bellamy are both learning. Clarke sees the issue as not wanting her friends to die right now. Lexa wants to protect her people for their entire lives.

Her role as Heda is eternal, and she knows she has to make decisions she can live with forever. That is the difference between the two women at this point in the story, and it is the key to the commander's mercy: it is not softness, it is long-range strategy.

Lexa's choices in season 3 and earlier

• The poisoning: takes only Raven to be killed and later passes sentence herself.
• TonDC and Mount Weather: accepts a heavy loss now for the sake of thousands in the mountain.
• Nia's challenge in Polis: kills one ambassador instead of twelve.
• Clarke: gives her authority to make decisions as a form of training.
• Blood will not have blood: the motto she announces in Hakeldama and keeps in Bitter Harvest.
• The takeaway: lexa the 100 viewers saw a softer commander, but the pattern of choices shows one consistent strategist.

What happened to Lexa next, and why it matters

The analysis above was written while Lexa was alive. A week later, in the season 3 episode Thirteen, she was killed immediately after having sex with Clarke. Critics and fans saw the death as part of the bury-your-gays trope, and fans rallied behind the phrase Lexa Deserved Better. Series creator Jason Rothenberg later apologized, saying he should have recognized the harm of the trope more fully.

That history gives the argument a different weight. The case that Lexa was a strategist, not a sentimental leader, was one fans were still making in real time, and the writing that followed did not honor it. The show kept going through seven seasons and 100 episodes, with Eliza Taylor's Clarke carrying much of the story, but the character's loss remained one of its most debated decisions.

For anyone watching now, the lesson is simple. Read Lexa through what she does and not through what the loudest voices in the room say about her. By that measure she was always a calm, merciful and unsentimental commander. That is the Lexa The 100 gave its audience, and the one this piece defends.

A last point for readers coming to the season fresh: watch what Lexa does with Clarke in Bitter Harvest and compare it to what the show did next. The mentoring in that scene is the point of the relationship, and it was cut short. Knowing the whole arc, every lesson Lexa offers in the episode carries the weight of what came after. It is worth a rewatch for that reason alone, and it makes the case for her consistency stronger, since the mentor Clarke needed was the one the story removed.

Sources

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