The world feels right once again. Sort of.
Everything feels right in the sense that The 100 is back after like a year of being gone, but nothing on The 100 is right. Clarke is a red-haired mountain woman on the run. Bellamy’s got a girlfriend we’ve never seen before. Abby’s struggling with balancing her multiple jobs. Raven’s disabled. Octavia and Lincoln are arguing. Jasper’s a total disaster, and he’s punching Shawn Mendes in the face. Meanwhile, Jaha’s on some kind of crazy drug trip and hanging out with a computer.
We were particularly heartbroken to see what had become of Jasper, who has shaved his head and taken up some serious drinking in the wake of Maya’s death last season.
We didn’t realize how tense things had gotten until we were nearly shocked out of our chairs when Jasper started singing in the jeep, and soon everyone was singing in the jeep. It was so great to see these kids—Bellamy, Jasper, Monty, Raven, and Miller—actually acting like kids for just a second, doing car karaoke like we still do on a regular basis.
The joy didn’t last long, however, because they were interrupted by a beacon from the Ark, which is going off in another sector. That also may have been the most joy we’ll see all season, according to executive producer Jason Rothenberg.
CLICK: Jason Rothenberg and Eliza Taylor preview season 3
“I felt like it would be nice to come back to that kind of an energy,” Rothenberg tells E! News of the peaceful, somewhat organized nature of Arkadia (formerly called Camp Jaha). “And there is that Almost Famous scene, but you know, the story’s bleak and it’s about survival. It’s not going to be filled with moments like that, because it wouldn’t be true to what’s happened in the world that they’re living in.”
“The world they’re living in” is one that’s seriously dangerous, and it’s especially dangerous for (and because of) their missing friend Clarke. As they learn from Indra, Clarke has become somewhat of a legend among the Grounder clans, known as the deadly Wanheda, which is exactly the opposite of what she was trying to achieve when she left in the first place.
“You don’t really see this happen, but it’s like everywhere she goes, ‘I heard it was 10 thousand people that she killed.’ ‘I heard it was 20 thousand,'” executive producer Jason Rothenberg tells E! News. “She just wants to escape, run away, and not be that person anymore, and she can’t run away.”
Her attempts to run away have included dying her hair a nice red color, killing animals with her bare hands, and sleeping with a nice girl who works at the trading post where she reloads on supplies.
“Jason [Rothenberg]wanted that to come from a pure need for human connection,” star Eliza Taylor explained to E! News about the scene. “It’s not about love, it’s not about romance, it’s ‘I need to feel good, and I need someone to hold me,’ basically. That’s all it is.”
CLICK: Watch Shawn Mendes’ acting debut
“Romance in the show really doesn’t come along very often,” Taylor continues. “I feel like everyone Clarke touches dies, so that’s not good. But that’s actually the same for a lot of the characters on the show—as soon as something’s looking like it’s going to go well, it goes the opposite way, which is what we love and hate about it.”
We guess that means we shouldn’t read too much into any spark with that hot Ice Nation guy who now has Clarke kidnapped, but we’ll just have to see how that plays out.
Over in crazytown, Murphy’s spent the past three months in that bunker, watching those videos over and over again and eating through all the food.
The video shows that Chris, the guy who created Jaha’s new AI friend, A.L.I.E., built her to resemble his friend Becca, and A.L.I.E. basically tells Becca that she’s programmed to fix the problem of “too many people.” Another video shows Chris shooting himself, and his friends discovering that A.L.I.E. has been let out.
Murphy was about to suffer the same fate as Chris, but then the door opened, and he ended up running into Jaha again. Jaha’s convinced that A.L.I.E. is responsible for saving the world, and that the nuclear warhead is the secret to helping A.L.I.E. finish what she started, whatever that is. He wants Murphy to drink the Kool-aid along with him, but Murphy’s smarter than that, or dumber than that, depending on how this goes.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
The 100 premiere continues next Thursday at 9 p.m. on the CW.
CLICK: The 100’s stars in and out of costume
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