Note: Full spoilers for The 100: Season 2 finale follow.

The 100: Season 2 Finale Review

The 100 ended its second season in a harrowing, unsettling manner, as Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) finally succeeded in freeing her friends trapped inside Mount Weather – by flooding the place with the radiation those from the Ark were immune to, in the process knowingly killing everyone who lived inside Mount Weather, including those who’d tried to help them and the children present.I spoke to The 100’s executive producer and showrunner about this huge turn of events and where things are leading in Season 3, now that Clarke has decided she needed to leave Camp Jaha and go off on her own in the wake of what she did. Not to mention that entirely new storyline introduced, as Jaha (Isaiah Washington) and Murphy (Richard Harmon) encountered a holographic life force with an uncomfortable interest in nuclear weapons.Those of you who read my interview with Rothenberg that lead into the season premiere , and dealt a lot with Lexa’s fateful decision in the penultimate episode of the season, will recognize the first question here. I’m including it again because I had to edit the second half of Rothenberg’s answer out before the finale aired, to avoid spoilers. But what he said certainly was intriguing as to how Clarke is perceived by the Grounders moving forward.Yeah, Lexa is still in command on the ground. There will definitely be, I think as a result of what happened, huge, huge storyline ramifications going forward. Had we killed her, that would have been way less interesting. There’s so much more we can play with with her now. There are secrets out there. How is Clarke going to respond? Clarke is f**king legendary. Clarke is Paul Bunyan. Everyone is going to know about Clarke of the Sky People. She got betrayed and she single handedly now goes and takes out Mount Weather. Last year, she single handedly [stopped the Grounders] - obviously she wasn’t single handed in either event but the way legends spread, that’s going to be interesting to play next season.At the beginning of the season, I knew what the theme was for the season. I knew at the end of the season, Clarke was going to save her people that were in Mount Weather but that she was going to go so dark to be able to get that done that she was not going to ever be able to participate in the victory or the celebration. I didn’t know quite how that would look at the end of the season but I knew that’s what I was going for for the final beats of the season, so I just stuck with it. That’s just the kind of show it is. We’ve never flinched from doing the unbelievably hard thing. Episode five of Season 1, with the culling, everybody thought we were not going to let that happen. The kids on the ground would get the missiles up in the air, and they were going to see it and happy ending. I think that’s how most shows would have done that but that was something of a statement for us and I think we did the same thing with Finn’s death this season. People thought we were talking about it the whole time and somehow we were going to find a way to avoid having to do that but that’s not what the show is. For me, the end point was always kind of clear and I think summed up between Jasper and Maya when Jasper, in his really heartbreaking performance -- I thought Devon [Bostick] was incredible, really in the whole episode, really in the whole season but particularly in that one moment at the end when he’s cradling Maya as she dies and he says she was innocent and she says, “None of us are innocent.” That’s the truth. Mount Weather shouldn’t have existed. Those people only had life because of this sort of sin that they’d been committing to the grounders for 50 years. None of those kids… Albeit it’s incredibly tragic and sad and they’re innocent bystanders and they didn’t ask to be born, and they didn’t ask to get the blood, but the great original sin of Mount Weather is that and so at the end of the day, any other answer to save the kids or even to save Maya, who I love, just felt like a cop out, frankly.That’s sort of, again, for me anyway… I get bored if things stay the same. Chapter one was the story of the drop ship and the 100 on the ground last season. The story of chapter two, Season 2, has been Mount Weather and that story is obviously done at this point. Season 3, we turn into Season 3 pretty hard with the bookends of this episode, the Jaha/Murphy story. So I feel like Season 3 will be as different from Season 2 as Season 2 was from Season 1.Yes. Emerson is the lone survivor of Mount Weather. The inside baseball, behind the scenes story is episode 16 was so big… Some day I’ll tell the full story of how it became what it ultimately is. There was a lot of things that had to be left on the drawing board, frankly, to get it done and have it be producible for our budget and get it done in 42 minutes. One of the things - there was supposed to be an action scene in the hallway outside where Bellamy kills Emerson. But we had to lose it and ultimately i found it to be kind of interesting to leave him out there, dangling. So there may in fact be… I love the actor, Toby [Levins], who plays that character and I think it’s interesting that he’s out there still. But the reason is, my intention was there would be no survivors, but ultimately, at the eleventh hour, I had to sort of spin it and he got what you would call a stay of execution. Monroe, by the way, has gotten like five of them. I’ve written “Monroe dies” scenes in like 5 scripts. None of them have been shot. She’s got nine lives, that one.Right, I mean I think that she got the job done. She set her mind to it in Season 2, and was obsessed with saving her friends and she did it. But she says it, in that last scene, that seeing their faces every day is going to remind her of what she had to do to get them there. And I think, in a really cool callback -- not to pat my own back -- to Dante’s scene earlier, when Dante says, “I bear it so they don’t have to..." She’s the one that’s going to have to deal with the death of all those kids and the innocent people inside Mount Weather. The people who she saved don’t have that burden to bear and she doesn’t want to deal with it. She just wants some peace and quiet. She doesn’t want to have to worry about everybody else. If you think about it, since episode one, she’s been pretty stressed out. I think she could use a walkabout, to borrow a term from Eliza’s country.I do think Bellamy is going to be recognized as the hero that he became this season. I think that Kane, in the very brief moment between the two of them, in the dorm, as they’re freeing everybody - it’s essentially an acknowledgement in so many words of the mistake he made in episode one of this year when he arrested him and they sort of disregarded the fact that these kids had been on the ground for this time and knew way more than they did. Bellamy had always wanted to be a member of the guard. Perhaps we’ll see that ultimately coming to pass. Perhaps we’ll see him getting some real responsibility. I don’t want to talk too much about what my plans are for Season 3 but obviously, the dynamic within the camp… everything is going to change now. What’s left of this alliance of the twelve clans, that Lexa sort of painstakingly put together in order to defend themselves against Mount Weather, when Mount Weather is gone? Are those old animosities between, for instance, the Ice Nation and the Tri Kru. Is that going to become a problem again? It’s much like World War II. After the allies defeated the Nazis, the Cold War happened, because our great enemy that had allied the Russians and the Americans was gone. So I think that’s one of the things we’ll see playing out as I build up this universe in Season 3, which is something I’m very excited to do. Of course, the Sky People represent that 13th clan and who will they line up with? Will everybody agree on the way forward? Probably not.Yeah, to me one of the things that I really wanted to do -- the only stuff I really wanted to dig up with that story was I thought it was fascinating to really kind of key the answer to the question of how the world ended in the first place, a hundred years earlier. I feel like it takes us into a whole other world, which ultimately, I hope, will feel like it makes complete sense going forward, and is part of the tapestry of the world of the show, while being so different. I’m fascinated by artificial intelligence and I’m fascinated by what it means to be human and I think this entity, this artificial consciousness that’s in that house, is trapped in that house. That guy in Murphy’s bunker is sort of the Steve Jobs who created this program and lost control of it, like Dr. Frankenstein, losing control of his monster and he wasn’t obviously able to stop her from ending the world but he did manage to trap her in that house. He cut off all connectivity. So she’s been stuck there this whole time. The questions that we’re beginning to answer and ask ourselves as writers, as we begin to leave now for Season 3, is what does that AI want? What is her ultimate goal? When she says “we’ve got work to do” regarding that warhead, at the end, what exactly is she talking about? I imagine it won’t be what people expect but that’s a tune in next year kind of thing.

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