Victory to the Sky People! Clarke succeeded in saving her people, but it came at a great cost to the world and to her personally when all but one of the Mountain Men were eliminated. Meanwhile, Thelonious reached his destination and the City of Light wasn’t at all what he expected.
The 100 Season 2 finale was brutal and shocking throughout the hour. What comes next? BuddyTV spoke with Executive Producer Jason Rothenberg to get the scoop on A.L.I.E, the future of Mount Weather, Clarke’s state of mind and how the Grounders will play into Season 3.
This is the second part of our conversation, for the full interview, read the first part: The 100 Season 2 Finale Interview: EP Jason Rothenberg Teases ‘It Can Always Get Darker,’ including the War Games reference.
You mentioned War Games earlier. A.L.I.E, is she Joshua?
Well, I loved War Games, but she is an AI. She’s an Artificial Intelligence, a sentient computer program that when she gained sentience, she sort of had the hard take off that Ray Kurzweil talked about in “The Singularity is Near,” which is a book everyone should read certainly as we go into Season 3.
Ultimately, [she] looked on mankind for one reason or another — all of which we will explore in Season 3 — and was in fact responsible for the end of the world. We never answered that question before. We never brought up that question really before. And we plan on playing in that world more in Season 3.
Is she Joshua? She’s an AI who ended the world and ultimately was trapped in some way by her creator, whether it’s that guy in the video or not, remains to be seen, but was trapped in that house for 97 years. He wasn’t able to stop her from ending the world, from launching the nukes, but he was able to trap her. The big questions for Season 3 are: What does she want? Why is she like this? What does she mean when she says we have work to do?
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Are we done with the Mountain Men and Mount Weather?
Everybody is dead. The only survivor of Mount Weather is Emerson. He’s out there, Lt. Emerson, probably to play a role. The Mount Weather story has been told. One of the things, I say often, I, as a storyteller, get bored if things aren’t changing. Season 1 and Season 2 were very different and Season 3 will be as different from Season 2 as two was from one.
We will always continuously change this world, build this world out. We’re talking about a whole planet that experienced that 97 years ago and has been changed as a result of it. I love the idea of continuing to sort of broaden our horizons, see new environments and meet new groups of characters and begin to explain what happened in the first place 97 years ago?
Why did Clarke have to leave? Was it strictly because she couldn’t deal with the decisions she made?
Yeah. In many ways, she’s broken by what she had to do. In the beginning of the season, her journey in my mind was always going to be that she would get it done, she’d achieve her goal in saving her people, but she was going to go so far to get that goal done that she wasn’t going to be able to celebrate. She wasn’t going to be able to feel the joy or relief of the reunions and celebration that everyone else was going to be feeling.
She was going to look at herself as a monster. She essentially says as much in the scene. She’s going to bear it, which is what Dante said to her. She bears it so they don’t have to. She’s taken on the pain of all those innocent deaths in Mount Weather so her people can now be free and be home. She doesn’t want to remember it every second and seeing their faces is going to do that.
We find her at the end of this journey at the end of the season, just in need of a break. After taking care of everyone else for so long and being under fire for so long, she just wants away from it all. That’s where we leave her and we’ll pick her up out there in the world.
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Will the Grounders still be a part of the story in Season 3?
Oh, huge, for sure. For me, one of the great things that happened with Lexa’s betrayal, if you think about it, Lexa sacrificed Clarke and the Sky People assuming of course that they were going to die. Yes, she made a truce with Mount Weather, their long time enemy, and they weren’t going to be harvested and there wouldn’t be reaping anymore and they wouldn’t be killing each other, but they wouldn’t be like at peace with each other.
It was like a Cold War situation, right, it’s the USSR and the United States where they don’t trust each other but they aren’t killing each other. And that was going to be good for Lexa and she’d be able to keep her coalition together as a result of that.
And then what happened? Clarke went ahead without her help, without her thousand person army and killed everybody at Mount Weather. Destroyed the long-standing enemy of the Grounders. And, so the legend of Clarke of the Sky People grows going forward. It will be one of those Paul Bunyon situations, “I heard it was 5000 people.” “No, I heard it was 10,000 people.”
Everybody’s going to know what happened. And of course, that’s going to be mutually not only problematic for Lexa, because suddenly this great enemy that they had that’s still out there that was going to hold her coalition together is gone. What happens to her coalition? We’re going to play with that hugely in Season 3.
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The 100 returns for Season 3 on the CW.
(Image courtesy of the CW.)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
Contributing Editor and Writer for Collider, BuddyTV, TV Fanatic, CliqueClack, and other publications. TV criticism, reviews, interviews with actors and producers, and other related content. Founder of TV Diehard.
