After almost a year since the game-changing season four finale of The 100, the CW has finally given fans new material to obsess over. And I don’t know about you, but I am certainly obsessing. Season five of The 100 returns on April 24 with an ambitious and exciting six year time jump, which the last few minutes of the season four finale revealed.
A quick refresher of where we left our faves: Octavia united the Grounder clans and the Arkadians in order to share a bunker to wait out the second apocalypse. Jaha, Kane, Abby, and some of the other secondary characters are waiting underground for the earth to be habitable again under Octavia’s rule. Bellamy, Raven, Murphy, Monty, Harper, Emori, and Echo went to back up to what was left of the Ark in space in order to escape when they could not get back to the bunker in time. Clarke stayed behind and sacrificed herself in order to make sure that her friends got off the ground safely. However, the Nightblood she injected herself with earlier in the season worked and she survived for six years with only a young girl, Madi, who we saw at the very end of season four.
Oh, and a new group of prisoners, whose existence had been hinted at throughout the season, came down to Earth in the final few seconds of the season finale. No big deal, right?
Now that we remember what’s going on, let’s talk about the trailer and new promotional material the CW has released over the past two weeks. The biggest take away from the trailer is that these six years have changed all of the characters. Octavia has had to step up and be a leader to people who hate each other. Bellamy has had to live with the guilt of leaving Clarke behind while trying to be the leader she believed he could be. Clarke was alone for who knows how long, and has become a mother to a young grounder girl. Those are just the character’s we can say for sure have changed. We do not know how Jasper’s suicide has affected Monty, how Kane keeping Abby alive despite her hesitation has affected both of them, or how Raven is dealing with being back in space and most likely being unable to get her friends back down to earth.
This time jump lends itself to the transformation of all of the characters we know and love. It also lends itself to interesting parallels. A group of prisoners is coming down to Earth, and do not know what to expect. Clarke and Madi are out there, living peacefully and waiting for Bellamy and the others to come back down. There is a large group of people trapped inside a bunker. It all sounds very similar to season one and early season two, only now the roles have changed, and the audience is not aligned with the prisoners arriving, but with those who are already there, and are in positions that were threatening to Clarke and the delinquents at the start of the show.
And because this is The 100, and nothing is ever easy, it seems like war is once again on the horizon as the different factions prepare to fight for the last habitable place on the planet, “Eden” (Also the title of Season five’s first episode). What we don’t know yet is exactly what side our characters are going to take in this war, especially given the call back to the moral ambiguity that The 100 struggles with when Clarke says, “There are no good guys” and shoots someone off screen in the final few seconds of the trailer.