‘The 100’ Series Finale: Our 5 Biggest Questions Answered

The episode’s writer and director addresses all our burning questions — like why that one character didn’t transcend

'The 100' Series Finale: Why Couldn't That One Character Transcend?
The CW

Warning: Spoilers follow for the series finale of The CW’s “The 100.”

“The 100” came to a close after seven seasons on Wednesday night, but there’s still some unpacking to be done about that extremely emotional series finale.

We asked showrunner Jason Rothenberg, who wrote and directed that final episode “The Last War,” all of our lingering questions — so you don’t have to wonder. Our first one was a no-brainer…

Why wasn’t Clarke allowed to transcend with everybody else?

“Clarke is the angel of death in the finale,” Rothenberg said. “As Lexa avatar said to her in the very end, nobody in the history of any species in the universe has ever committed murder during the test. So there was always a kind of Moses story that we were going for with Clarke where she’s not allowed to go into the promised land at the end of the story.”

He also thought it was a “beautiful” touch to have her friends choose to stay with her in that final scene instead of going up into the sky in that little ball of light. “They didn’t want her to be alone,” he said.

So now once everyone who stayed on Earth with Clarke dies, that’s it for them?

That was the deal, essentially. You could imagine a scene probably between them and some weigh station beam of light who told them what the rules were if they chose to stay. So to them, it’s not mandatory that you leave this body, but if you chose not to, then you are choosing — you’re not gonna then get a second chance at it later when you die for real. So they made that choice willingly to stay together as a unit, as a family, and also obviously to keep Clarke company.

And no exception could be made for Bellamy, who was killed off earlier this season?

That was prior to transcendence, and ‘only the living shall transcend’ is what Cadogan wrote in [his book.] The idea was, as long as they held on long enough to still be drawing breath — whether even having their hearts pumped through CPR or actually breathing — at the moment of transcendence, that they themselves would transcend. That was something that I always, obviously, knew was going to happen. Emori physically did die, [but] her mind was still ‘alive’ in the mind space, so she transcended.

Is transcendence essentially another version of Heaven?

Depending on a person’s religious beliefs, they could interpret the story that way. As a show, we’re saying that it is essentially higher beings joining the universal consciousness. That is the next level of humanity. It’s not a religious concept necessarily. It’s the reality-based next step in human evolution.

What was the moral of the story in the end?

The moral of the story all along has been that tribalism is bad. Until we transcend, pun intended, our instincts to fight for our side, or our party or our country or whatever, we’re not going to evolve. We’re not going to survive until we realize that we’re all in this together. That’s what that boiled down to on the battlefield in that moment when they lowered their weapons and made the choice to stop fighting. That was the key that unlocked transcendence for them.

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