How will Raven Reyes (Lindsey Morgan) fare on the brand new planet in The 100 season 6… if she ever gets down there?
Raven Reyes, one of the most brilliant, tortured, and persistent characters in The 100, went into cryo sleep at the end of season 5 in a relatively good place.
Having spent the past five years finding her place in the SpaceKru family, Raven had come to feel tremendous guilt over the fact that she was not able to get them home.
She was ready to sacrifice herself by staying behind on Eligius while the others went to the ground, even contemplating committing genocide by killing the sleeping prisoner army she and Murphy found there.
But this was not the end for Raven — nor was it the end of her suffering. Because this is The 100, and The 100 loves torturing Raven. (Luckily it also loves keeping Raven alive, so, uh, keep up the good work?)
Rather than dying on Eligius, she spent most of season 5 in captivity, separated from her friends but bonding with Zeke Shaw (Jordan Bolger), forming what we can assume to be her first romantic relationship since Wick in season 2.
By season’s end, Raven’s bond with SpaceKru has remained intact, despite some friction with Echo. However, her relationships with two characters she arguably used to be the closest to, Clarke and Abby Griffin, are more fraught than ever.
Although she doesn’t know it yet, Raven has also lost two members of her family, as Monty and Harper chose to stay awake and grow old together on Eligius while the others slept.
What waits for Raven on the new world if she ever gets to set foot on it? More pain, more loss… and more happiness?
Here are seven things we hope to see for Raven in The 100 season 6.
More agency and involvement
To be clear, Raven the character has plenty of agency. But Raven the entity of exposition/technical know-how has very little control over what happens in the story, and very little room to have any thoughts or feelings about it.
If Clarke and Bellamy are the head and heart, Raven is the hand; the technical brawn who saves everyone’s lives but rarely gets to step into the leadership position she has been flirting with since season 1.
In The 100 season 6, I’d like to see her react more to things and events that don’t directly affect her. We’ll almost certainly get to see SpaceKru mourn and remember Monty and Harper — hopefully in a way that doesn’t just pile more guilt and bitterness onto their shoulders — and hopefully Raven will also get the chance to experience the new world.
Reacting to the new planet and their society, truly interacting with it (and the people) and expressing a sense of wonder just because, would feel like a first for this character who usually has to hunker down and do the hard work while everyone else gets to go out and mess things up.
A proper reaction to Harper and Monty’s deaths (and Jordan)
If not her best friend (I still say that’s Emori), Monty is probably the closest thing Raven has yet come to a soulmate (dare I say ‘platonic’?).
Certainly Monty was the only character she was was truly able to match wits with, at least since losing Sinclair, and with all the volatile personalities stuck on the Ark together for six years, working on tech stuff with Monty must have been a much-needed source of solace for her.
Losing Monty and Harper has got to hurt. Everyone in SpaceKru, certainly, but Raven and Bellamy should feel the loss of them most keenly (kind of like how we might have expected Octavia to mourn Jasper in some way). Those characters knew each other from day 1, and stuck together through so much hardship.
But what is unique about Harper and Monty’s exits is that their deaths did not merely bring pain. Them living out their lives and dying on their own terms is better than any of these people might have dared to hope for — and their deaths very literally brought new life, in the form of Jordan.
How will Raven feel about Jordan? How will she emotionally connect to him, if at all? What will Monty and Harper mean to her in their absence? I really hope there is time to show Raven remembering them.
More intimate moments with Shaw
Raven’s story is incredibly rich and multi-faceted, and it didn’t feel like anything was missing while she didn’t have a love interest.
But anything that makes Raven happy makes us happy, so seeing her form a bond with Shaw — who genuinely cares about her — was a breath of fresh air.
It all happened too fast, with their romance almost a sidenote in someone else’s story, so I hope to see more of them front and center in season 6; both individually and as a couple. We need some material for those fanvids, is all I’m saying!
There has been some uncertainty about how much exactly Jordan Bolger appears in season 6 beyond his initial inclusion in the first batch of episodes; we know Shaw joins the advance team on the ground, but after that, we don’t know much at all. And we do know that sometimes the availability of supporting cast is out of the show’s control.
But let’s hope now that Raven has finally found a significant other she truly connects with, he at least won’t die horribly (again) or disappear into thin air (again).
Raven making peace with Clarke and Abby
Raven’s relationships with the Griffin women have always been complicated. There is such a depth of feeling there, but also a lack of shared screentime, which makes it even more necessary for Raven to actually share conversations with these people in season 6.
There are also acute issues that need to be dealt with; Raven and Clarke clashed towards the end of season 5, with Clarke pointing a gun at SpaceKru to save Madi, and Abby recreated Raven’s trauma with her mother by shocklashing her in order to get her fix.
Since Raven will presumably be in space with Abby while Clarke is exploring the ground with the advance team, there might be more hope for the latter relationship to be healed — if that is even possible. In lieu of Clarke, Raven might also bond with Madi, which would certainly reinforce her connection to the Griffin family.
I feel like I’ve been shouting into the void about more Clarke/Raven friendship content for the past five years, so I’ll just leave it at pleeeeaaaaseeeeee and move on.
At least ONE conversation with Octavia
I know, I know, I ask too much! But listen, they’re actually going to be in the same location for an extended period of time, for the first time in about three seasons, so it’s possible that Raven and Octavia might finally have an actual conversation.
It would be super interesting to square these two characters off against each other after everything that’s happened, maybe especially because they’ve never had a significant interaction.
Of course Octavia has plenty of people she needs to have hearts-to-hearts with, including Abby, Madi and Diyoza, but just like with Jordan, it’d be refreshing to see her interact with someone who never really got to see Blodreina in action, and only has a vague concept of who Octavia is, was, and could be.
On Raven’s part, I really just want to know what she made of all the Wonkru/Blodreina stuff, since she never got to react to it in season 5.
More scenes with Emori and Echo
They’ve told us that Raven, Echo and Emori are friends, but they’ve hardly shown it.
We did have those wonderful moments revealing the new SpaceKru dynamics at the top of season 5, but then the plot happened, and at most we got driveby looks and mannerisms to suggest a familial intimacy that The 100 didn’t prioritize — that year.
Because Raven, Echo, and Emori are all still here, and we’ve got these SpaceKru friendships firmly established (with the added oomph of losing two of their number, something that might either push them closer together or drive them apart).
Of course, when season 6 begins, Echo and Emori both join the advance team on the ground, presumably leaving Raven on Eligius IV to run controls, so we might have to wait a bit before the three SpaceKru ladies are reunited.
But hopefully, once they do, The 100 might find some space for Raven and Emori’s supposed best-friendship to truly shine, and for Raven and Echo to share some less volatile moments than they did in season 5. After all, pre-time jump, Raven’s go-to people were Monty, Harper and Jasper — and they’re all gone now. She needs new people.
Addressing Raven’s disability on the new planet
The 100 gave Raven a disability in season 2, making it impossible for her to walk without crutches, and then without the leg brace that Wick built for her.
In season 3, the show explored the effects of the disability and chronic pain on her psyche in a beautiful and raw way, first by having her give into the temptation of a life without pain, and then empowering her to reclaim her personhood.
In season 4, Raven was fighting for her brain, and once again won the battle for herself. But to make room for these storylines, anything involving her physical disability has been minimized; she hardly struggles to walk now, and if she still suffers from chronic pain, we are not made privy to it.
This in itself isn’t something I necessarily want to point to as a fault, as the treatment of her disability tracks with who she is as a character: this is the same girl who told Finn to learn to live with his “battle scars” after all, and arguably, she has taken her own advice.
But in season 5, there was a pointed lack of attention paid to how she must have felt returning from space (where I think we’re to assume that her leg bothered her less for gravity reasons and/or extended spacewalk sessions, but again, that is never addressed). No emphasis was placed on how her spine injury may or may not be hurting her on the ground.
Raven’s representation matters, and even if we are to understand that she has learned to live with her pain and her brace, it is important to continue to show that, and more importantly vocalize it, for the character and for the audience looking to Raven for representation. If you hadn’t watched seasons 2-3 of The 100, you might not even realize what her condition was (if you noticed it at all).
The difference between the environments on Eligius IV and on the surface gives ample opportunity to explore how this new planet affects the humans arriving from Earth. Raven would be the perfect lens to explore this through, as she’ll be able to express exactly how different it is — if it’s different at all — and how that might positively or negatively affect her.
What about you? What do you hope to see for Raven in The 100 season 6?