The 100

The 100 (pronounced "The Hundred") is a post-apocalyptic science fiction drama television series that premiered on March 19, 2014, on The CW. The series, developed by Jason Rothenberg, is loosely based on the novel series of the same name by Kass Morgan. Six seasons have aired as of Summer 2019, with the seventh confirmed to be the final season.

The show starts in 2149, 97 years after nuclear war has left Earth seemingly uninhabitable. On The Ark, a space station where some of humanity still survives, 100 juvenile delinquents are sent down to Earth to determine if it’s become survivable again and to conserve precious resources on the Ark.

What starts as a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Flies quickly becomes something else as the kids realize that they’re not alone and things up on the Ark just keep getting worse. And that's just the first season.

Tropes used in The 100 include:

A Child Shall Lead Them: A common theme, especially given how young most of the main characters are.
- Clarke is the leader of the Sky People at around 17/18. Lampshaded by Abby and Kane talking about Lexa’s place as Commander.
  - Abby: “They’re being led by a child!” Kane: “So are we.”
- Selecting the next Commander involves taking the Nightblood children, holding a conclave where they all battle each other, and the last one standing is the new commander. Though Lexa was in her early 20s (still young for a leader) when we meet her, she became the Commander when she was 12.
- Octavia wins the final conclave and becomes the leader of Wonkru when she’s 16/17.
- When she takes the flame and becomes the next Commander, Madi Griffin is only 12.
Abusive Parents: Considering that a lot of the cast members are juvenile delinquents, this pops up in a few backstories.
- Raven’s mother was a drunk who traded Raven’s food rations for alcohol.
- John Murphy had a pretty loving family, until he got sick and his father stole medicine to help treat him. It didn’t help, and he was executed for the crime. Murphy’s mother then became an alcoholic who repeatedly told him that his father’s death was his fault.
Action Girl: There are a lot of them. Octavia and Echo are the best examples from the main cast. Outside of the main cast, Anya, Harper, Lexa, Luna, and Diyoza all fit. In general, Grounder women are as likely to be warriors, and therefore badass fighters, as the men.
Adaptation Displacement: The book series is mostly a footnote to the TV series at this point.
Aerith and Bob: You have some pretty normal names (John, Abigail, Marcus), some less common names (Thelonius, Octavia, Lexa), last names used as given names (Lincoln, Bellamy) and some outright bizarre ones (Jacopo, Ontari).
After the End: 97 years before the story starts, there was a large scale nuclear war that left Earth seemingly uninhabitable.
A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played with a couple ways:
- Played straight with ALIE, who was responsible for causing the nuclear war that left the world in ruins, after determining that the problem with the world was “Too many people”. The problem there is that ALIE was doing exactly what she was programmed to do, just not in the way that was expected.
- Subverted with ALIE 2.0, known as the Flame to the Grounders. It was designed to interface with human minds, to avoid making the same mistake again. It’s been used by the Grounder Commander for nearly a century, providing them with greater wisdom by storing the memories of all previous commanders along with some of the greater cognitive abilities that ALIE has. Possibly double subverted with Sheidheda, the Dark Commander. He’s able to corrupt and even possibly possess the Commander, though his evil was obvious when he was alive and is more due to himself, not the influence of the chip.
Apocalypse How: At the start of the show, we have a Planetary Class 2 (it’s presumably planetary - we almost never see anywhere outside of the Virginia/DC/Maryland area). Season 4 just barely averts Planetary Class 3, while season 5 takes it to Planetary Class 4, leaving the main characters to head off for another solar system.
Artifact Title: Happens really quickly. It’s named after the 100 juvenile delinquents send to the ground, but two of them die on the way to the ground, about ten minutes into the episode.
Asskicking Equals Authority: How the Commander of the Grounders is chosen. The conclave requires all Nightblood children to fight to the death, with the last one standing becoming the Commander.
Battle Couple: Lincoln and Octavia. Miller and Bryan. Bellamy and Echo.
Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted hard in this series. Characters spend so much time covered in dirt, blood, cuts, and bruises that it’s surprising when they look clean and healthy.
Bittersweet Ending: A few of the seasons end with this:
- Season 2 has most of the Sky People survive the fight against Mount Weather, at the cost of Clarke, Bellamy, and Monty helping to commit genocide.
- Season 3 ends with ALIE defeated, but a wave of fire and radiation on its way that will kill everyone within 6 months.
- Season 5 ends with Earth completely destroyed and uninhabitable. Monty and Harper die finding a new planet for everyone to start over on and do better this time.
Break the Cutie: Anyone who starts as a more hopeful, naive character will go through this eventually.
- Jasper was an upbeat, goofy stoner who really seemed to enjoy being on Earth. He doesn’t even get through one episode before being speared in the chest and strung up on a tree. He really goes through the ringer in season 2, at first trusting Mount Weather and finding a girlfriend/ally in Maya. Then he discovers that the Mountain Men plan to kill the 47 Sky People for their bone marrow, has to become the leader of the resistance, and is about to kill Cage Wallace when Clarke and Bellamy flood the place with radiation, killing all of the Mountain Men, Maya included. From that point, he becomes a Death Seeker and Straw Nihilist.
- Octavia starts off already having been somewhat broken, since she spent her entire life up to that point in her family’s small room on The Ark, then a prison cell. She spends most of seasons 1 and 2 trying to find somewhere to fit in, mostly with the Grounders more than the ark people. Then she gets abandoned and disowned by the Grounders when she refuses to retreat from Mount Weather. She’s almost okay, but then season 3 happens. Her brother turns against her and the Grounders, her Love Interest Lincoln is executed, and she breaks. She later kills Pike for revenge, but never feels better about it, spending most of season 4 spiraling. When she wins the conclave and allows everyone to share the bunker, she’s about to find a place... until we see what happened between seasons 4 and 5, where being ruler of the bunker turns her into a vicious tyrant and one of the Big Bad Ensemble. Unlike other examples in the show, she does at live long enough to start getting a redemption arc in season 6.
Cartwright Curse: A couple:
- Clarke has had Finn (who she had to Mercy Kill after he went crazy and killed people trying to find her), Lexa (who was accidentally killed by someone trying to kill Clarke), and less intense versions with Wells (childhood best friend with a one-sided attraction towards her) and Cillian (a doctor on Sanctum she had a one-night stand with). So far, only Niylah has avoided the curse.
- Raven has also had bad luck. She was in a relationship with Finn before Clarke was, Wick mysteriously disappeared after season 2 (we never see or hear that he dies, but there’s no way he survived the end of season 4), and then Shaw dies just as their relationship is getting started.
Cliff Hanger: After resolving the main story, each season finale ends with one to set up the main conflict of the next season:
- Season 1 ends with many of the main characters knocked out with gas grenades by what look like special ops troops. When Clarke wakes up, she’s in an all white quarantine room inside Mount Weather, revealing that they’re the Mountain Men the Grounders have been afraid of.
- Season 2 ends with Jaha and Murphy having made their way to an oddly intact mansion on an island. Murphy sees a video telling how an AI got nuclear launch codes nearly a century ago, while Jaha meets the AI itself.
- Season 3 has the revelation that ALIE was uploading human minds to the City of Light in order to make sure they would survive Praimfaya, a wave of fire and radiation that would likely kill everyone within six months.
- Season 4 ends with a time jump. Even though Earth was supposed to be survivable again after 5 years, it's been a bit more than 6 years later and no one has come down from space or out of the bunker. What Clarke thinks is her friends coming down from space turns out to be a prisoner transport ship coming back to Earth.
- Season 5 ends with the destruction of Earth, for good this time. Rather than waking up from cryosleep after ten years, it's been 125 years, Monty and Harper died but left a son, and he shows Clarke and Bellamy the new planet that Monty found, which might be somewhere they can survive and do better.
- Season 6 ends with two big ones:
  - Sheidheda has been removed from the flame, saving Madi, but escapes, presumably to take over the Eligius IV ship.
  - Diyoza's previously unborn daughter, Hope, comes out of the anomaly as an adult. She talks to Octavia, who recognizes her even though she remembered nothing from her time in the anomaly just minutes before. Hope stabs Octavia in the stomach then passes out. Bellamy tries to hold Octavia up as she's bleeding out, until the anomaly comes in to the room and she disappears in a flash of green.
Con Lang: Trigedasaleng, the language the Grounders speak. It’s based on English, but different enough to be hard to understand. In-universe, it serves as a code so that the Grounders can communicate without the Mountain Men understanding what they’re saying.
Cozy Catastrophe: Madi and Clarke seem to have settled into this between seasons 4 and 5. Sure, the world around the Valley is pretty much dead, but it provides them with just about everything they need.
Crapsack World: It’s decades after a nuclear apocalypse, so it’d be surprising if this wasn’t the case.
Death Seeker: Jasper is this in seasons 3 and 4, as well as Octavia in the first few episodes of season 6.
Defrosting Ice Queen: Clarke towards Lexa in season 2. After Costia’s death, Lexa was a strong believer that ”Love is Weakness”, but spending time with Clarke, seeing a fellow leader who was like her, caused her to revisit that idea.
First-Name Basis
- Almost everyone calls John Murphy “Murphy”. The exceptions are Abby (not quite a Parental Substitute) and Emori. Anyone else calling him “John” is treated as sinister.
- Only Miller’s father and boyfriends have called him “Nate” or “Nathan”.
From Bad to Worse: Many, many people don’t think through their actions. In the first season, it’s mostly a case of characters (justifiably) holding the Idiot Ball. In later seasons, the characters are smarter, but the circumstances are much worse.
Genocide Dilemma: In the finale of season 2, Monty reverses the ventilation system to allow radiation into Mount Weather, which would let the Sky People escape unharmed, at the cost of killing all of the Mountain Men. Clarke and Bellamy decide to pull the lever, killing well over 300 people, including many innocent civilians.
Grey and Gray Morality: With a couple notable exceptions, everyone falls somewhere in the grey middle of morality. Frequently stated by the characters as “Maybe there are no good guys”.
Heel Face Revolving Door: Many characters do this, even the protagonists. Possibly exemplified by Murphy, who does this to such an extent that other characters call him out on it.
I'm a Humanitarian: Wonkru during the “Dark Year”. It actually got much worse than mere cannibalism. It was made a crime, punishable by death, not to be a cannibal. The first person killed for this is a man who refused to eat his brother.
In Name Only: Just about. This is an incredibly loose adaptation of the novels, with really only the general premise and some character names kept from the novels. Considering the show was in production before the first novel was published, it’s not that surprising.
Killed Off For Real: They don’t play around with death on this show. When someone dies, you’re going to see it and it’s going to stick.
- Played with in Season 6 with the Primes. They avoid death by downloading their brains to Mind Drives and uploading them to new bodies. Even then, wiping, smashing, or losing the Drive can lead to their actual death.
Last-Name Basis: (John) Murphy, (Nathan) Miller, (Eric) Jackson, (Jacapo) Sinclair are almost never referred to by their first names.
Last Fertile Region: The Shallow Valley in season 5.
Love Interest Traitor: Lexa, ordering her army to retreat as she and Clarke are leading them into battle at Mount Weather. They do eventually reconcile, but it takes a long time.
Love Triangle: Averted more than you’d expect from the teen drama show that it starts off as. When Clarke discovers that Finn already was in a relationship with Raven, she immediately cuts off the relationship that had just started to develop.
Moral Myopia: A frequent issue the characters run into on this show. Almost everything is permissible if it’s done for your people or family, and the struggle to rise above that is a constant theme of the show.
Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Each season has a completely different conflict than the one before:
- Season 1 is about the delinquents trying to survive against nature and the Grounders, while up on the Ark is a fight against dwindling resources.
- Season 2 has the delinquents and the Ark brought back together, trying to work with each other again. There’s also a lot more of the Grounders and their culture, with all of them fighting against the Mountain Men. The season ends with breaking the alliance between the Sky People and the Grounders, Clarke, Bellamy, and Monty killing all of the Mountain Men, and Clarke leaving rather than returning to the camp.
- Season 3 has the war between the Sky People and Grounders reignited, with a faction of the Sky People fighting for a more peaceful existence. There’s also infighting with the grounders, especially between the coalition and Ice Nation, and eventually all of it gets swallowed up by ALIE and the City of Light.
- Season 4 is a fight against time, as Praimfaya (a deadly wave of fire and radiation) is approaching and will kill everyone, so they need to find a way to hide out long enough to survive it.
- Season 5 jumps forward 6 years from the end of Season 4 and involves new character dynamics between existing characters from the time away, along with a battle against new antagonists, a prison ship full of miners who were put in suspended animation and remember the Earth before it was destroyed.
- Season 6 is on a moon in another solar system, where the main characters find themselves in an alien world with different nature, ruled by a theocracy built around reincarnation.
Once a Season: Clarke has to pull a lever in a very tense situation in the season finale. Has led to fans interpreting an interesting relationship between her and levers.
One Name Only: The Grounders. If they need a more specific name than just their given name, their clan name is included (“Lexa kom Trikru”). Madi is the one aversion, taking the name Madi Griffin after she’s adopted by Clarke.
Parental Substitute: Quite a few.
- Abby acts as this to Raven. Makes it particularly hurtful when Abby helps Diyoza and causes them to hurt Raven not out of fear for her safety, but to feed her drug addiction.
- Indra is this to Octavia. Considering that it’s two seasons between meeting Indra and meeting her actual daughter, it seems the feeling is pretty mutual.
- Kane acts like this towards Bellamy, though Bellamy never lets Kane forget his part in Aurora Blake’s death, so it ends up being a little one-sided.
- Clarke is this to Madi, though their relationship is closer than most others like this in the show. Clarke refers to Madi as her daughter, not like a daughter, and Madi goes by Madi Griffin, taking Clarke’s last name.
Race Lift: Happens In-Universe. The Primes’s body hopping is severely limited by who has the royal blood, so different incarnations of the same person are often different races.
Save the Day, Turn Away: Clarke, at the end of Season 2. Even though she’s the de facto leader of Arkadia, she can’t bear to return after what she had to do to save everyone, so she goes off on her own, leaving things in Bellamy’s hands.
Serial Escalation: Each season, the conflict gets bigger and weirder:
- Season 1 is a conflict between a bunch of kids down on Earth fighting the Grounders, while the adults fight dwindling resources up in space.
- Season 2 continues the fight against the Grounders while adding in Mount Weather, which has crazy levels of technology compared even to the Ark.
- Season 3 introduces Grounder clans beyond just the Woods Clan, adding in a tyrannical regime taking over Arkadia from the inside, and a battle against the AI that ended the world the first time.
- Season 4 has Praimfaya, a wave of fire and radiation that will kill everyone and the increasingly desperate measures taken to try and survive it.
- Season 5 has the fight over the single area on Earth that survived Praimfaya, fought between the existing characters and a group of former prisoners on an off-world mining colony, who have advanced weaponry and remember the Earth from before it was destroyed.
- Season 6 brings us to Sanctum, a moon in another solar system, which they find already inhabited by another mining mission, which has since become a nearly two-century old theocracy built around reincarnation.
Set the World on Fire: The Damocles missiles were designed by the Eligius prisoners to do this on a local scale, threatening cities with destruction if they weren’t allowed to reintegrate into society. When McCreary realizes he’s losing the battle at Shallow Valley, he drops the missiles, destroying the valley, which is the last livable place on Earth, effectively setting the world on fire.
Theme Naming: Done in and out of universe:
- The main characters take their names from science fiction writers (Arthur C. Clarke, Edward Bellamy, Octavia Butler, H.G. Wells). This could be just a theme decided by the writers, or a reference to their ancestors all being astronauts and therefore likely to have a stronger than average interest in science fiction.
- The Grounders tend to have their names come from historical/mythological figures (Lincoln, Gustus, Indra) or named after nearby locations or landmarks (also Lincoln, Alexandria, Ontario, Memorial Botanical Gardens, Roanoke, Niagara Falls). For most of them, this is the reason they do so in-universe, not just an inside joke with the writers.
- Octavia’s name makes for a great Fridge Brilliance moment: she’s constantly torn between the Grounders and the Sky People, and her name fits both the science fiction and historical figure naming trend.
Thicker Than Water: Bellamy and Octavia. Bellamy is willing to kill Chancellor Jaha to get a place on the ship going down to Earth with her, and when they get down to the ground, he remains fiercely protective of her. This doesn’t mean that they always like each other, however - as early as season 1, Bellamy tells her “my life ended the day you were born”, and it goes downhill from there.
Tyrant Takes the Helm: Played a couple of different ways:
- Abby is specifically trying to avoid this in the pilot by using excessive amounts of medical resources to save Chancellor Jaha, since the alternative is Kane taking over. Given how his character develops later, this fear is somewhat unfounded.
- Played straight with Pike being elected chancellor in season 3. His first act is to pardon himself and plan a massacre of 300 Grounders who were sent to protect Arkadia.
You All Meet in a Cell: Many of the main characters knew each other a bit before, but they really all meet each other in the drop ship, not sure what’s going on, until they’re told they’re being sent down to Earth.