Monty Green: Cold Child Thawing
Now for a moment of unscheduled Monty Meta. I want to talk about how Monty Green is widely viewed as the angel and cinnamon roll of The 100 and how I think this perception simplifies (if not misinterprets) a character who is actually one of the most ruthless kids on the show. Monty is a boy who’s engineered a genocide. He’s a boy who’s committed matricide twice. He took part in a mission to drive innocent Grounders off their land and aided in the arrest of his mentor knowing he’d be charged with treason. Monty has shown himself to be capable of some seriously cold moves. Not because he’s a bad kid, but because he’s been conditioned to be logical, useful and unfeeling through his childhood. I want to discuss Monty as being the victim of emotionally abusive parenting but also how Monty has recently shown signs of healing and becoming warmer through his bonds with his found family of the delinquents.
In S1, when Monty arrives on earth the first thing he’s faced with is his best friend being speared and snatched by Grounders. Monty wants his priority to be saving Jasper, but Clarke forbids him from coming on the rescue mission, because his knowledge is a valuable resource for their survival effort. What Monty is told in this moment is that his brain is more valued than his heart. It’s significant that this message comes from Clarke, the surrogate mother of the gang, because it’s probably the message Monty has always received from his own mother too. When Hannah recruits Monty for Pike’s team she repeatedly pressures him to focus his mind on their mission objectives and repress any emotional conflict he feels. There’s never any suggestion that Hannah’s treatment of Monty on Earth is different from how she treated him on the Ark. Monty was recruited by engineering and likely had a lot of adult expectations weighing on him from an early age, particularly parental pressure. But Monty needed some warmth in his life too. He needed to get stoned and be happy with Jasper. It was Monty seeking release through friendship and recreational drugs that led to him screwing up and getting arrested. On earth when Monty is under pressure to build radio communications, he’s forced to repress his fears for his best friend’s life. It may be a consequence of Monty’s stifled emotions that he ends up botching the job and frying the wristbands.
Monty’s mind doesn’t function as well when his heart is neglected. I think this is the main reason Monty cherishes his friendship with Jasper, a kid who always follows his heart. Jasper’s own “My kingdom for a soda can!” parents sound like they were more relaxed than the Greens. With a warmer upbringing, Jasper is more emotionally available, more daring on treks, flirts with girls easier, makes new friends faster than Monty who initially hangs back in Jasper’s shadow. There’s even a sense of Monty living vicariously through his friend as he says “let us have this” when Jasper becomes the camp’s folk hero. Monty even wanted Jasper to hook up with Harper, the girl who Monty himself had a crush on. Jasper is the impulsive irrepressible kid that Monty has always felt restricted from being himself. But the happy Jasper that Monty has known all his life has been seriously damaged by his spearing and subsequent PTSD. Jasper remains a kid who follows his heart, but his heart is now a fragile erratic thing. When Jasper first lashes out, Monty rejects him, giving him the cold shoulder, but he later comes back to support Jasper on the bridge, maybe realizing that he can’t just experience positive emotions through Jasper. To be a good friend he must support Jasper through his negative moods too.
S2 is littered with examples of Monty coolly following his head in situations where Jasper follows his heart. When trapped in Mt Weather, it makes them good team leaders for the 47 captives as Monty focuses on the technical needs of their survival while Jasper fires up group’s morale. Monty shares Clarke’s hostile mistrust of the mountain folk while Jasper is far more open to trusting and bonding with them. When he learns about the harvest chambers, Monty wants to take the more ruthless choice of abandoning the other kids and attempting a break out with Jasper alone, but Jasper holds him back, unwilling to leave the others to be put in cages. When Maya is sick with radiation poisoning, Monty orders Jasper to let her die rather than risk his own safety to save her and it’s Monty who realizes Tsing is lying to them. When Monty is hidden by the Mt Weather resistance, he keeps hiding while the woman protecting him is shot and his friends are dragged off by guards. In contrast Jasper gives himself up due to two resistance members being threatened and has to be restrained from chasing the guards who drag away Fox. This is not to say Monty is immoral or cowardly. Very often Jasper’s actions in following his heart are foolish and futile. But it shows how Monty has been conditioned to bypass emotional impulses in order to make cold logical decisions. It’s striking to me that Monty is actually the least conflicted of the three people responsible for the Mt Weather genocide. While Bellamy was protesting that they shouldn’t kill kids or their allies and Clarke was hesitating and hoping to be offered a better idea, Monty was the one hurrying them to pull the lever. He knew it was the only choice and he accepted it without hesitation. Early in S2 Monty had darkly said to Maya that if her people could only survive by killing hundreds of captives then they should “Die” instead. Yet Monty proves that he’s willing to kill hundreds of civilians himself (Maya included) for the sake of his own people’s survival.
When it comes to dealing with that cold choice he made in Mt Weather, Monty neglects his own emotions, focusing instead on being a minder to Jasper. In early S3, Monty is persistently there for Jasper – his brother, his family obligation – but Monty isn’t actually shown to be comforting. He lectures Jasper, tells him to snap out of it, throws cold water in his face and pressures him to contribute to missions. It’s not the best way to help a person who’s clearly suffered a nervous breakdown and Jasper himself feels so alienated from Monty because he can’t understand why Monty appears to be “fine”. But this is Monty’s conditioning. This is how Monty has always been expected to swallow his grief. We see this when Monty is reunited with his mother who dispassionately informs him that his dad has been killed. When Bellamy asks if Monty is okay he answers “I have to be” because this is the expectation that he feels. His mother initially offers Monty no comfort or closure. Monty has to beg his mom for that and it’s not until Hannah herself cries for her husband that we see Monty crying too, like he needed her permission to grieve. It’s also worth noting that Monty’s grief for his dead father doesn’t last too long, which fans tend to attribute to Monty’s emotional strength, but it may actually imply that Monty’s dad was a cold parent too and that Monty didn’t have a strong emotional bond with him.
Hannah pulls her coldest most abusive move earlier on the day that Monty ends up killing her. She seems to do it as a form of punishment. Since Monty betrayed her by helping his friends escape, she betrays him by letting Pike use him as a hostage so that is friends can be captured. By this point Monty is starting to feel a stronger sense of loyalty to his found family of the delinquents than he feels towards his own mother. Being “one of the 100″ gives Monty a stronger sense of place, so he chooses to save Octavia by killing Hannah. But Hannah’s first death doesn’t give Monty closure for either the grief of losing his mother or the damage inflicted by her emotional abuse. Knowing part of Hannah is still alive in the City of Light means there is part of Hannah still alive inside Monty too. When Jasper attempts to comfort him, Monty angrily pushes him away and it feels like Monty is emotionally punishing Jasper with his coldness just as Hannah had punished him for his betrayal. Monty pointedly refuses to hug Jasper goodbye when he leaves camp, just as Hannah had refused Monty a last hug before he went to the Dropship. Monty is still feeling torn over whether he made the right choice. By manifesting Hannah-like behavior and coldness, Monty seems like he still has a lingering sense of loyalty to his mother. It isn’t until Monty has to make the choice to kill his mom again that he gets any emotional release. Monty’s final “I love you” before he deletes Hannah’s code is not lie. He does love her (you can love your abusive parent) but he loves his found family more and therefore he is capable of this last hard choice. Monty knew Clarke’s plan to shutdown the City of Light would erase his mom anyway so he made the decision to be the one to do it, as mercifully as he could.
Erasing Hannah does something else to Monty. It makes him stop repressing his emotions. Monty lashes out at Raven who’s hurt by the blame he directs at her but she understands the pain he’s in. For the first time Monty is grieving like Jasper grieves, erupting with uncontrollable feelings. And grief isn’t the only thing Monty experiences. It’s earlier in the same episode that Monty sleeps with Harper and admits that he hasn’t felt happy in a long time. This is partly because Monty previously relied on Jasper to be his sole source of happiness. Harper has given Monty a similar sense of relief that he used to only feel getting stoned at the starboard window bay. When Jasper returns to Arkadia, Monty is ready to reconcile with him while Jasper seems to have swallowed down his sadness so they can go back to being friends again. Monty realizes too late that Jasper’s emotions are actually being blocked by the chip. Monty can’t be sure that Jasper is himself again until his emotions come flooding back and his friend is a tearful traumatized mess again. But for the first time in a long time, Monty accepts Jasper’s messy emotions. Monty has his own messy emotions to match and he sees that they need to work towards happiness together. Monty is warmer than he’s been before. In his new family, he is free to feel.
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