The 100 Fans Are Going Nuts Over Bellamy's Return

It isn't exactly new information for fans of The 100 that Bellamy Blake is returning in this week's episode -- he showed up last week in the tease -- but that hasn't stopped them from inundating Twitter with love for his character ahead of his return. Bellamy, who has been with the series since the first season, was presumed dead after an explosion back in June, and given that The 100 is both a show that doesn't shy away from big character deaths, and in its final season, fans immediately started to worry that the death -- even without a body onscreen -- might stick.

Earlier this season, Bellamy discovered The Disciples, a group living on Bardo, had been essentially harvesting memories from his sister Octavia in the hopes of using information about those closest to her (especially Clarke) to help them win their war. An attempt to save her didn't go especially well, and it ended in a standoff between Bellamy, Octavia, and the Disciples, in which Octavia promised them cooperation in return for their sparing Bellamy's life.

Before the deal could be sealed, though, a trigger-happy guard set off a grenade, seemingly killing Bellamy (but more likely sending him back through the Anomaly/wormhole). After that, he was gone from the show for over a month, before returning now for what we assume will be the rest of the show's final season.

While this upcoming season marks the end of the main series, The CW has been developing a prequel series to The 100. The new show, which takes place long before the events of The 100, will have a backdoor pilot episode at some point in the final season of The 100. The CW has yet to make any decisions regarding the future of the show, but it likely wouldn't begin production any time soon given the coronavirus shutdowns. It, like the planned Arrow spinoff Green Arrow and the Canaries, got a backdoor pilot within the final season of the parent series, but The CW has yet to commit to making (or not making) either.

"They asked me to develop a prequel and there were several different avenues that we could have gone down," showrunner Jason Rothenberg recently told me of the backdoor pilot, which was titled "Anaconda" and ran in early July. "My initial thought was, let's do it in space, where as we know the Ark is coming together at this time. All the ancestors of our protagonists from the original show are up in space, but ['Anaconda'] became logistically what the prequel should be, because it made more sense for the story we were telling for season seven. I didn't want to take an episode off in our final season because every episode is so special. I wanted it to kind of be intrinsic to the story we were telling in season seven as well as being the launchpad for the prequel series."

You can see how some of the show's fans reacted to Bellamy's return, using a hashtag that lit up Twitter and has been on the trends board ever since, below.