Hypable speaks to The 100 cast and crew about the upcoming season 5 at WonderCon 2018.
We’re now almost exactly one month away from The 100 season 5 premiere episode “Eden,” which airs on April 24 at 9/8c on The CW.
Related: Choices, wolves and venom: Richard Harmon previews Murphy’s journey in The 100 season 5 (exclusive)
To promote the long-awaited fifth season, cast members Eliza Taylor (Clarke), Bob Morley (Bellamy), Christopher Larkin (Monty), Lindsey Morgan (Raven), Richard Harmon (Murphy), Jarod Joseph (Miller), Sachin Sahel (Jackson) and Tasya Teles (Echo) attended WonderCon 2018 in Anaheim, along with showrunner Jason Rothenberg.
They did a panel discussion, and the first 15 minutes of the premiere episode was screened for fans! See our Twitter recap for details.
The cast and crew also participated in a number of press roundtables, with Pamela Gocobachi representing Hypable and asking several of The 100 fans’ burning questions.
Here are our roundtable interviews, starting with Richard Harmon talking about Murphy’s state of mind in The 100 season 5:
Murphy’s mind is “disheveled” at the start of season 5, as six years with nothing to do is “a little too much to handle” for him, according to Harmon.
He also reveals that the actors had to come up with a lot of what had happened in those six years, because they didn’t have a lot of flashbacks. But “throughout the season, you’ll learn a lot about what we went through.”
In this interview, Harmon reveals that Murphy will have a “lovely storyline with Raven,” and talks about how much he enjoys the dynamic those two characters have developed.
While he won’t go into specifics about which new characters he’ll be interacting with, he does give a shoutout to actor Mike Dopud, who was announced as part of the Eligus crew quite late during filming.
“They become family quite quickly,” he says of the newcomers, also including Ivana Milicevic, William Miller and Jordan Bolger.
Season 5 felt like a “blank check” for the actors in terms of what they could do with the characters; they got to “let go and add new things.” Interestingly, one of the things Harmon let go of was Murphy’s “redemption arc.”
As for Bellamy and Murphy, Harmon says their relationship “might surprise you,” with Bellamy being Murphy’s closest friend “and the one who believes in him the most.”
Next up is Bob Morley (Bellamy), who talks about Bellamy wanting to go back to the ground to Octavia:
We start by asking Morley a question about Bellamy and Murphy’s relationship, and he says, “I feel like their relationship is older brother/younger brother.”
In those six years in space, Morley jokes that Bellamy, having been a janitor, would be cleaning the Ark a lot. On a more serious note, he says, “[Bellamy] and Raven kind of took it on themselves to create a chore list for everyone. So in a way he tries to create a routine and regimen, and whether everyone else follows that… we’ll have to wait and see.”
“He’s definitely taken on the head and the heart concept from Clarke, and tried to approach it with a much more level-headed and rational sensibility,” Morley adds.
As for whether he carries the guilt of Clarke’s death, Morley says, “I think that by ensuring that everyone is staying alive… that’s the way that he can absolve himself. But you’re never really going to forgive yourself totally.” He also expects that they’ll all have “therapy sessions” about it.
Speaking about Bellamy and Octavia’s separation, Morley says, “I think that’s the one that’s really killing him. I get asked about Clarke quite a lot, but the way that I thought about it and played it is that Bellamy thought Clarke was dead. So Octavia is really the one he’s concerned about and holding out hope for. That’s the real driving force for him. So whenever he’s looking out the window, that’s who he’s thinking of.”
Morley found the fifth season interesting, because “Bellamy was very much who he was until some of the sticky situations where he may be aggressive or irrational … the way that he approaches them now was kind of odd for me, because I’d always played him as very unpredictable, so that was just a little bit tricky for me to get my head around and play him as a rational human being.”
But, “as the story progresses throughout season 5, I think the writing room’s done a great job of building an arc for him.”
As for what will surprise fans the most about Bellamy in season 5? “Probably his facial hair,” jokes Morley. Or maybe, “his ability to read a situation and not immediately act. And also a huge shift in character dynamics. The new SpaceKru, they mean a tremendous amount to Bellamy, almost verging on a new family for him. There are alliances that are drawn over those six years that have grown within him.”
Here’s our three-part interview with showrunner Jason Rothenberg:
Rothenberg starts by saying they’re gonna show the first 20 minutes of The 100 season 5 in the panel later today.
On how early they decided on doing a time jump, Rothenberg says they began talking about it when they began planning season 4. And, having separated the characters for six years, “we start season 5 roughly when all those isolated arenas come back together.”
On the challenges of rediscovering these characters after ageing them six years, Rothenberg says, “the trick of a time jump, especially one as long as six years [is that] a lot will change. They gotta feel like the people we’ve come to love, but they’ve also lived six years of life, and need to feel different enough to justify this conflict that’s gonna arise as a result of who they meet when they come back down.”
Rothenberg likens the reunions to a high school reunion — that sense of, “holy crap, you can’t be the same person I went to high school with!”
He teases the reunion of the people in the bunker with everyone else, saying, “Bellamy has a hard time adjusting to who his sister has become. And vice versa.”
After getting closer to Octavia at the end of season 4, “Bellamy has spent the last six years thinking, ‘I gotta get down there, I gotta get back to my sister,’ that’s the thing that’s always driven him. So when he meets her again, and he sees the way she is… Octavia has had to do some really dark things to keep that group underground together and unified, to lead them, she’s had to make some really hard choices which have probably affected her soul on some level. She’s really… damaged? But hopefully we understand why she is the way she is. She didn’t do anything she didn’t feel she needed to do.”
Rothenberg says Octavia’s story is the one he’s most anxious and excited for the audience to react to.
In terms of what was the biggest challenge of the season, Rothenberg says it was the time jump, because “we needed to fill in those blanks for ourselves, how to make sense of this world that we encounter in the bunker. How each of them have changed, and then putting them back together, but being true to the fact that they are different, they’re not the same. And then figuring out who they are now, and I mean that in terms of relationships, too. Bellamy and Clarke are very different. Bellamy now has this SpaceKru family, Clarke has her daughter, and what’s gonna happen this season when those two things don’t need the same thing? You know, what happens when what’s right for Madi is not what’s right for Murphy or Raven or Echo, the people that Bellamy now considers family?”
He also talks about how the actors might suggest bits of backstory for their characters because thy know them “inside out.”
We asked Rothenberg what Madi will be like as a character, and Rothenberg says, “Lola Flanery, who plays Madi, is great. We’re incredibly lucky to have found her. And her role this season is not just as Clarke’s important significant person. She has her own really important story that happens this season, which puts her in danger and obviously ignites a thing in Clarke that she’s never had to deal with before.”
Continues Rothenberg, “It’s really exciting for me; I’m a parent, and I know how that was, your priority shifts in an instant when your kids are born, and you’re also given a new window into what your parents must have felt like too. So it changes Clarke’s relationship with Abby as well. But yeah, Madi is really cool, a very cool new character.”
He further reveals that Madi, “is from Shallow Valley, the place Clarke finds her way to, and the reason she survives is because she’s a Nightblood. And so that becomes a thing.”
Madi and Clarke’s relationship “is explored in detail in 5×01. What we’re gonna show today is the first 20 minutes; it doesn’t go all the way to the meeting of Madi, but that’s where that episode goes,” says Rothenberg. “It’s a crazy episode, it’s literally just 28 episodes of just Eliza [Taylor]. She’s alone, on Earth, trying to survive. And then she finds the garden, and then she finds this kid… it’s a totally special episode.”
And finally, here’s Christopher Larkin talking about Monty in season 5:
Larkin teases that after six years in space, “You will either love the people that you’re with, or you will hate their guts and never wanna see them again.”
He talks a bit about the algae, which he’s been making “obsessively, Top Chef, Chopped-style.”
When Monty gets back to the ground, Larkin doesn’t know if there is much to look forward to. “His last memories are of killing his mother once, twice, and then losing Jasper in his arms. I don’t know what the ground holds… maybe being back in space is a bit of a respite, and offers some reprieve from that. So maybe it’s a scarier, more unwelcome experience than the first time around.”
On whether we’ll see any of the emotional consequences of losing Jasper, Larkin says, “in terms of PTSD, he’ll be dealing with that forever. If you lose someone for long enough, it’s always very hard in that first year, and then as time passes, you still miss them and you love them, and you have fond memories, but it does get easier. So I’m curious how Monty would deal with losing his mother and Jasper after all this time.”
We also got a first look at the brand new The 100 season 5 poster! Here it is below:
Poster sneak peak as @linzzmorgan does her thang in today’s #wondercon autograph session. #the100 pic.twitter.com/YbSZo1nIlZ
— The 100 Writers Room (@The100writers) March 24, 2018
The poster that they’re using at WonderCon today! #The100 (via @bellamysradio) pic.twitter.com/QKYsfZTdle
— The 100 S5 News (@The100S5) March 24, 2018
It’s interesting to see Clarke and Octavia placed so prominently, on opposite sides of the ground/underground divide. What do you think it means?
Additional reporting by Selina Wilken.
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