While we’re loving the frantic pace of The 100 season 2, we hope we’ll get the chance to learn more about the show’s mythology and its fascinating characters.
Due to its breakneck pace and action-heavy storylines, The 100 isn’t exactly a flashback-friendly show.
In fact, only two episodes so far have been built up around flashbacks: “My Sister’s Keeper,” which revealed Octavia and Bellamy’s troubling past, and “Spacewalker,” which sent off Finn Collins in style (and featured a surprising twist to his backstory).
Both episodes taught us valuable information about the characters they focused on, and allowed us to learn more about the world our heroes came from.
But although there are plenty more character origin stories we’d like to see, it’s almost impossible for the show to do these kinds of episodes anymore considering its multi-track story format: with A, B, C and sometimes even D storylines to advance in each episode, there’s hardly time to throw flashbacks in the mix, too!
Related: The 100 season 2, episode 12 recap: Things we lost in the fire
However, with two heart-stopping seasons under its belt, we think it’s time The 100 gave us a moment to breathe, and allowed us to learn a little bit more about some key characters and past events that have shaped the show as we know it.
The last four episodes of The 100 season 2 will undoubtedly be more fast-paced than ever, as the Grounders and Sky People (hopefully) take down Mount Weather. And we’re sure a few massive twists will once again shake up the world, in anticipation of the third season of the show.
But while we wait to find out who lives, dies and falls in love, let’s have some fun, and imagine some possible flashback episodes we’d like to see in The 100 season 3:
5. How Murphy, Monty, Jasper and the others landed in confinement
Don’t forget that while we have grown to love most of the misfit delinquents, we still don’t know how exactly they ended up as part of the 100 in the first place! Although the show has told us some of their backstories, we’ve never actually seen them – and as “Spacewalker” proved, there’s often more to someone’s story than there appears to be.
One of the most interesting characters this year is Murphy, whom we’ve come to see in a more sympathetic light after he shared his tragic past with Raven earlier this season. But we don’t just want to hear about it! Everyone loves Murphy, and we think an episode showing him going from a normal teenager to a rage-filled sociopath would go over very well with the audience.
Plus, it’d just be fun to spend some time with some of the side-characters, as they transition from glorified extras to important players in the game. Miller and Harper have already had more substantial roles in season 2, and unless they’re killed off, we could see them become even more important in season 3 – and in that case, exploring their past will help us get to know them better. Plus, what about that girl Bellamy, Finn and Murphy saved earlier this season? And Wick? There are a lot of characters just waiting to be explored.
4. Kane’s backstory (with a surprise twist?)
Okay, we admit that this one’s a bit of a stretch. But there’s been so much speculation about Kane possibly being the father of Bellamy or Octavia… don’t you want to know if it could be true?
Of course The 100 isn’t a soap opera, and the show has improved tremendously by steering clear of the CW tropes that haunted it in early season 1. But sometimes, it’s fun to add a bit of family drama to the mix. The 100 novel author Kass Morgan knows that better than anybody – her own twist on Bellamy’s parentage was quite a gamechanger!
And even if the writers (probably wisely) avoid that tired “I’m your father” cliché, there are other ways to build on Kane’s character by showing more of his backstory, what with his mother being a religious figurehead, and pre-Earth Kane being willing to murder (!) Abby to further his cause. Plus, what happened to his girlfriend? So many missing pieces of this puzzle.
3. A Grounder-centric episode
Ever since Lexa revealed that she was once Anya’s second, we’ve been dying to see a flashback episode shedding some light on these characters’ pasts. Maybe we could find out how Lexa was chosen as the next Commander, how she united the 12 tribes, how she lost Costia, and how this all affected her bond with Anya.
It’d also be a great way to bring back Dichen Lachman, who we’ve been sorely missing since her character was killed off earlier this year.
A Grounder-centric episode would also give us further insight into how the Grounder society works. We’ve had so many tantalizing clues about the Grounders’ customs and laws, but it’d be great to have a whole hour exploring their world, pre-Sky People invasion.
We could get an origin story for Indra, learn more about Lincoln’s troubled relationship with his kinsmen, and discover what made these characters who they are. There’s so much Grounder history to explore, and a flashback episode would probably only scratch the surface!
2. The origin story of the Ark
The Ark station started out as 13 individual space stations; 12 of these banded together after one was “lost to conflict.” Originally, only 400 human souls survived in space, but by the time the 100 were sent to the ground, over 2,500 people inhabited the colony. All of this is what we’ve been told, but what are the human stories at the core of this development?
We know from the show that the 13 original stations were inhabited by people from a variety of countries (including the U.S., Britain, Venezuela and Uganda) who escaped the nuclear war. How were they chosen? What happened on the day of the launch? Did anyone make it aboard by chance, who happened to be related to our present-day heroes? (If Finn wasn’t dead, we’d totally sit through an hour’s worth of story about his teenage delinquent great-grandmother who snuck aboard the ship by accident, and fell in love with the technician who discovered her in the cargo hold… but now that would just be depressing.)
We can imagine a great flashback episode centering on the ancestors of Clarke, Bellamy, Raven and the others; it might seem like a jarring change of pace, but it’d also add more depth to the universe of the series.
Plus, Thelonious Jaha is, what, in his late 40s? We can therefore assume that his grandparents were around when the bombs hit and the Ark station was formed. In theory, he would have had first-hand accounts of life on the Ground. How did this affect him? How was he elected Chancellor? How did the government form? It’s all very Battlestar Galactica, and we want to see the writers’ take on it!
1. The evolution of the Grounders
There’s no denying that the most fascinating aspect of The 100 is the Grounder mythology, which we are slowly introduced to as we spend more time with Lexa, Indra, Lincoln and the others. But the tidbits of information have only whet our appetite, and we want to know more!
Isn’t it interesting, for example, that the group of human survivors most closely tied to the world – growing up in the ruins of cities and famous landmarks, as opposed to hidden away in a mountain or on a space station – is the one whose society has changed the most drastically over the past 100 years?
Only 100 years have passed since the nuclear war tore apart the world as we know it, and left the surviving humans (who presumably hid in bunkers) to rebuild in a toxic wasteland. 100 years may seem like a long time, but even taking into account the Grounders’ shorter lifespan, that’s at most four generations – meaning that, say, Indra’s grandparents were probably alive when the bombs hit.
That’s a very short amount of time to form a whole new society, complete with an original language and belief system. What the hell happened there? They know English, so it’s not like their ancestors suddenly went mute or anything.
It’d be great to see the writers try to outline the evolution of the Grounders, and show us how the war-torn survivors managed to carve out a living during the first horrible years on the Ground. Their children would be born deformed and broken, but a few would have been unaffected by the radiation, and these were allowed to live, being raised to breed a new race of humans.
How did the come to form these warrior-based societies? Why are they fighting each other at all, considering how precious a healthy human life must have been to the original war survivors who realized that humanity was suddenly a threatened species? Unlike in space, where the 12 tribes banded together to survive, on the ground the 12 tribes broke apart, and have only recently reunited. That’s an interesting parallel, which we’d love to see explored on the show.
Our list of questions only keeps growing the more the world of the show expands, and as we enter the third season of The 100, we’d like to see some of the origin stories shown rather than told.
Do you want to see ‘The 100’ do more flashbacks?
Of course, despite our desire to explore the world of the show, we love The 100 just the way it is. The 100 isn’t Lost, after all, and we like the fact that it’s an action-reaction kind of storytelling, which doesn’t leave much time for the characters to sit around and reflect on their past sins.
But every time the show does do a flashback, it’s usually incredibly informative, and changes our view of the characters in some way.
And there are so many fantastic characters we’d like to spend more time with, and learn more about – and since it’s all action and no filler in the present, flashbacks might be our only way to discover what made the characters who they are. This, in turn, would make their gruesome fates affect us even more.
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