The 100 Creator Talks the Planned Prequel Series

With the end of The 100, the years-long story of a hundred survivors of a dead Earth, fighting to find a new and more peaceful home for themselves in space, has concluded with the ending series creator Jason Rothenberg has been building to for the majority of the show’s final season. With the coronavirus pandemic changing the face of television, the series’ finale happened almost in a vacuum and it’s hard to know what the odds are of the prequel that has been planned going forward. Both it and Green Arrow and the Canaries, a planned Arrow spinoff, are in limbo as Warner Bros. Television, The CW, and more or less everybody tries to figure out what TV looks like in 2021 and beyond.

The first order of business, of course, was to send characters that the fans have loved for years off in fine fashion. After that, Rothenberg turns his attention to developing what the history of their society would look like — and what brought them to the perilous moment that started the original series.

“This is the end for them, but it won’t be an awful life,” Rothenberg said of last week’s finale. “It’ll be a good life.”

Fans always ant more of the thing they love, but The 100 is having its cake and eating it too, a bit: Rothenberg is developing a prequel series, which can expand on the world (and even the families of belvoed characters) without spoiling the ending he gave them in the main series.

“I think that’s fair to say,” Rothenberg told ComicBook.com. “Hopefully it gives people some peace of mind to know that their characters are going to be okay, at least that group of them anyway. And you’re right, the sequel is the prequel, a number of characters are… we do have plans, hopefully if we are lucky enough to get the series ordered to go to space and meet their ancestors, all of their great-great grandparents and uncles of Bellamy, and the Arkadia, and everybody else’s really.”

That’s more or less what he told us back when “Anaconda,” the series’ prequel episode (and thus the de facto backdoor pilot for the prequel) was airing earlier this year.

“They asked me to develop a prequel, and there were several different avenues that we could have gone down,” Rothenberg said. “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 protagonist in the original show from the original 100 are up in space.’ But then this became kind of … We keyed it into what the prequel should be because it made more sense for the story we were telling in season seven.”

You can see The 100 finale on The CW’s website, and catch up with previous seasons on Netflix. Vudu is offering a bundle deal of the complete series to own for $30.