Bellamy didn't have to be ruined
Bellamy's arc is terrible. I honestly think that it didn't have to be. I can totally see how a charismatic leader like Cadogan could rally the crew to his cause. What he's selling, a war to end all wars, should be very tempting to characters who spent their entire adulthood fighting without end, going from one battle to the next, and losing loved ones in the process.
Before he dies, Bellamy says "That's how we do better", and that's been a major motive for both him and Clarke for a long while now. In other circumstances, I could see Clarke also falling for Cadigan's words. Some in the crew earnestly joining Cadogan makes sense to me, and Bellamy fits. But not in the way it was presented. I heard that Bob Morley had an issue with the director or whatever, and it's a real shame. Because if instead of lasting one episode, his pilgrimage had lasted the whole season as a tertiary plot, giving him more time to see things as his cultist friend does and us more time to see him change gradually and understand where he's coming from, I genuinely think that it could have worked. Especially since while Cadogan is wrong about the war, he's not wrong in the fact that suffering can stop. In my view, a more fitting ending would have been a confrontation between this need for suffering to end represented by Bellamy, and the idea that suffering is a part of being human represented by Clarke. But I'll come back to that in the next point.
Due to how rushed it was, Bellamy's arc felt like a real character assassination, and it's kind of amazing to fail one of your original leads like that at the finish line. It's sad because it really could have worked
The ending thematic issues
This one is more complex. It's not that it's too out there or too weird or anything like that. I just feel like the thematic implications of merging with the entity aren't explored as thoroughly as they deserve.
When Clarke meets the entity, she tells it off, claiming that the way it judges species is unfair, and that it has no right to talk down on her given that it killed far more than she ever did. All of this is true! The entity, whatever its motives are, and however alien its sense of morality might be, is evil in my eyes, and, I believe, in the eyes of most. Only deluded people like Cadogan or desperate ones like Bellamy could possibly see merging everybody without their consent as a good thing. I wish we would have spend more time on those questions.
More importantly, to me, the ending doesn't fit the rest of the show. Not because it ends badly! I wasn't expecting a happy ending, even if I wasn't expecting this either. But because the themes are, in my view, kind of thrown out of the window.
The show was always about people trying to do their best in impossible circumstances. Hurting people to save their loved ones, hurting their loved ones to save people... Being forced into monstrous actions that eat away at them, and still getting up afterwards to try and do better the next day. And in the end, it just took one (honestly mediocre) speech from Octavia for everyone to lower their weapons and for some alien to make all of those choices disappear. Let's skip over the fact that she convinced people who had been groomed from birth into a cult-like mindset with just a few words and focus on the lesson we can learn from that ending... I honestly can't think of any! The only thing it makes me think of is that someone was tired of working on the show and made sure to make a sequel impossible
Maybe it would have been too obvious, I don't know, but the entity seeing everyone lower their weapons and deciding that while humanity isn't ready yet, it still has the potential to grow and just leaving would have worked better in my view. At the end, Clarke and the rest would have tried to lead both the people of Sanctum and the people of Bardo in harmony, and while the show would end on an hopeful note, we would have sensed that tensions would still likely rise, as humanity slowly falls upwards.
Murphy and the rest giving up on eternity to spend their lives with Clarke is cute, if bleak, but while friendship and love are also important themes of the show, I do feel like there were more interesting things to do
I don't think the season is awful all in all, I really enjoyed it for the most part. But it failed the landing where it mattered the most
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