Freaking Out Over Dead Lesbian Syndrome

A couple of months ago the CW show The 100 killed off Lexa, a lesbian character, right after she had consummated her relationship with Clarke, the main character.

Fans went nuts. Many stopped watching the show, and its ratings crashed. The showrunner has apologized profusely, but critics have not been mollified (note: Clarke had a previous lesbian liaison and everyone lived!).

The 100 is a post-apocalyptic science fiction series. A nuclear war killed most of earth's population. A few thousand people survive on space stations in orbit. But after many decades, the space stations are running out of resources: in particular, oxygen. Because of this, pretty much any infraction is punished by death, as a form of population control. But it's not working any more; the only way the human race can survive is to return to earth, which is still a radioactive hell-hole as far as they know. So the Sky People, as they are called, send 100 kids sentenced to death down to earth to see if they can survive.

NPR has a story about this today: 

About 10 percent of the deaths that I counted were gay, bisexual or otherwise queer women, which, when you think about it proportionally, is kind of nuts because not many television shows, unless it's "Orange Is The New Black" or something, have more than one or two maybe gay, bisexual or otherwise women. And the fact that most of them - a lot of them end up dead is troubling.

Now, there may be a real Bury Your Gays or Dead Lesbian Syndrome in TV and the movies, a holdover from the 50s when various ethics codes in the media required that no sin go unpunished, at a time when homosexuality was considered aberrant.

But in this case The 100 is 100% not guilty of Dead Lesbian Syndrome. The lesbian character didn't die because she was a lesbian, but because the main character loved her. In this show, every loving relationship eventually ends in death.

Bellamy's girlfriend dies. Jasper's girlfriend dies. Clarke's dad dies. Octavia's boyfriend dies. Monty's mom dies. Everyone in Mount Weather dies. Clarke's previous two boyfriends die; Clarke herself was forced to administer the death penalty to the second one to avoid all-out war with the "grounders," as the natives are called.

The 100 is literally the grittiest show on TV. Most shows starring people in their teens and 20s have them running around with perfect clothes, hair and teeth and makeup, regardless of how barbaric their situation. Not The 100. When someone gets beat up, they're bloody and bruised and the damage lasts multiple episodes. They live in a post-apocalyptic world that has devolved to a medieval level for most inhabitants.

Life on The 100 is dirty, short and brutal, regardless of sexual orientation. So don't stop watching the show because Lexa got killed. Anyone Clarke loves is gonna die: hers is the kiss of death.

A far better reason to stop watching the show is that is essentially the anti-Star Trek: everyone acts like an idiot, all outsiders are distrusted, hated and killed, everyone holds a grudge and nearly every character has lost their moral center, at a time when humanity needs it most. The show has a dismal, hopeless view of mankind and its ability to survive its own self-destructiveness. Each season the plot lurches from one looming catastrophe to another bigger and even more calamitous disaster, with any rays of hope snuffed out within one or two episodes.

The one good thing the series does is emphasize our predicament: for the human race to survive, we need each other. Otherwise we won't have a civilization; we just have an ever-growing pile of corpses.