The 100 season 7 will feature a backdoor pilot for a planned prequel spinoff to air on The CW. Here’s what we want to see.

It was recently announced that The 100 showrunner Jason Rothenberg plans to expand the world of the soon-completed sci-fi show with a prequel series set 97 years before the events of the pilot episode.

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Deadline, who provided this news story, states that the series “follows a band of survivors on the ground as they learn to cope in a dangerous world while fighting to create a new and better society from the ashes of what came before.”

From the ashes they will rise, and likely reveal to the audience exactly how Bill Cadogan and his Second Dawn cult morphed into the paradoxically technophobic and Becca Pramheda-worshiping, Trigedasleng-speaking, sword-swinging, in-fighting Grounder factions some of us know and love.

One of the 16 episodes in the seventh and final season of The 100 will be devoted to setting up this planned spinoff, formatted as a so-called backdoor pilot within the existing series. The episode will be written by showrunner Jason Rothenberg, who is set to executively produce the spinoff if it gets picked up to series.

Presumably, the backdoor pilot won’t be completely divorced from its parent series, seeing as the events surrounding the first apocalypse so heavily inform The 100 ’s present-day events — and some of this timeline’s key players are still around in some form or another.

This might be the episode that tells us how Sheidheda was created, how Bill Cadogan and the Second Dawn cult is connected to the Eligius missions and Russell’s Sanctum cult, and how Becca Pramheda became Grounder Jesus. It might even manage to tie in Diyoza and the early days of the Ark, if it turns out that it was all more connected than we’ve been led to believe.

Of course if — and that’s a big if, because we’ve been burned by The CW’s spinoff pickup decisions before — The 100 prequel series gets picked up to series, we can probably expect the new story to be mostly disconnected from that of The 100, featuring brand new main characters* with new moral dilemmas and new types of backstories.

These characters would be more like “us,” in the sense that they grew up in a functioning society and probably find it harder to adapt to the lawless, resource-scarce, wild West-ian post-apocalypse.

(*Unless the Anomaly introduced in season 6 does end up facilitating some permanent time-hopping, allowing John Murphy to travel back to year 2052 and become the first king of Ice Nation, leading to the season 1 finale cliffhanger revelation that he is in fact, King Roan’s grandpa Theo. Haha no that would be crazy. Unless…)

But what if we do get this Grounder-centric spinoff? What do we actually want from a prequel series that shows what happened the first time the world ended and chronicling the world’s descent into darkness?

Do we want to watch Indra, Lincoln and Lexa’s great-grandparents fighting President Wallace the 1st? Do we want to explore a brand new, unknown chapter of the ground’s history? Should it be tonally and visually similar to the show we love, or should it surprise us by setting itself apart?

Here are some wild ideas.

1. Something old = something new

One obvious worry a The 100 fan might have for this prequel series is that it seems, at a glance, to be yet another repetition of an already repetitive cycle: displaced, desperate humans splitting up into contentious factions to fight for territory and resources in the name of survival.

We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it six times over. The cycle never breaks, we get it, and seeing it start (or continue from the one we’re currently living in) does seem rather bleak and pointless.

As refreshing as it was visually, and in terms of pace and energy, The 100 season 6 didn’t really reinvent itself in terms of themes or narrative patterns. It was the story of Mount Weather with a fresh coat of paint. And that was fine, because in so many ways, that is what the story of The 100 is: a violent, tribalistic loop the characters keep trying and failing to escape.

But the spinoff can’t be that. Even though the prequel is essentially the origin of The Cycle™, the actual series needs to set itself apart and very quickly prove to its potential audience that it’s not just The 100 with new actors playing the same basic parts in a post-apocalyptic production of Hamlet.

Right now, it seems suspiciously like we already have all the pieces of the puzzle. We know about Becca and Bill Cadogan and the Grounders’ ongoing war against Mount Weather (which was the reason they created Trigedasleng in the first place).

We know the Nightbloods descend from those initial 12 “disciples” of Becca that were injected with her serum. We know they threw their radioactive babies out with the trash.

But there are so many things we don’t know, and so many ways this prequel could expand and grow beyond even the scope of The 100 — not just by showing surprising new factions of survivors on the ground, but by diving into a wider universe of colonies and stories.

After all, we’re only assuming the ground was completely cut off from space. We’re only assuming that Bill Cadogan snuffed out technology in his Second Dawn cult members and led an idealistic war for the shape of the future against Becca and/or Mount Weather. We’re only assuming there aren’t huge chunks of history that have been forgotten or intentionally erased.

All we know about the past, we know from two societies that were — intentionally or otherwise — forced into technological and evolutionary regression. The Grounders, obviously, were pulled back into the dark ages, but aside from their enforced, oppressive civility, the Ark survivors weren’t actually that much better off.

How could the Ark ever have thought Earth was a barren wasteland, considering that it was teeming with life? How could they not have known about any of the Eligius missions, and why did they not try to contact any of the colonies? Either the Ark really was a metal patchwork pile of trash whose radios just weren’t good enough, or the government purposefully kept their people in easily controllable ignorance for whatever mysterious reason.

Either way, all we actually know is that we know very little. And what we do know doesn’t really make sense. After all, the apocalypse happened right in the middle of huge technological strides that, if Becca’s own initiatives were anything to go by, included very advanced means of survival (cryo sleep, nightblood serum, sealed bunkers) and space travel. The Eligius missions alone apparently colonized a dozen planets. And who’s to say they were the only ones?

To assume that the Second Dawn, Mount Weather and Ark survivors were the only big players in or around Earth in the immediate post-apocalypse, just because that was the case 100 years later, seems very short-sighted.

There is so much potential for unknown, new and different factors that could totally shake up this story. Literally anything could have happened 100 years ago in this history-less, communication-less world, and it would be totally plausible that our primary timeline characters never knew about it.

So no, this prequel series doesn’t just have to fill in the predictable blanks in a puzzle we’ve already seen completed. The big picture could look completely different from what we’ve been led to believe. The only limitation is how big Rothenberg wants this new story to be.

And hey, even if we don’t go full-on The Expanse with this and start exploring colonies on other planets and space stations, there are plenty of ways to expand the story on the ground alone.

2. A wider, wilder world

The 100 has gone so much further than could have been reasonably expected in so many areas, but one way it’s never lived up to its own potential, has been in bringing its post-apocalyptic worlds to literal life.

There just isn’t enough effort or imagination (or sfx budget) poured into the world around the story and characters, leaving us with a lot of nondescript woods and the occasional very, very cool scenic feature or radioactive creature that hints at so much more.

Since this new series exists to delve into the background of the main story, maybe that could include the literal background; one great way to visually differentiate the two shows would be to enrich the landscape and make the raw Earth more viscerally dangerous in the process.

After all, one of the many great things about everyone’s* favorite Pauna is that she symbolized the survival of not just everyday forest dwellers but zoo animals; household pets; horses, cows, eagles.

So many species besides humans somehow not wiped out by Praimfaya but surviving long enough to breed, and carrying on maybe not wickedly mutated but definitely affected and probably rabid and dangerous.

(*this is my article, I love who I want)

Imagine a world where you not only have to survive the riotous mayhem of a recently lawless humanity, but terrified gorillas and panthers and alligators roaming unnatural habitats! I would watch that show.

Following along with wanting more wildlife, this The 100 prequel would also be a great way to expand the lens of the world we get to experience. Why not be a bit less navel-gazing and let British Columbia double as more remote locations than Delaware (it’s all deep-praimfried anyway)?

The only indication we ever had that life existed outside North America was in season 4, when Praimfaya 2 swallowed up a Grounder in Egypt.

But that was enough; we know now that humanity either survived on other continents or spread from however many bunkers there would have been (there must have been others). There might even have been Eden pockets after the first apocalypse that allowed the survival of small communities.

If we are to see how the different Grounder clans formed and spread, that obviously indicates some traveling (whether or not the characters use the fantasy fast travel passes made popular by Game of Thrones to get around). Hopefully that’s how we can explore this recently destroyed, The Last of Us-meets-Horizon Zero Dawn-esque landscape that the spinoff could provide us with.

3. Suicide by Earth

The prequel series is, to our knowledge, going to be primarily focused on the people on the ground — the Grounders, Mount Weather, and hopefully some x-factor factions to shake things up.

We don’t know if the spinoff will attempt to split focus between the Grounders and Ark survivors, as they did in The 100 season 1, but it doesn’t really seem like a feasible format for this story, because we already know that the two storylines will never collide. So parallel stories would just split our focus.

Yet it seems almost impossible to imagine the writers not taking a trip up to where it all began for our original main characters — and I’m not sure many The 100 fans would be satisfied with a Grounder-centric spinoff that ignored the Ark completely.

After all, the Ark is where we could potentially meet Griffins and Blakes and Jordans and Sinclairs and all kinds of interesting “founding families” of The 100’s core characters (barring some totally unbelievable, yet probable, coincidence in which an ancient Jaha cousin ended up in the Second Dawn cult), and that is, at the end of the day, the only way to emotionally tie the two shows together.

Luckily, it so happens that there is a canon, established way for Ark characters to cross over to the ground — one which was introduced all the way back in The 100 season 1, but which was never actually used as a plot device (though it played a big role in Kass Morgan’s book series): suicide by Earth.

Apparently, in the past, people from the Ark would float themselves in escape pods, heading for Earth, (allegedly) believing it to be uninhabitable but wanting to die “at home.” And sometimes they survived; Lincoln himself told a story about how he tried to care for one of them.

Becca Pramheda was the first to take a pod down to Earth, and Raven Reyes would be the last. But what about all those people in between? Who might have taken the leap from space towards a burning Earth, and what reasons might they have had for doing so? Could this be the foundation of the great romantic star-crossed lovers story that this spinoff will definitely include? All I know is that it seems too cool an idea not to do it.

4. The Ice Nation origin story

Sure, there are a lot of Grounder clans I want to know more about, but Ice Nation? Ice Nation called itself Ice Nation and reinstated their own private monarchy and gave their leader a very stupid crown, and made up a fashion code of bleached leather and ermine coats. What’s not to love?

We all know the only way Azgeda makes sense is that they started out as a rogue group of professional D&D players and/or a biker gang, who were on a camping trip when the world ended, and got involved with Becca and Cadogan’s idealistic battle for the shape of the future totally by accident.

They played along because why the hell not, but at some point they decided to peace out of the Grounder weirdness and defected to Minnesota, using the apocalypse as an excuse to give into all their violent cosplay fantasies and live like vikings.

Grandpa Theo — with or without the reveal that he is in fact a time-traveling John Murphy — is clearly already my favorite character, and I can’t wait to learn more about him and his dramatic self-made kingdom.

5. Some fun

Listen. It’d be so easy to make this The 100 prequel all doom and gloom. The world has just ended, and we know that humanity is going to descend into tribal warfare where mercy and compassion are considered weaknesses and where children are raised to be murderers.

And while the grit and gore and horrendousness of it all is part of the appeal of this show, as it is with The 100, it all needs to matter. We need to be emotionally involved, not just intellectually interested.

Love and connection and triumph and real moments of shared joy — small, ridiculous, meaningless, but real — are what weigh up our own human burden of pain and suffering and inevitable death. Our new heroes need to be real, and they need to be human, and they need to be able to find light in the unimaginable darkness of their new existence. Otherwise, what’s the point?

These characters need to fight for something more concrete than ideas and ideals, and we need to believe that their lives and humanities are worth the pain and darkness that we’ve agreed to endure with them. Humor was never The 100‘s strong suit, but maybe this is yet another way the prequel could set itself apart.

Say it with me, everyone: The ending’s the same, but who says the journey has to suck?

What are your hopes for ‘The 100’ prequel series?