The Audience Inherited Skykru's Perception of Murphy Without Questioning It
I have just finished a binge of 'The 100' after discovering it accidentally. I didn't even know I was watching it (I thought it was the next episode of the last show I was watching), until a few minutes into the first episode. I was hooked pretty much immediately, and I've just finished the finale! Fell a bit flat for me, but I tend to appreciate things like 'The 100' in their entirety rather than how they ended. I absolutely loved the show. Solid 9/10 for me.
I have loved reading all of your contributions, and I wanted to make one of my own that I'm quite passionate about. I've been reading a lot of discussions about John Murphy lately, and one thing I keep seeing repeated is that he starts the show as 'the asshole character' before eventually earning a redemption arc.
Introduction
I am just off the back of the show, and my immediate reaction is that I completely disagree with that framing. Not because I think Murphy was secretly a saint or a great guy, but because I honestly don't think the show ever gave me a good reason to see him as uniquely bad in the first place.
I think the audience has bought into or been captured by the rest of 'Skykru's perception of Murphy without ever really asking themselves whether the group was actually right about him.
People talk about Murphy like he starts as 'the asshole', and slowly becomes more human or 'good' over time. That was never how I experienced the character at all. Maybe it's my natural bias for the underdog, but watching the show, Murphy felt less like the dangerous outcast and more like the group punching bag, the easy target.
The Hanging Scene
While it didn't affect my enjoyment of the show and I understand why they did it, the hanging scene completely broke my suspension of disbelief.
The group falsely accuses Murphy of murder, literally hangs him for something he did not do, and after that the social framing of the show STILL acts like Murphy is the one who needs to earn everyone's trust back.
Realistically, a group that literally lynched someone unjustly would either fracture over it or become deeply apologetic to the victim. Instead, everyone basically moves on and Murphy somehow remains the 'sketchy, untrustworthy one'. I can't even remember if he got a damn apology for the whole incident xD No one seems traumatised over it, and yet everyone demonstrates a capacity to be traumatised at their actions, Bellamy in particular. If John had died, Bellamy would been a murderer from that point forward. I never felt the 'weight' of that from anyone but John himself.
Bellamy
Ballamy and Murphy BOTH participate in the early 'Lord of the Flies' spiral, but Bellamy gets framed as a conflicted leader while Murphy gets framed as fundamentally rotten. But if you actually strip away the music, the charisma, the narrative framing, and the plot requirements, I struggle to understand why Murphy is treated as or seen as uniquely awful compared to basically everyone else. John is also framed as uniquely sadistic during this period, which was something I kinda judged him for earlier until the Pike flashbacks, but at the same time a huge amount of that comes from presentation and charisma rather than an actual comparison of actions and motivations.
Let's also not forget before ANYTHING was said or done, Bellamy shot Jaha. As much as I love Bellamy, I don't understand why I was supposed to root for him or assume he's any better than John.
The Pike Flashback
The Pike flashbacks just reinforced the view that John was never uniquely or fundamentally bad. Murphy wasn't some uniquely broken sociopath dropped into an otherwise healthy social environment. The Ark had already turned him into the kid everyone was comfortable humiliating and abusing long before they ever reached the Earth. He lost both his parents, which again I'll come back to, but that meant he was vulnerable. From his perspective, his teacher beat the living shit out of him, literally pummelled the guy, and his classmates mostly stood and watched.
I just never bought into the idea that I was supposed to even expect John to act in the groups interest.
John's Parents
Granted this happens much earlier in the show, but on the ground there are a few scenes where John is treated with contempt for the crimes of his parents. I think one or both of his parents were floated for stealing medicine for him, one of the most sympathetic 'crimes' committed in the entire show. That's not greed. It's not ambition. Not violence. Desperation. And yet I vaguely remember a few snide remarks being made to John about him thinking he 'deserves to live more than anyone else'.
A crime, by the way, that Abby committed too when she saved Jaha. That is framed as tragic, compassionate, morally difficult, whereas Murphy's parents doing the exact same thing gets lumped in with the general perception that Murphy comes an inherently selfish or criminal background.
Almost every other prisoner receives sympathy from one another for whatever draconian rule landed them in jail. Octavia for example, is framed as a victim of Ark law. The audience is encouraged to see her existence as evidence of the system's cruelty. Murphy's family are also victims of Ark law, but somehow the emotional framing around Murphy often remains "he is selfish, of course he's trouble". Heck, if John is gonna be treated as selfish because his parents stole medicine to keep him alive, why on Earth does Raven get redemption for her spacewalk?
Conclusion
What actually makes Murphy uniquely bad?
A lot of people say Murphy became trustworthy later in the show. I felt almost the opposite. Murphy was one of the ONLY people I would've trusted from early on, because he was emotionally legible.
He usually says what he means. He rarely hides self-interest behind morality. He reacts to betrayal like any human being actually would, and whenever someone genuinely treats him like one of their own, he almost always responds accordingly by becoming more dependable, more group-oriented, and he demonstrates with Emori that he can be fiercely loyal and actually completely selfless, if he feels someone has earned it by giving that back to him. It would have been unreasonable for me to expect him to act in any other way at virtually every point in the show based on how other people treated him.
John usually became exactly what people expected him to be. Treat him like one of yours, and he acts like one of yours. Treat him like an outsider and he acts like an outsider.
The more I think about it, the more I feel John wasn't a force for bad in the show at all.
He was a mirror.
I posted this purely to generate discussion and to share my thoughts - please let me know what you think!