The 100 Season 7 Trailer Asks Whether Survival Was Worth It

Over the past six seasons seasons, the characters of The 100 have been forced to make many sacrifices and difficult choices to survive. Clarke and the merry band of juvenile delinquents that were originally sent to the ground with her have fought everything from dangerous Grounders and radioactive Mountain Men to prison ship escapees and one another. They’ve lived through nuclear disaster, committed mass murder, spent over a century in space looking for a new home and battled a cult of body snatchers pretending to be gods.  

What could possibly be left for them to do? Hopefully, reckon with the people they’ve become.

The extended trailer for The 100 season 7 promises a wild journey to the end of the series’ story– the clip features fights, blood, explosions, a line of skeletons and something that looks to be a public execution. A final fight for control of Sanctum is clearly under way, bringing out the worst in the factions who remain alive. 

But it begs the question: Is this really all there is? Is humanity destined to fight and murder and betray one another, no matter what city or world or time they find themselves in? Is this the truly best we’re capable of? 

As Clarke Griffin grieves her dead mother and tries to impose some sort of order on a Sanctum that seems to hover on a knife’s edge, the relevant question seems to be not just what happens next, but whether this could all possibly be worth it, in the end.

From its first episode The 100 has been fairly brutal in both its depiction of what it takes to survive the end of the world, and the ways that the very act of survival can damage the people left behind. 

“I used to think fighting is what we do,” Clarke despondently muses to Gaia. “Now I worry that fighting is what we are.”

The story of The 100 season 7 will necessarily be focused on the strange Anomaly that spit out a suddenly aged-up Hope Diyoza who stabbed Octavia at the end of last season, causing her to seemingly disintegrate in her brother’s arms. But since Octavia is clearly alive and well in this trailer – what happened to her? Where has she gone? Where did this Hope come from? And how did final season of a show about a group of teens who were supposed to repopulate Earth after Armageddon turn into…this?

Given that a lot of us have seen shows like Farscape and Stargate before, it’s easy to wonder whether the clearly time-bending wormhole in the forest might somehow hold the key to a better future for the remnants of the human race, perhaps in a distant time or on a faraway world. But the question at the heart of this season should probably be – do they deserve it? 

The characters of The 100 have repeatedly indulged their basest natures in the name of “protecting their people,” whether those people are humans, Grounders, Ice Nation or refugees from space.  Even Clarke herself, long used as this series’ moral compass, has done some pretty horrific and possibly unforgiveable things. Are these people who should get a fresh start on some dazzling ice planet or leafy forest world, if they’re just going to make the same mistakes? 

“New world, same problems,” Indra quips in the trailer. But at some point, that stops being a joke, and starts becoming a pathology. 

Even after the horrors of last season, the new clip shows us a world still drenched in darkness and bloodshed, as different factions of humans battle one another, Russell Lightbourne begs for death, and Clarke promises to kill him as punishment for all the wrongs he and the Primes wrought on Sanctum.  

“The answer to all this violence isn’t just more violence,” Jordan wisely tells someone offscreen. But will they – or anyone – listen?

Here’s hoping. After everything they’ve been through, perhaps the only way The 100 can end is by showing us a humanity that’s grown up enough to try.