The 100 Season 7 episode 2 Review: The Garden

"The Garden," however, stands juxtaposed. At the end of a long journey, it offers something different in the eye of each beholder: to a repentant Diyoza who's exhausted from all the fighting, it's an oasis, a safehold. Home. To a headstrong Octavia who misses her brother and always needs to make things right, it's a beautiful and meaningful place to lick her wounds and plan, but ultimately still a prison. For a little while anyway.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must tend to our garden. It's the last line of the satirical novel Candide, which features a long journey of its own. Some take it to mean that the journey was for nothing, or that Candide should toil away as a distraction from the great philosophical questions. But it always struck me that we should each find some metaphorical patch of this Earth and tend to it, invest in it, make it better in some way, and make it our garden. For Diyoza, Octavia, and Hope, Sky Rim – or really, the family they create there – is their garden.

For ten years anyway. The format of this episode allowed for us to get to know Hope properly, which is wonderful although not altogether necessary – Shelby Flannery plays her with such clarity and strength of purpose that she draws the viewer in immediately. But this look beyond the surface feathers in so many lovely details – like the use of "my mother, my responsibility" – that speak volumes to the audience about who Hope is. Her disdain for Echo feels like it's all the more pointed because her Auntie O is far away, which makes it that much sweeter as she breaks down and accepts Echo's help and comfort. Tasya Teles does great work here (as always), and doesn't get nearly enough credit for it.

While Hope has the kind of sharp edges that clearly come from Octavia, there's a clear parallel to the way Clarke raised Madi, on stories of her comrades, and as far from thoughts of war and destruction as possible, at least where Diyoza was concerned. Another parallel is that this is our second pair of women raising a kid together this season. It's hard to think of any other shows with examples of such nontraditional parenting, but it's wonderful to see here.

Clarke and Gaia read as completely platonic co-parents who respect one another, but who ultimately came together for the good of the child, and purely due to her. Diyoza and Octavia on the other hand, while they still read as platonic rather than romantic to me, have a deep love and an overall more meaningful bond that's familial or even visceral, due to their tumultuous history. They're women who know each other's worst secrets and picked one another when literally no other human being on the planet would. That means something.

The 100 | Season 7 Episode 2 | The Garden Promo | The CW