The Idiot Ball

For those of you who don't know, the Idiot Ball is a common TV "trope". (I apologise for sending you down the rabbit hole of that website).

What this trope means is that a character's idiocy, usually ignoring/forgetting an easy solution the viewers can see, fuels a plotline and allows it to continue. This character is said to be holding the "idiot ball" which is sometimes passed around between the characters.

Whilst wandering downstairs today I happened to watch part of an episode of "100" This show is based around a group of criminal teenagers trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth, whilst their parents worry about the space station they live on falling apart around them.
(SPOILER ALERT).

The ground-based plots seem to be purely based around who is carrying the idiot ball each week, either through stubborn attitude, lack of communication or just plain stupidity. The episode involved a captured "grounder" who had used a poisoned knife to poison one of the teenagers (eurgh stop with dumb teenage drama in scifi, it only ever seems to use this trope), and was being tied up and beaten up by a bunch of thuggish louts that had gained power.

Upon learning the knife was poisoned, they reasoned one of the vials he was carrying had an antidote, ok, fair assumption, he doesn't want to poison himself by accident after all; but then, after their pleas for aid (spoken in English, god only knows what language the barbarian speaks) fall on deaf, and rather bloodied ears, the leader of the thugs tears off a piece of the ship, and starts to whip the man with it.

You have to question the logic here, a buff, scary man who has lived his whole life struggling to survive in an irradiated wasteland, and you think a teenager hitting him with a length of fabric will convince him to share?

At this point I sat and thought "just cut him a little on the arm with the knife, then offer him the vials and see which he wants, if he chooses, give some to him, if he lives cool, you've saved your friend, if not, one of the other two vials can help and it's better odds than letting him die." after all, a man living like he has been must have a STRONG sense of self-preservation.

Maybe my logic wouldn't have worked, maybe it's silly to look so deep into the fiction, but when the teen girl the man had a crush on (I see that plotline going in a very strange direction) came up and cut herself with the poison, and he gave them the antidote, I felt entirely vindicated. My solution, though twisted, was used and ended the plot, leaving time for emotional talks and "character development" to wrap up. The whole "torture with belt and corkscrew" plot was just there to pad out time, making the space-based plot seem longer than it was.

The sad thing is this idiocy happens, as I said, every episode, which moved the show swiftly from "Good show idea, will watch" to "bad TV".

Maybe I should read the book it was based on and compare...