The 100 Creator Previews the Finale's Big Battle: "They're Screwed"

Things are not looking up for The 100. The Grounders are heading their way, their weapons expert has been shot and that jerk Murphy wasted all their gun powder. But these kids aren't ones to go down without a fight. Ahead of Wednesday's season finale (9/8c, The CW), creator Jason Rothenberg spoke to TVGuide.com about how the hundred will fare in the bigshowdown with the Grounders, the likelihood of the Ark making it to Earth and more.

Clarke (Eliza Taylors) and Bellamy (Bob Morley) have polar opposite views as to what's best for the hundred right now. How will they overcome these differences and work together?
Jason Rothenberg: I think one of the things that I love so much about our show is that both options usually are bad in terms of any decision and this episode is no different. Whether they stay or go, most likely people will die and ultimately that decision is taken out of their hands. I think one of those things that is certainly true about Clarke and Bellamy is that they've come to respect each other over the course of the season. They've come to recognize each other's strengths in terms of what one does well and the other probably doesn't. Bellamy's more of the physical, rah-rah leader and Clarke is more of the figurehead, the queen. He's her sort of knight, basically.

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Raven got shot! How is this going to affect not only her chances of surviving, but also the hundred's?
Rothenberg: That definitely has huge, huge implications, not only this week, but probably if she survives in Season 2. I would say definitely it makes what [the hundred] ultimately have to do one hundred times harder because she won't be able to be the one to do it. That bullet only gets worse and worse over the course of the episode until she's essentially gone.

Murphy used the majority of the hundred's gun powder to escape. How does this affect their battle strategy?
Rothenberg: They had been in the process of building mines and they have some gun powder that they could probably convert from a mine into grenades, so they'll have certain things but not even close to what they need to defend themselves to the force that's coming for them. They're facing an overwhelming numbers disadvantage. Literally. It's not the 100, it's [the movie] 300. The Grounders are coming in such force and with such skill. The warriors that are coming are the worst of the worst. They're screwed. How they get out of this one is a big part of the story we tell in [Episode] 13 and whether they get out of it or not. I think that the thing that we come up with is pretty spectacular and not something anybody I think has seen before.

You haven't held back in regards to violence and killing off characters this season. How much of a bloodbath is this finale going to be?
Rothenberg: We jokingly sometimes talk about how by the end of the season you'll have to call the show The 50 and it's not far off from that. At the end of things there will not be close to as many people standing as there are in the beginning. Whether those are our main characters people will have to tune in to find out, but certainly lives hang in the balance at the end.

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We just met another group of natives, the Reapers. How much more are we going to learn about them?
Rothenberg: We definitely play with them some more, but we don't begin to really unpack the world and how it works and how the various groups — Reapers, Grounders, Mountain Men — are related and fit together and how the arrival of these strangers from the spaceship threw the puzzle pieces in the air until Season 2. That is essentially what Season 2 is about.... Part of the goal for me this season was to introduce these Grounders as the big bad guys antagonistic force and ultimately begin to shed some light on their complexities, that they aren't purely evil. ... They have a story in which they're the heroes of their own story. Obviously in [Episode] 13 they're still the huge antagonistic force — they're coming to destroy the hundred — but we've started planting seeds for Season 2 in which we'll see them as a little bit more gray than black and white.

The hundred have heavily relied on Lincoln as an ally recently. What role will he play in the big battle?
Rothenberg: It's actually really more Finn (Thomas McDonell) who comes up with the idea in the 11th hour that winds up, if not saving the day, than certainly buying them time to complete the mission that the episode sort of sets out to pull off. And the way that he does that is surprising and cool and brings certain elements of the show back in previous episodes in a good way.

I have such a soft spot for Jasper (Devon Bostick) and he's come so far since being stabbed in the pilot! 
Rothenberg: Jasper completes his journey to becoming a hero in an odd way. He's responsible for the win as it were at the end of the episode but yeah, I have a huge soft spot for him too. There are not a lot of light moments in this show so every time the camera finds Jasper, he manages to make me smile. He does something that I didn't expect. And he'll make moments where maybe the moment wasn't so developed in the script and he really maximizes the impact of it. And I appreciate that so much because comic relief is important, especially when things get as bleak as they have for us this season.

Jaha (Isaiah Washington) announced plans to take the Ark to Earth, but it's clear this isn't going to be easy to pull off.
Rothenberg: As he says in [Episode] 12, either we're going to die in space or we're going to die getting to the ground. And so they all go in knowing that their odds of survival were zero if they stayed up there. They'd all be dead within days. If they try to go, their odds of survival will be 5 percent or less. But at least that's better than zero. So I think it's safe to say that that's probably around the percentage of people that make it to the ground is, out of the 1,500 or so that set out at the beginning of the episode. It won't happen the way people imagine. Not everyone will make it, and certainly I think there are surprising along the way.

Get an exclusive first look at one major setback facing the Ark's return to Earth below. The 100 season finale airs Wednesday at 9/8c on The CW.

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