You can be forgiven for not being caught up with The CW’s dystopian-future series The 100. Based on a decent but neglected young adult (YA) book series, the series took some time to find its footing. But then, last season, the story of 100 teenagers dumped from an orbital space station onto a toxic, abandoned Earth morphed into something altogether more interesting and complex. Violent and fascinating, the show is full of cultural clashes, compelling alliances, and a relentless, uncompromising worldview. This show may not have been on your radar before, but with the third season starting tonight, it deserves to become a priority.

Breathless propulsion

In the series, a small fraction of humanity has survived after a nuclear apocalypse, and the titular Hundred are one hundred (very attractive) criminal teens sent from the Ark space station to investigate whether Earth is now hospitable to human life. Led by Clarke, the show’s protagonist, and a variety of other teenage misfits, the Hundred quickly discover that the Ark residents are not the only people who survived the bombs.

Far from empty, Earth is populated by numerous tribes and factions with complicated inter-relationships and a unifying wariness of each other. Some of the show’s most surprising and compelling twists arise due to clashes between communities with distinct cultures and vastly different levels of technology. Sky People (former Ark residents) have education and tech know-how but are perpetually at a loss for resources; Grounders live in a bow-and-arrow paradigm; the residents of Mount Weather, who feature throughout season two, are both highly sophisticated and dangerously weak.

As these groups collide, the world of the show grows larger and more intricate, and its episodes are characterized by intensity and constant forward motion. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a television writer best known for his work on Lost and as the creator of The Middleman, has joined The 100 as a co-executive producer for season three, and in an interview with Ars, he described this quality of the show as “breathless propulsion.” On The 100, he told Ars, “there is no time to sit down and have a moment.”

The adjective "gritty" is often thrown around to describe The 100, but in this case, it doesn't just imply realism and violence. Characters are perpetually covered in dirt and dried blood, and the dominant wardrobe aesthetic lands somewhere between dirty rags and Heavy Metal. At the same time, The 100 can also be visually striking. The look of the show ranges from shots of its heroines falling into the mud, exhausted and beaten to a pulp, to stark, Sisyphean silhouettes of a group of men clambering up an empty dune.

Admittedly, the first few episodes do resemble other fare from the teens-wearing-post-apocalypse-chic genre you’ve already encountered (Hunger Games, Divergent, etc.), and that impression is not helped by hot, leading teens who take their first opportunity for freedom to get drunk and screw over their parents. But things change quickly for the Hundred. The initially limiting character traits that define them (Clarke is the princess, Bellamy is the rebel, Murphy’s the villain, Finn’s the love interest, parents are parents) fall away, and the show transforms into something more impressive and significantly bleaker. In other words, this is not a soft-focus YA romance. It’s Battlestar Galactica, complete with a fully formed world and a gnawing terror of extinction.

The 100 shares an unflinching hardness with Battlestar, but it also picks up some of Battlestar’s philosophical considerations of the ethical implications of violence. Rothenberg says that these ideas are baked into the DNA of the show, which is at its core about “put[ting] our characters in impossible situations where there are no good answers,” and with those choices, “we deal with real ramifications.”

The constant preoccupation with hard questions also grounds the series’ gloom. Incredibly dark stories can have an impulse to be bleak for the sake of bleakness—as a bid for seriousness and importance. The 100 is certainly serious, but the very starkness of its premise also makes it a surprisingly intriguing platform for ethical thought. The show forces its characters and its audience to examine the results of Clarke’s decisions—what is this violence doing to her? There was no better choice for her to make, but who is she now after she’s chosen?

Female characters, YA roots, and not being Twilight

The grime and brutality may be the first things that you notice about The 100, but the next quality is that its cast looks quite different from many sci-fi shows and from much of sci-fi more broadly. The show is replete with totally kickass female characters, many of them leaders or in positions of command: Clarke, one of the original Hundred; Anya and Lexa, ruthless Grounder leaders; Octavia, who tries to navigate between the two cultures; Indra, Lexa’s fierce enforcer; Raven, the Ark’s most talented mechanic—the list goes on.

Even more unusually, these characters are only very rarely involved in love plots; their primary concerns are power and survival, and they strut around the show’s forests painted with fearsome black warpaint and decorated with spikes. They are uninterested in male attention, unless that attention comes in the form of a warrior’s fealty.

Grillo-Marxuach credits some of this aspect of the series to the show’s book roots. “YA was way advanced from mainstream science fiction in terms of having very complicated multi-dimensional female characters. That’s the good thing we get out of our YA roots.” Grillo-Marxuach interjects: “The flip side of that is that there’s some perception that we’re doing Twilight, but I think anybody who’s looked at our show knows damn well we’re not doing Twilight.”

The show has been praised for its diverse cast, but diversity in narrative doesn’t matter if those characters are ultimately uninteresting. On the show’s preponderance of female leads, Rothenberg observes that it’s not ultimately about gender: “It all just comes down to: are you weak or are you strong? Can you help me survive, or do I have to kill you? These characters are where they are because they deserve to be, not because of any preconceived notions.” As Grillo-Marxuach says, “an awesome character is an awesome character... and I think anybody, regardless of their gender, is going to look at this group of people we’ve created and be really beguiled by who they are.”

What to look forward to

After two seasons of world building and launching its primary characters, the next season of The 100 will spread outward, demonstrating just how large and complicated its world can be. “[Showrunner] Jason [Rothenberg] really set us up to examine the geopolitics of Grounder culture versus Sky People culture,” Grillo-Marxuach says, and much of the next season will be about how the Sky People fit into the world now that they’re finally established on the ground. “What effect do [the Sky People] have on a world that’s developed into this atavistic warrior culture that surrounds them?”

Whatever else happens in The 100’s third season, it seems clear that the series’ relentless pace shows no sign of moving into a more leisurely, measured phase. “It never slows down, it never gets boring, we never ask questions without answering them,” Rothenberg told Ars. “We’re going for it on this show. We don’t pull any punches.”