‘The 100’ Cast & Creator Tease How It Will All End at Comic-Con@Home
The 100 is saying goodbye this summer, but not without one final Comic-Con appearance to celebrate the CW drama.
Stars Marie Avgeropoulos (Octavia Blake), Lindsey Morgan (Raven Reyes), Richard Harmon (John Murphy), Tasya Teles (Echo), Shannon Kook (Jordan Green), JR Bourne (Russell Lightbourne/Sheidheda), and Shelby Flannery (Hope Diyoza), and creator and executive producer Jason Rothenberg took part in a virtual Comic-Con@Home panel looking back at the past six seasons and teasing how it will end.
The Final Season Plan
“We definitely started the season wanting to make sure we didn’t leave anything on the field,” Rothenberg says. “There were certain unanswered questions over the seasons we wanted to answer,” and they were able to do so with the prequel episode, “Anaconda,” which served as a backdoor pilot for a potential spinoff.
“The ending of a story is the moral of that story, and we wanted to say something with this season,” he continues, teasing, when fans see the finale, they’ll “look at the whole series differently.”
Evolving Characters
Dynamics change for Octavia each year, Avgeropoulos notes, adding that in Season 7, she’s a “nurturing, self-actualized version of herself,” especially since she was somewhat mostly isolated on Skyring. With her makeshift family, she’s used the tools her brother Bellamy (Bob Morley) taught her about parenting.
Now that Raven’s had to make “impossible choices” like other characters (including Eliza Taylor’s Clarke, with whom Raven shared a conversation about just that this season), she’s gotten “a taste of the gray,” Morgan says. “It’s been a big lesson for Raven,” who has called others out and judged them “unjustly because she hadn’t been in their situations” in the past.
This season, Murphy has been “a reluctant leader, but then as time goes on, you see him start to care what happens to these people he didn’t even know” before, Harmon shares. He may have “changed in a lot of ways,” he adds, but “he’s still that same old Murphy down inside, and we have to wait and find out as everything’s wrapping up to see where his allegiances to himself and everyone else really lie.”
Echo’s been dealing with losing the one person she allowed herself to love and open herself up to—”Bellamy means everything to her,” Teles notes—but she’s also learning a bit more about herself in the situation she’s in. “Her big challenge this season is figuring out who she is without someone to follow,” which is “a scary thing because Echo is such a highly-skilled, trained killer. We’ll see what happens there.” (Rothenberg adds that when some big changes happened last minute this season, a lot of the responsibility fell on Teles to “really do more than we’d ever asked her to do before, and she crushed it.”)
The “very idealistic” Jordan wants to do good, Kook says, pointing out that both his character and Flannery’s are outsiders and bring different perspectives. “This season, he’s really exploring what’s at the root of the culture in Bardo,” as they train for “the war to end all wars,” Rothenberg previews. “He doesn’t buy it. He saw something when he was adjusted, and it’s definitely got him on a journey that takes us all the way to the finale and proves to be pivotal.”
The 100, Wednesdays, 8/7c, The CW