After an 11 month hiatus and 6 year in-show time jump, The 100 is not only back on our screens — it’s back to being the show that I fell in love with four seasons ago.

Two years ago, after seeing gifset after gifset on my Tumblr dash of this little CW show called The 100, I finally gave in and decided to load it up on Netflix and see what all the fuss was about.

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I was, admittedly, less than impressed by the series premiere. I thought it was cheesy and a little over-the-top, with nothing to set it apart from the rest of the generic teen fare.

Still, I knew pilots could be rough, so I decided to stick it out. If by the third episode I was still rolling my eyes, I’d go ahead and move on.

The ending of the third episode made me gasp and say a few unprintable words out loud while I quickly pushed ‘play next episode’ on Netflix. I spent the entire fourth episode leaning forward so aggressively that my back hurt by the episode’s halfway point but I didn’t care — I wanted to make sure I caught every single moment and detail of what was happening on screen.

By fifth episode, I was ugly sobbing into my pillow, completely floored that the show had gone there (reminder: 1×05 was the episode that featured the culling) and fully prepared to dedicate my entire life and soul to the show.

I finished the rest of season one that night. I was bleary-eyed and somewhat delirious by the time I watched the Ark descend to the Earth, but I regretted my decision-making exactly 0%.

I sped through the second season at a similar pace, basically astounded that this show that I already loved so much had an even better second season.

I went back and watched Spacewalker (aka the one where Finn died) with friends four different times just so I could see the look of shock and disbelief on their faces when The 100 went there again and killed off its floppy-haired, white boy love interest/main character.

I fist pumped when Clarke and Lexa kissed. I gasped so loudly and so dramatically when Lexa betrayed Clarke at Mt. Weather that my husband came running in from the other room to make sure I was okay (reader, I was NOT okay). And, honestly, I’m still not over how good that season two finale was and I may never be.

At that point, I basically told/forced everyone I knew to watch the show. I offered to watch it with them if they didn’t want to watch it alone. I, a confirmed introvert, invited multiple people over to my house to watch it with me. I gave near strangers my Netflix account password if they didn’t have Netflix just as long as they promised to watch it.

I was completely, totally and absolutely in love with The 100.

And then seasons three and four happened.

A shift in focus and a decline in quality

Full disclosure: I still think that seasons three and four of The 100 — which are both weaker than the two that preceded them — are heads and tails above most shows currently airing on television.

First of all, I’m a die-hard Kabby shipper, and season three in particular kept me particularly well-fed. Secondly, The 100 has one of the strongest ensemble casts on television, with no real weak link among them and an abundance of immensely talented and charismatic actors and actresses. Also, the sets are astounding, created and attended to with obvious care and attention to detail from the props department. The writers, too, know how to craft great scenes, filled with genuine emotion and excitement and weight.

But I also can’t honestly say, especially in reflection, that these two seasons filled me with as much love, adoration, and awe as the first two did. There was just too much that fell short in them for me.

There are plenty of criticisms we can levy against the events of these two seasons (season three in particular); certainly plenty that has been said and written about these two seasons by people far more talented and eloquent than me.

What it came down to for me was what I saw as a shift in focus for the show. The show has always been about survival, but what it chose to explore about the nature of survival has always varies.

Season one asked us to consider the question of: Who do we need to become in order to survive?

That first season offered a few answers to this question, but none so succinctly as when Bellamy says, “Who we are and who need to be to survive are two very different things.”

Season two then pushed all our favorite characters even further and darker, forcing us to ask the question: What have these characters had to become in order to survive? And more than that, it made us wonder — like Abby did — if “after everything we’ve done, do we even deserve to survive?”

These are profound, complicated questions with no easy answer, and the show is at its best when it put its characters in impossible situations, presents us with these difficult questions and forces us to sit and twist in discomfort with the ambivalence of the answers to them.

Seasons three and four kept the same premise The 100 has always had — a story of survival — but instead of having its characters grapple with ideas of identity within the context of survival, it simply had them contend with a series of circumstances that needed to be dealt with in order to survive.

Whereas seasons one and two asked the question of, “Who are we as a result of what we’ve done to survive,” seasons three and four mostly — not always, but mostly — centered instead around the question of, “What do we need to do in order to survive?”

And that question of what instead of who deprived the show of a many of its best elements — the very things that made it so unique and thoughtful. As a result, it was still exciting but a lot less interesting to me than its first two stellar seasons.

An invigoration of the original premise

So it was with great trepidation that I approached the season five premiere. I’d managed to stay pretty much spoiler free, a result of my general detachment towards the show rather than any deliberate attempt to do so.

I really liked the idea of the time jump and was impressed by the season four finale as a whole. I thought that a soft reboot was exactly the sort of narrative move the show needed to get itself back on track.

Still, after two seasons of variable quality, I was skeptical. I decided to fall back on my same process from season one: If after three episodes I still wasn’t feeling it, I’d say goodbye to The 100 once and for all.

Fortunately, it took me about all of three minutes to realize that this season was going to be different than the previous two.

The increasingly frenetic, almost overwrought pace of the last two seasons was gone, replaced instead by a show that is confident enough in both its storytelling and its talented cast to spend time showcasing both.

The season premiere allowed scenes to breathe, it gave us inside jokes and multiple smiles, quiet moments of friendship and love and family without the ever looming sense of doom and destruction hanging over it.

Yet within this newness is also a return to previous dynamics which made the first two seasons work so well in terms of narrative.

You have the newly arrived group from space who don’t know WTF is going on and immediately come up against a hostile population of ‘grounders’ who are intent on protecting their home. You have a group stuck in space desperately trying to get to the ground and reunite with their people there. And finally, you have a group who’s underground — currently unknown — who have gone to gruesome, desperate lengths to survive.

Except now, we know the reasons for the mountain men’s brutality born of desperation, we understand the hostility of the grounders intent on protecting their home.

Right away in season five more than ever we see what Clarke has had to repeat to herself over and over again: There are no good guys.

And with that understanding, this season has likewise returned to those early explorations of identity amidst survival — except now it has spent some time refining the questions it wants to ask.

After six years in relative comfort and complete safety, SpaceKru has had to replace the breakneck speed of survival with the everyday monotony of living. Of course there’s the problem of how they’re going to return to the ground, but they’re also blessed with the luxury of worrying about how good — or not — their food is going to taste.

Now wholly separated from the pressing need of survival, the question for them then instead becomes: Who are we now that we can be more than just survivors?

This, then, is in stark contrast with BunkerKru. While we spend a scant minute or so with them, it’s enough to show us that life below ground exists on the exact opposite end of the spectrum as life in space.

Here, the need to survive presses in all around them, claustrophobic and heavy. Under miles of rubble and trapped in a safe haven turned prison, the question is: Who are we if all we have is survival?

With Madi and Clarke, we have an experience that’s wholly unlike any we’ve seen on the show before — one that is completely divorced from the concept of survival at all.

Above ground and — for all they or we know — the last surviving humans on the planet, Clarke and Madi are allowed to just be. They are neither haunted by what they’ve done to survive, like SpaceKru, nor are they suffocating under its weight, like BunkerKru.

Instead, in the sunshine and the green of Eden, Madi and Clarke get to explore the most human and relatable question of all: Who am I?

I can’t wait to see how The 100 explores these new questions, but most of all, I’m glad to fall head over heels in love with this show all over again.