The 100 finale is already here. In “Blood Must Have Blood, Part Two,” the battle between the Sky People and the Mountain Men hits the peak of its crescendo in epic fashion. With all hope lost, Clarke, Octavia, Bellamy, Jasper and Monty have to find a way to save their people. What sacrifices will they have to make along the way?
BuddyTV spoke with Executive Producer and Creator Jason Rothenberg to find out how Clarke moves on after Lexa’s betrayal, whether there’s any hope in this world, Jaha’s quest for the City of Light and the difficult decision facing Clarke.
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Clarke at the end of “Blood Must Have Blood, Part One,” she was left just standing there. How is she able to take that disappointment and forge forward with her people in danger.
That moment is designed obviously to be the lowest of the low. The low point where everything she had going into the episode and into the ultimate battle for Mount Weather was taken away from her including the woman she had been falling for romantically. Everything is taken away from her in that moment. And her people are left to die and she has no way in and when we find her that’s where she still is.
She doesn’t know how she’s going to do this. She knows that door’s not an option so she heads to the door she knows about. That’s where she finds Octavia and of course things transpire from there. I think it’s always darkest before the dawn, but I guess in The 100 it can always get darker. [Laughs] And that’s where this episode begins.
One of the things I really like about the show is no one is entirely in the right or entirely in the wrong. Cage is trying to save his people. Lexa made a choice to protect her people. Clarke’s made decisions to save her people. Is the lesson of the show so far that co-existence is impossible in this world?
I don’t know that that’s the lesson. To me, it’s about– It’s certainly hard, right? The theme of the season has been how far will you go to survive? How far will you go to save your people? So, when it is two men enter and one man leaves situation then how far will you go to be the person who walks out at the end.
Sure, I think as a human being that peace is, not to quote War Games, “The only way to win the game is not to play.” That’s where I live and I think ultimately that could be a place where these people ultimately get because clearly it’s not winning anything in their continuing “how far will I go for our own side” battles.
Going into this final battle, what do you think characterizes the situation? Is there hope? Or is it utter despair?
As we leave things at the end of [Episode] 15 and go into the finale, hope is very hard to find. It is, as I said already, it is a low point across the board. Clarke’s been abandoned and betrayed. She’s lost her outside army and inside army. Her people are essentially left for dead; the people she’s been obsessed with saving all season long.
Bellamy on the inside, likewise, standing in that empty harvest chamber. He’s lost all of his people and his inside army. He’s totally screwed. Octavia also left facing the door in the reaper tunnel is just lost her long, hard-fought standing in the Grounder world. She finally found a place to belong with Indra and it’s taken from her in that moment. It’s a very, very bleak beginning point in this episode.
In many ways, it’s designed to put our heroes back center stage. It’s been a big season, an epic season of expanding the playing field outward and thousands of Grounders and Lexa the commander of those Grounders played a big role obviously, but at the end of the day in this finale, it’s a very different finale than last season. It becomes about Clarke and Bellamy and Jasper and Octavia and Monty and really the people who started the show and are the heart of the show.
For Jaha, is he too caught up in himself? Or is there more to it than his own desire for a destiny?
I do think that he certainly has delusions of grandeur and he firmly believes he’s been called and he’s got a mission that needs to be seen through to the end. The City of Light is the thing that’s gonna save his people. He believes that. Whether he’s losing it or whether it’s in fact a reality, I think it’s his reality. He believes it.
Murphy buys into it for awhile. I think what happens in the first scene of the finale is Murphy sees how far Jaha’s willing to go to keep on that path and it’s too far. There’s a break between the two of them. And ultimately whether or not he finds that destiny, whether or not he finds the City of Light and what it turns out to be, we’re going to answer that question of course and we’ll ask other questions.
I don’t think that anyone could take definitively at the end of the finale that yes or no he was either delusional or in fact right. I think it is left ambiguous intentionally.
Who has the make the most difficult decision of the finale?
Without a doubt, Clarke. I mean Clarke is– the whole season has been engineered to push — all of these characters — to the brink of how far will you go? At what point does the good guy become the bad guy? Can you go so far in achieving your goal and saving you people that you do something that turns you into the bad guy?
In Episode 15, we saw Lexa make the choice to sacrifice Clarke and the Sky People in order to save her people in making that deal with Mount Weather. And suddenly, Lexa’s the bad guy, that was literally many people’s reaction. By design, we knew that was what was coming, but that was what we wanted to explore.
Dante’s always been a bad guy in some people’s minds, but this season we saw that he’s more complicated than that. He’s drawn a line where he wasn’t going to do this horrible thing to these 44 people. And because of that people began to question if he was in fact a bad guy.
In Episode 15, he was forced to do that horrible thing to cross that line that he’d drawn for himself. Forced by his son’s ineptitude really to do that one thing he never wanted to do. It becomes Clarke’s journey in Episode 16 to come to a similar moment. Will she or won’t she make a similar choice? That’s what the episode is leading to.
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The 100 airs Wednesdays at 9pm ET 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.
