1.4 - Murphy’s law
Aka: Children Will Listen
Everyone makes mistakes, but they’re learning. Charlotte’s parents were killed by Wells’ father. She relives their deaths every night in her dreams. When she looks at Wells she sees her parents’ killer. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is.
Bellamy gives Charlotte a knife to protect herself. To make her feel more powerful, and in control. She’s young. What, twelve maybe? At most? The only thing she’s ever known is powerlessness. She couldn’t save her parents. She can’t stop the nightmares. There are no demons to slay because the man who killed her parents is on a spaceship orbiting earth, and nothing she does can bring him closer to her, or her closer to him, or bring her parents back.
Bellamy sent Charlotte away so she wouldn’t have to see him kill Atom. He did his best, but Charlotte saw anyway, and learned from Clarke how to kill quickly, and nearly silently.
So when Ballamy’s advice gets twisted in Charlotte’s nightmare-riddled mind, it’s not his fault. And it’s not Clarke’s fault that Charlotte turned around and used what she learned from Clarke to kill the best friend Clarke has ever had in her life.
Clarke meant well when she confronted Murphy, but while her idealism and passion for justice are often valuable, this particular situation called for Bellamy’s pragmatic realization that people are stupid and groups of people are more so. Clarke just wanted justice, but what she got was a lynch-mob.
Charlotte may be traumatized, desperate, and killer, but she’s also a child and also, apparently, not so damaged that she’s gone crazy (which I was worried about). She was desperate enough to kill to try to make the pain go away, but enough of a fundamentally decent human being that she couldn’t let someone else die for what she had done. And just too much of a child to be able to see that there might be other options. She was just too young, too immature. Nuance comes with maturity, and she’d never had a chance to get much past pure black and white. Kill the person who reminds you of your parents’ killer and maybe the nightmares will stop. It’s not fair to let someone else die for what I did. I killed someone and that was wrong, now other people might die, the only thing left to do is sacrifice myself because I still have no power and everything I touch dies.
Charlotte, sweetheart, that’s not the only way.
Clarke could have let Charlotte take her hand. Had she not jerked away and yelled at a frightened, confused, guilt-ridden, (murderous) child, perhaps Charlotte would have settled on a middle ground between “don’t let them hurt me” and “just let them kill me” instead of following the pendulum out to its widest self-destructive arc. It was a mistake to pull away, but Clarke was also right that you can’t just kill someone to make yourself feel better. That was true, but Clarke didn’t specify that “someone” includes yourself too. And it may have been a mistake to pull away, but Clarke was already maxed out on kindness and understanding just in risking her life to help the girl who murdered her best friend escape a lynch-mob. She’ll probably regret pulling away for the rest of her life, but offering comfort to her friend’s killer was, in that moment an (understandable) bridge too far.
Clarke and Bellamy decide not to kill Murphy, who would willingly have murdered a child, not for what she did to Wells, but for what almost happened to him. The society Clarke and Bellamy are building needs rules, and that’s good. They can’t have a rule by mob, and that’s good too. Right now, the rule is: No Killing. But they’re still learning the ropes and it’s going to be a lot of trial and error.
Banishing Murphy may still turn out to be a mistake. Clarke and Bellamy and Finn left him with a weapon and grudge. His blood isn’t on their hands, but the consequences of Murphy’s actions will be on all of them.
The one silver lining here is that Bellamy seems to have gotten his whole obnoxious flirtation with pseudo-anarchy thing out of his system (for now). He recognizes Clarke’s value, and she recognizes his. They started as antagonists, and then reluctant allies, and they’re still reluctant, but it looks like they’re going to at least take a stab at co-ruling their little band. And they’ll be much stronger together than apart.
Also, this show is all about making hard decisions, and power plays, and people (mostly) doing what they think is best and right. But good intentions aren’t enough, and sometimes your best effort isn’t enough, and you have to make decisions, but also, every decision you make has consequences.
