The 100 Ending: Fan Opinions
Something that has been on this writers mind lately is the ending of my beloved show. How will it end? How do I want it end? When will it end? (After season seven, obvs. A thirteen episode season five, sixteen episode season six, and a thirteen episode season seven would bring the ending episode to number 100. How much does that need to happen?) I know and love this show, it’s a fact of my life. Because this is a fact of my very existence, I know that a happy ending is very unlikely despite how much I might want my faves to catch a break and live happily ever after.
I reached out to a handful of fellow fans with two questions:
1) For you, what would be the best possible ending for The 100?
2) Now putting that aside, realistically given the nature of the show what do you think will actually happen?
Read their answers below!
Check out how fans think #The100 should end. Share on XAshley:
Okay this is still kind of generic but here goes. Let’s say we go with Jess’s idea with 7 seasons and 100 epsiodes. I personally don’t know what to expect from this season other than dark Octavia. Possibly hostile miners and a hopefully epic bellarke reunion. I am a sucker for angst with a happy ending. I want it all I want them to build a settlement and have everyone pair off and start their families and essentially repopulating earth. I want Bellarke babies and for them to live a long happy life together, raise Madi together and become grandparents. Marcus and Abby live with them until they die. Raven and Murphy, Monty and Harper, Miller and Jackson. Octavia and Niylah. And everyone is alive and thriving. I want to see Octavia take charge with Gaia so they have that balance. And while they do have their foes and scary moments they all get through it together and can finally live without worry if they will make it to tomorrow.
As for what I think will happen? It’s so hard for me to decide because I have not been right in the past haha. And if we get season 5 plus 2 more seasons there are so many things that can happen it’s crazy. J Roth did say we’re weren’t going to get a happy ending I expect a bunch of our mains to die including Bellamy or Clarke or both. The one left standing in the very bloody end I can see is Madi.
Kels:
- For me the best possible ending would definitely be a hopeful one. Clarke and the squad happy and alive. Building for a brighter future or even a flash forward that shows they did build a better future for next generations. Maybe even something like Madi’s perspective as an adult of the world now vs what it was when Clarke first found her. 2. Realistically I think this story has always been sort of a tragedy and it will end as one. With our mains, specifically Clarke and Bellamy dying for their people in one final gesture. And I guess there can be hope in that too (in that tragic way of course)
Rayna:
1) I think the best ending would obviously be peace. The Arkadians have just defeated their last antagonist. The arkadians watch as whatever it is falls/dies/shuts down. We get a small flash forward (bc I’m sick of time jumps) and see the remaining delinquents on a hike. They have peace now so they can do stuff like that. Or they could be scavenging for a plant or something. But either way, they go out and find the dropship, it was part of the land untouched by praimfaya. They didn’t realize where they were but they come into a clearing and there it is, their first home, looming over them. They’re all quiet as they stand in a line, looking at it. Murphy makes some snide comment and they all laugh and start exploring the clearing. We see them come across pieces of their past, a gun, a skull, a pack of berries. Clarke and Bellamy walk up the ramp and look up at the ship. Bellamy says “Remember when you didn’t want me to open the door because you said it could be toxic?” Clarke laughs and says “I wasn’t entirely wrong.” Bellamy laughs, brings her in for a side hug and a forehead kiss (because I’m garbage), “no, no you weren’t.” Zoom out and see the delinquents all hugging and laughing. BOOM!!!!!
2) realistically, it’ll end like Rogue One. They’re facing an enemy they just can’t defeat and this is it. The arkadians are gathered to watch their impending doom. Bellamy & Clarke are in the front. They grab hands. Clarke says “The ground. That was the dream.” Boom.
Jamie:
The reason I watch “The 100” is, weirdly enough, the 100 (the 102 counting Bellamy and Raven), so my ideal ending for the show is to have what’s left of the delinquents finding a home on the ground, preferably led by Bellarke (who get to live happily ever after together). However, knowing this show, I’m pretty convinced that the ending will actually be a ripoff of Rogue One, with Clarke and/or Bellamy sacrificing themselves to save everybody else. As much as the writers love their “shocking” deaths, I can’t imagine both of them will make it out of the series alive.
Claire:
- I have a hard time with #2 because I think Jason’s messaging about how dark the show is, and how dark he wants us to THINK it is, bumps up against the standard conventions of a CW prime-time television show in some interesting ways, so predicting how he’ll go is a question mark. He also said some stuff when he was on Meta Station that seemed to imply that maybe he had had an end in mind from the outset, when he was thinking about it being a 5-season show, and that possibly as they go along that that has shifted, and maybe even HE doesn’t know just yet, so like how can we really be following the trail of breadcrumbs to predict an ending that he may not have written yet. Like if the show was on HBO or something, I would say that the most likely ending would be for Clarke and Bellamy to die together in the show’s final moments (and maybe other faves too) to in some way permanently secure the peaceful and permanent and safe future of all humanity. So we’d see people like Kabby and Marper and Gaia and Octavia and some of the others like carry on forward and maybe somebody has a baby and we know that long-term humanity is going to be okay but it’s only possible in some way BECAUSE Clarke and Bellamy died to save them.
in terms of the ending that I WANT, I actually wrote it in a fic and I’ll share it with you:
So, obviously some of this stuff is slightly different now because I wrote it before s4 so there’s no bunker or space or whatever, but the basic premise is the same, which is that my perfect ending would include a flash-forward so we see the civilization that they rebuild and all of our main characters are remembered and celebrated as legends
” It wasn’t given to Marcus and Abby to know how their story would end while they were still living it – just as it is not given to any of us to know, when we are born into the world, what will become of our lives. Thelonious called them a “transitional generation.” Keep humanity alive on the Ark, that’s all they had to do. They were like Moses, guiding their people to a Promised Land they themselves were never meant to see. They could never have predicted Earth. They could never have predicted this love. They never saw any of this coming. There are so many things they don’t know about the future unfolding before them, as they lie in their fur-draped bed in the King of the Ice Nation’s castle, listening to each other’s gentle breathing as the sun streams in through a high stone window. They don’t know about the geodesic domes Raven will invent, the rows of hydroponic greenhouses Jasper and Monty will design to create self-sustaining food sources, or the communication link Clarke will establish through the Commander’s Flame with Becca that allows her to shut down the three nuclear plants nearest to Ice Nation, leaving their mountain runoff water supply uncontaminated. They don’t know, yet, that they will live. It’s not six months, it’s a lifetime, a long and good one, with a camp full of children and green things growing under a still-blue sky. They will finish the work Jake Griffin started, to find the Sky People a permanent, lasting home. And hundreds of years from now, children will walk through the wreckage of those now-empty glass domes and tell each other the stories of how the people from the earth and the people from the sky united to survive the Great Storm and rebuild the world. They will run through the fields, now bursting with fruit and flowers and trees in bloom, and they will know the names of the men and women who came together here centuries ago to build them this home. Every year, on the feast of New Unity Day, the children will perform a pageant depicting the day the Grounders, Sky People and Ice Nation finally moved into their new home, Kongedacapa (“Coalition City”) to weather the Great Storm together. They will gather around the Eden Tree – its vast, ageless canopy of green casting a sweet cool shade over the center of the city – with sticks as toy swords and crowns made of daisies, to honor the great heroes who once saved the human race. Roan the Ice King, whose land became their home. Lexa and Luna, greatest of all the Commanders. Clarke Griffin and Bellamy Blake, who led the army of children from the sky through dangers untold. Lincoln the Gentle and Octavia the Bold, first of the Grounders and Sky People to believe that together their people could know peace. But the greatest honor is reserved for a boy with a round knot symbol drawn on his forearm in the ink of wild berries, and a girl with two small rings on a chain – centuries old, preserved with care – around her neck, who kneel side by side for the ceremonial watering of the Eden Tree. Marcus the Peaceful and Abigail the Life-Giver, the Last Chancellors, who fell from the stars to find love at the moment they thought the world was ending. The boy and the girl will kneel on the spot where Marcus and Abigail were wed so many hundreds of years ago, when the tree was first planted in the soil after the Great Storm ended, and perform the ritual. Water from the river that runs through what was once Ice Nation is poured from a stone bowl that once belonged to Commander Lexa onto the roots of the tree that Chancellor Marcus Kane tended on the Ark as a child. It will be a fable to them, a legend of long-ago heroes and warriors. They will make their parents tell them the tales of Clever Raven, who never met a riddle she couldn’t solve, or the sinister Mountain Men who once kidnapped children to lock them underground, or the love of the Last Chancellors who changed the course of history. They’re stories, really. Not people. But the thing that matters is that they lived. They lived, and their people lived, and the children will remember.”
Here’s a link to the fic itself – (very nsfw, but just in case people want the context – http://archiveofourown.org/works/7755886 )
I think Jason has a desired perception of himself and of the show as being deeply shocking, and sometimes it is, but also sometimes it grafts very neatly onto conventional TV plot beats for the kind of show that it is. This is why I feel like it’s pretty likely that Kane and Abby will make it to the end, or at least live until towards the end of the final season (I could see them going out together in the finale too) – because as much as they say “NO ONE IS SAFE!”, big deaths are pretty clearly telegraphed in advance and they don’t kill off series regulars unless the actor is not well-liked or they want to leave.
Like there have been rumors about some actors having been hard to get along with, and some clearly had bad blood with Jason, so they craft a story around writing those guys off, but outside of that, the conventions of TV dictate that you don’t kill off a series regular unless it opens up more story ground than it closes off. So our visceral fangirl panic any time we think our faves are in trouble is often at odds with the practical realities of how television is made, which is that Ian and Paige are adults with children and are looking to settle into a long-term gig and probably have bulletproof contracts, in addition to being very well-liked by both Jason and the cast. which isn’t to say that I don’t have a ton of anxiety about their well-being, but I rarely feel like it’s founded in fact, it’s just like gut panic. So I feel like that same principle writ large applies to my feelings about the finale. The show is dark for the kind of show it is, but it is still the kind of show it is. It’s still pointing towards the ultimate trajectory of “some group of people from multiple different clans will establish a new society and rebuild humanity” which means the end is ultimately going to be hopeful and not nihilistic in SOME fundamental way.
Nicki:
The kind of ending I want for the show doesn’t need to be “happy” or “perfect” or “peaceful.” Something more like everybody looks at each other and sighs then squares their shoulders, Bellarke grab each others hands and they march off to fix the new problem. But I want characters to have a bit of hope and some good relationships while they go fight whatever their new problem is together.
Another flash-forward would be cool too if they did it right: everyone older and with families and cabins. But then something happens. That’s how I see it ending/want it to end, like you think they’re finally okay but then something happens. Not “Surprise! Clarke dies!” But here’s Bellarke and their two kids, working in the garden and outside their house. They seem happy and healthy. Then Indra comes riding past saying, “The desert clan is matching on Polis! We need your help!” The story ends but it continues because we know they can do it.
Kalista:
I would personally want the original delinquents to be on their own. The show has only given us a look at the same area season after season when there’s an entire word out there to explore. The show has also alluded to “passing the baton” from the adults to the younger generation in the past but I’d want it to be more concrete. An ending where there are no more adults left and what’s left of the original 100 really are their people’s last chance. Kind of how it started in season one where they were sent to see if the earth was habitable and to repopulate it if the ark hadn’t come down. I would hope the show’s ending would pay some kind of homage to season one (perhaps one last look at the drop ship) while making a mass exodus to a new paradise somewhere else in the world that’s uninhabited where they can finally settle down and be happy. The ending should be a new beginning; where they start to rebuild for the future of mankind. Now as for how it will actually end, I’m unsure. The one thing I’m certain of however, is that it won’t be happy, which is unfortunate. As a viewer, after all of the pain and suffering the characters have gone through, naturally I want some kind of payoff. Or else what was the point, you know? But I’ll have to keep my expectations realistic and remind myself of who’s actually writing the show.
There you have it. All answers seem to be born in the same vein: We hope for hope but have low expectations of it because The 100 is set in a brutal universe that thrives on our tears. Basically, Jason, CW, Jesus, Santa? Let there be hope…..and also don’t kill of our faves, please.
Thus concludes my final article for Post Apocalyptic Media. I want to thank Derek and Stephanie for inviting me here and letting me write for them and bounce ideas off of them and basically chatter their ears off about all things The 100 and of course its fandom. It’s been a true pleasure writing here and I cannot thank you enough for the opportunity.
To all the fans (or non fans, I don’t know who reads my stuff) thank you so much for joining me on this journey. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
xoxo,
Heather
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