The 100 type TV Show network The CW genre Sci-fi

Warning: This article contains major spoilers from the season 6 finale of The 100. Read at your own risk!

Wait, is magic real on The 100?!

The CW’s post-apocalyptic drama has always been strictly science fiction, telling a futuristic story of world-ending events, space travel and artificial intelligence through the lens of a group of 100 juvenile delinquents (and eventually the rest of the people living in their former space station) trying to survive on Earth before ultimately abandoning it for a new planet. But the season 6 finale seemed to throw all the rules out the window in the final scene dealing with the mysterious “anomaly” that’s been teased all season.

In the final few moments of the finale, “The Blood of Sanctum,” Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos) helps open up the green swirling anomaly by using her mysterious back tattoo to break a code, and an adult version of Diyoza’s (Ivana Milicevic) baby Hope (Shelby Flannery) suddenly appears. Hope tells Octavia that “he” has Diyoza, and Octavia gives her encouragement to do what she needs to do, so Hope stabs Octavia. At this point we already had so many questions, but The 100 wasn’t done scrambling our brains just yet. As Bellamy holds the bleeding and dying Octavia in his arms, he is shocked when she suddenly disintegrates into nothing. She completely disappears and he’s left with nothing but a broken heart, so many questions, and his sister’s blood on his hands.

So uh… what exactly is the anomaly and why is it causing so many weird things to happen? Where did Octavia go? Is The 100 all of a sudden dipping its toes into magic for the final season? Executive producer Jason Rothenberg answers all those and more burning questions below.

Image zoom Sergei Bachlakov/The CW

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This show has always been hard sci-fi but the anomaly, especially in that final scene, seems almost mystical in nature. Are we going to see a genre shift for the final season because of that or do we just not understand the science behind it yet?

JASON ROTHENBERG: B. It’s definitely grounded in science and we will explain all or as much as possible as we go into season 7. I can’t really talk about what it is. We know time is behaving badly around it because Hope is now in her early 20s and was a fetus three days prior when Diyoza went into the anomaly in episode 8. For some reason, that’s a thing which has an explanation. The thing itself does as well. Any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic as Arthur C. Clarke says. That’s what we’re going to delve into in season 7. I butchered the quote but it’s close to the quote, sorry Arthur! Clarke Griffin’s [Eliza Taylor] namesake is a sci-fi writer.

Every finale in the past has blown up the world of The 100 and expanded it in new ways. So what does the anomaly add to the story that we’ve never seen before?

Well, we’re going to be seeing the anomaly for real. I can’t talk about the specifics of the anomaly right now other than to say that we will be exploring the f— out of it in season 7. We’re going to go there often and early, we’re going to go through it and come back from it, and we’re going to explain all the time inconsistencies or the fact that time is behaving badly. Physics are going to and need to — well I won’t say the rules of physics are going to go out of the window. They’re all going to hopefully be explained. But we wrote ourselves into some interesting corners with that last scene and we spent a lot of time in the writers’ room trying to write ourselves out of it, which is what we do every year. Because I don’t always know exactly what the next story is! But we always are teeing up the next story.

There’s obviously a lot to unpack within that final scene. But the biggest question is, what happened to Octavia? Is she dead?

I don’t want to tease anything about her fate other than we will explain what happens to her. Whether she’s alive or dead, Marie’s amazing and you can safely say we have not seen the last of her. But whether or not she’s dead and we tell her story in flashback or whether or not we see her again in the present, that’s something we have to wait and see.

Now we have to talk about Abby (Paige Turco), because although she had died in the previous episode, her body was being used by the Primes in Sanctum so the actor was still able to appear on the show. However, in the finale, Clarke floated her body out into space, effectively killing her permanently. There doesn’t seem to be any question about it but it still needs to be asked: is Turco gone from the show for the final season?

We always reserve the right to bring actors back in flashback stories but she is no longer in the present timeline of the show. Clarke is dealing with the death of her mother, Clarke is dealing with the fact that she had to do that horrible thing in floating her mother’s body, and for sure we’ll see the emotional fallout of that follow Clarke into the next season and become the spine of her “I’m not going to lose anybody else that I care about” story line in season 7.

Losing both Turco as well as Henry Ian Cusick in one season is a huge loss for the original “adult” faction of the series — are you going to be introducing new adult characters in the final season to fill the ranks?

Yeah, quote-unquote [adult] I think is right. Obviously at this point, Bellamy [Bob Morley] is 30; Clarke is 26, 27. These people are all adults at this point. Some of it is passing the baton, finally, the way in life we all have to deal with that. At some point, we lose our parents and become the parents ourselves. We’ve seen that with Clarke over the last few seasons but now it’s definitely cemented with the loss of her mom. Will we introduce new adult characters? Not for the reason of introducing new adult characters, if that makes sense. There will be new characters whose stories we follow next season.

The finale also introduced a mystery in the form of Sheidheda, a.k.a. the Dark Commander’s A.I. (Dakota Daulby) being uploaded somewhere instead of dying with the Flame, but no one could figure out where he went. Where will we see that story going in the final season?

I would say that is a good observation. Yes, he’s definitely a ghost in the machine. He’s lost and they don’t quite know where he is now. That was intentional. Yes, there will be a continuation of his story for sure. He’s not done wreaking havoc on our characters. I just can’t tell you anything about it yet.

The 100 will return for its seventh and final season on The CW.

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