A century ago Earth had a worldwide nuclear war, leaving it uninhabitable.
Humans have survived in a cobbled together space station, but it comes out that a vital system is irreparably broken and they have less than six months of oxygen left.
100 condemned young criminals are sent to the surface to see if they survive, through various mishaps they loose contact with the station and all are assumed dead.
Now the station will have to start killing people unless the 100 that are left can contact them and have them sent to the surface.
WTF?!
Why not just send the people you are going to euthanize to the surface anyway? A 95% chance of death is BETTER than a 100% chance of death!
Because sending a ship down to the surface takes resources. And the station doesn’t have resources to spare, otherwise they wouldn’t need to kill off their own population.
They seem perfectly able and willing to send the 300 people to be killed if so much as a radio signal reaches them, so they have the resources. Send the 300, maybe with a spare radio this time? Gee who would figured 8-17 year old criminals might not be the best at following order and going all Lord Of The Rings?
I’m not sure how far into the show you are, but as miller has said, it is spelled out later on during the first season that the station has limited ships capable of surviving a trip down to the planet. They can’t just send down whoever they want instead of spacing them, they need to reserve the capability to send the survivors down if necessary.
Ok well knowing that then there is little drama in the show’s main premise, we see in like the pilot? there are surviving humans on the ground. And most people on the station will either die or never be able to leave(I’m assuming the oxygen problem is unfixable).
No, they don’t have the resources. That’s the entire point: they could spare one ship, filled with expendable crew, as a Hail Mary effort to see if the planet is inhabitable. If it’s inhabitable, they can cannibalize the station for enough parts and fuel and so forth to get the rest of the population down. If it’s not inhabitable, they need every scrap of material they can get their hands on to keep the station running as long as possible.
Also, Lord of the Flies, not Lord of Rings. Really different metaphor there.
There’s the stupidest plot point of all. Even a full exchange at the height of the Cold War wouldn’t have rendered the US or USSR entirely uninhabitable, much less the rest of the world.
There would have been a lot of starvation, a lot of violence, a lot more cancer, and some places that people coudln’t live or farm, but on the whole, humanity and wildlife would have survived without an issue.
At the point you’re killing significant parts of your population(do we ever hear how many are on the Ark? 300 has to be a large portion!) what are you going to do whittle down until there are a handful of important people left? Or just face the fact everyone is going down radiation be damned, people might have to put up with higher cancer rates but it is preferable to being airlocked.
I actually really enjoy this show. It’s a departure from a lot of low quality CW shows, but I do think the first few episodes took a while to gain its footing. By the middle of the first season I was pretty entertained.
THere are of course issues but sending a test group down didn’t seem to be one of them. And besides, it’s not like we expect this to be the very best decision making. I think the original group was sent down in secret.
I am enjoying it so far, aside from my complaint. And I am damn impressed the CW could create a scifi show of this caliber, I overlook the CWisms like pretty late 20 something teens and love triangles etc.
It’s acid fog, and I’ll spoiler box the rest, since its from season 2.
It’s a weapon/defense system controlled by the people living in Mt. Weather
They also completely ruined the whole living in space to avoid radiation plot that drives the whole series when
they suddenly decided to casually reveal that living in space exposed them to way more radiation that the grounders, and thus they’d developed a much stronger immunity to it. I think there was also some weird throwaway line about how they’d been genetically engineered to resist radiation, which came out of nowhere, made no sense, and was never followed up on.
It’s still a fairly fun show to watch, but there are so many holes and flat out wrong things going on. They really should have hired some consultants to tell them how radiation actually works, for instance.
If it’s on TV and it is “science fiction,” it is probably crap.
These days, it’s hard to find good science fiction outside of books. Even then, I have a hard time finding science fiction books in the “Science Fiction & Fantasy” section.
Exactly. The kids keep making terrible decisions that in real life would have gotten them all killed ten times over. But in the show, their choices pay off and prove that they were right to go against the grain and defy any and all authority.
Of course, the grown ups in this show are also really, really stupid. :smack: