The 100’s Jason Rothenberg Compares Season 6 to the Beginning

The CW debuted the sixth season of The 100 tonight, and if you felt a little twinge of deja vu, it is not just you. With the survivors landing on a new planet, unsure of what to expect and not entirely prepared for what they will find, the parallels to the show’s pilot were obvious — and intentional, according to executive producer Jason Rothenberg.

“They were forced to grow up very quickly” in season one, Rothenberg told ComicBook.com. “A very cool fact about our new story in season six is, it does have strong echoes to season one. In season one, the 100 were kids, landing on a planet that was mysterious and unknown to them, and they needed to figure out how to survive on it. In many ways, that’s the story here. They’re the same people, obviously six years plus older now. Not that much older, but six to 10 years older and they’re landing on another mysterious world that they know nothing about and they’re gonna have to figure out how to survive on…of course, now they’re bringing with them all of the emotional baggage and lessons and things they’ve done. So it’s really, I think, kind of a fascinating thing to see when looking at it through the lens of season one. How different they are now, how sort of different they are as they encounter the challenges and threats and various sort of mysteries of this new world.”

Those mysteries are going to be many, and while the survivors will be facing a sometimes-inhospitable planet and welcome (and thus forced to present a united front), that does not change the fact that this is not actually season one. There are years of baggage that are coming along with the characters, and there will be some internal strife — including some disagreement as to exactly how to handle it when things get tough on this new world.

“In many ways, they will have a chance to breathe and a chance to sort of engage each other over what they’ve done to each other,” Rothenberg added. “Certainly in the most recent season, what each has kind of done to each other. They also revert back to those bonds from the six-year time jump, where space crew became space crew and Clarke and Madi became a unit and Octavia and Blodreina became the leader of this sort of underground crew. They’re all together now. They’re all together now; they will be viewed as a sort of homogeneous group, and of course those divisions internally still exist. There are still those bonds; the people who were part of space crew forged in those years together are still strong. Those relationships still exist. Clarke is still Madi’s mother. I think they will all kind of begin to wrap their arms around each other and come together as a group. They are the earthlings, they are the Earth people now, so I think that’ll be an interesting thing for people to see while still having divisions internally, just like in life.”

The 100 airs on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT, following episodes of The Flash on The CW.

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