The 100 will be returning for season 5 with at least one less original cast member, as Isaiah Washington (Jaha) will no longer be a series regular.
With only three episodes to go of The 100 season 4, TV Line has been informed that original cast member Isaiah Washington will not be returning as a regular next year.
Whether or not the character is killed off remains to be seen, although as TV Line notes, he may very well be back in a guest star capacity.
Considering that the apocalypse is imminent, Jaha (and everyone else)’s chances of survival are obviously slim. We’ve already lost one regular character this year (Roan, played by Zach McGowan), and we could very possibly lose more before the season is over.
But don’t lose hope yet: Jaha has survived everything thrown at him so far, and depending on what happens in the season 4 finale, he could potentially end up separated from the other main characters, perhaps leaving his fate ambiguous in case they want him to return in future episodes.
After all, it’s hard to imagine a version of The 100 in which Thelonious Jaha isn’t out there somewhere trying to save the day.
Despite his strained relationship to the other characters, Jaha has been an integral part of The 100 since it premiered in 2014: as Chancellor of the Ark, Jaha was the one who ordered the delinquents sent to the ground in the pilot episode, and spent the first season stuck in space, trying to save his people from annihilation.
Jaha was the one who got the idea to send the Ark to the ground, too, sacrificing himself in the season 1 finale to make it happen. But that wasn’t the end of his journey, because after hallucinating his dead son Wells at the beginning of season 2, Jaha realized that his time for heroics wasn’t quite through.
Crafting himself a one-man escape pod, Jaha got himself to the ground, and proceeded to go an epic desert adventure with Murphy — still fully believing himself to be his people’s savior, this time by leading them away from the conflict with the Grounders to the mythical refuge known as the ‘City of Light.’
What he ended up finding on the other side of the desert wasn’t the promised land, however, but an AI named ALIE, who had originally caused the nuclear disaster that ended life on Earth as we know it, and who now wanted to migrate all human minds to a digital mainframe to save them from the second apocalypse — the one which is now imminent.
So, in a third and most desperate bid to save his people, Jaha has teamed up with Clarke to save what is left of Skaikru, the pair hi-jacking an apocalypse cult bunker that they’ve discovered in the Grounder capital of Polis. (And which Jaha had been searching for all season.)
Whatever else Jaha is, he has always done what he believed to be best for his people, taking his role as their original Chancellor very seriously. In many ways, he has been the catalyst for all of the major developments on The 100, and it’s hard to imagine the show without him as a main character.
Let’s hope Jaha finds a way to survive, as he’s always done, and that Isaiah Washington will come back in some capacity in the series’ fifth season.
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