The 100 closed out Season 4 with some huge reveals, as a time jump found Clarke (Eliza Taylor) alive and well on Earth six years after the death wave hit, accompanied by a young girl we’d never met – only for a prison transport ship to arrive, singling to Clarke that her friends were still gone, but a potential new threat had arrived.

The 100: "Praimfaya" Photos 13 IMAGES

I spoke to The 100 executive producer/ showrunner Jason Rothenberg about these developments and what they mean for the show in Season 5 next year.They’re a totally new group of people. But there are Easter eggs in Season 4 that point to long duration mining space missions and a group of prisoners that went missing. So that’s there in the background of a few different scenes in an early episode and a middle-season episode. I was trying to plant some scenes for that story. But no question it’s a total left turn that brings the thing back full circle. Obviously The 100, in the pilot, were prisoners coming to an earth they thought was uninhabited. Now here comes this group of prisoners coming to an Earth that may or may not be inhabited, and now Clarke is the Grounder. So it really shifts perspective in a cool way, putting Clarke in the position of the person that threw the spear at Jasper in the pilot. That was what was most exciting to me about that idea, is the full circle nature of it and the perspective shift.Of course, if you’re a nightblood you could have survived in a sheltered area. Nightblood couldn’t help you if you were in the path of that thing. Madi – and that’s spelled M A D I -- is in the area that we find Clarke in, above that green valley. We will tell the story of how that valley survives. She says “This is the only patch of green on the planet. The rest of the world basically sucks,” from what she’s seen. She’s been journeying. She’s been scavenging. When we find her in Season 5, we will flash back and tell the story of how she made it. Ultimately, finding Madi was a lifesaver for Clarke. Suddenly she had a companion. Suddenly she had a reason to live. By the time we see her in [episode] 413, they’ve been together a number of years. It’s really a mother/daughter relationship. There is no question that Clarke is bonded, parentally, to that child now. I think it’ll be really fascinating to see how that changes her going forward in every day and how her decision-making as a leader will be affected by the fact that she now has a child. Parents perspective shifts in an instant. Your priorities shift in an instant. Clarke will now have to face some choices that put Madi on one side and her friends and her people on the other. What is she going to do if the choice is not the right choice for both? Of course it’ll also give her newfound insight into Abby. I think that’s also what happens when you have a child. You suddenly sympathize and empathize with your parents much more than you did prior. It’s new terrain and will add freshness to a story that’s been going on for, going into, five seasons.Yeah, well, you know there’s not much you can do when you’re sitting in space for five years. I do think having a child up there would make surviving infinitely harder. Much like birth rates were closely monitored on the Ark prior to the series starting, that’s not a burden they want to take on. Not that they won’t and I’m not saying one way or another, but producing a show with a bunch of kids is a pain in the butt too [Laughs] so we wouldn’t want to use too many of them.Yeah, the actors are now going to get to play their actual ages which is going to be fun for some of them. Time jumps are tricky. Obviously the time jump we took between Season 2 and Season 3, some people didn’t think we navigated that so well. There was definitely story that we could have told better - I’m thinking here of Bellamy’s relationship. Ultimately, that’s the trick of a time jump. In this case, it’s also the fun of a time jump. We’re taking a six year time jump. They’ve been apart now way longer than they were on the ground. You see how much change there has been in so many of these characters, from the pilot to where we are now. Imagine five times that in the various worlds they are siloed in - Underground, on the ring, and Clarke alone with Madi on the ground. You can expect real changes. To me, that’ll be part of the fun of it, putting Clarke and Bellamy back together when Bellamy has been a leader in his own right, if that’s his story, for six years on the Ark. Likewise, Octavia and Bellamy coming back together when she’s been forced to lead in a way that may or may not be something he approves of by the time they come back together. I think it’ll be fascinating and that’s the challenge for us, creatively, to have them feel like the same people, understand how they got that way, perhaps by including some flashback storytelling into the six year time gap, and keeping it fresh moving forward.

Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman