Jason Rothenberg Talks The 100 Season 5 Reunions
Which The 100 Season 5 character reunion is showrunner Jason Rothenberg's favorite?
The 100 Season 5 premieres tonight and, as we have seen from the season-ending time jump and the trailers for the upcoming season, our main characters are all in different locations. Clarke is hanging with surrogate daughter Madi in so-called Eden. Octavia, Kane, Abby, and Indra are in the bunker underneath Polis. Bellamy, Murphy, Raven, and Monty are in the Ring, floating in orbit.
You know what this means, right? Reunions.
While we may have to wait a while to see some of our favorite characters reunited, The 100 Season 5, perhaps even more so than other seasons, is a season of reunions. The coming back together of these characters is made even more intense by the fact that it isn’t just a few weeks or months that these brother and sister, mother and daughter, friend and friend, have been apart; it’s been six frakking years.
Den of Geek talked to series showrunner Jason Rothenberg about the reunions in The 100 Season 5. Did he have a favorite reunion to either write or, if he wasn’t writing the episode, break as a story?
“Yeah,” said Rothenberg. “I think Clarke and Bellamy’s reunion is amazing. It’s emotional, it’s surprising. Obviously, Bellamy doesn’t even know Clarke’s alive, but discovering that she’s alive after all this time is just a huge, mind-blowing moment.”
Of course, like children, it’s hard for a showrunner to choose favorite scenes or narrative moments.
They’re all really emotional … I don’t know if we can talk about it specifically, but Bellamy and Octavia’s reunion is another one that’s just powerful, for totally different reasons. They’re all really great. I love the reunions, I’m here for them.
Rothenberg said there weren’t any particularly difficult reunions to write, though reunion-free Episode 2 was a tricky episode to write in general.
“The reunions were just about figuring out when… how long can we delay what are obviously very important moments, and we want these characters to reengage and have their various storylines collide and connect,” said Rothenberg, teasing the timing of some of these moments. “We don’t want to wait all season for it. We needed to lay in a track to understand how each of these three different arenas evolved into the things that they are. It was more about the timing and pacing, I wouldn’t say that any of them were particularly difficult to break, although the writers might not agree with me because everything is always hard to break.”
The 100 Season 5 premieres tonight at 9 p.m. ET on The CW.
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Kayti is a pop culture writer, editor, and full-time nerd who comes from a working class background. A member of the Television Critics Association, she specializes…