WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The 100 Season 7, Episode 16, "The Last War," which aired Wednesday on The CW.

At the end of The 100, humanity had faced its final judgment by the higher beings responsible for the Anomaly Stones, deciding if the entire species deserved to transcend to the next stage of its evolution or were destined to wipe each other out in endless in-fighting.

While the species was indeed determined to be worthy and transcended from their physical forms, longtime protagonist Clarke Griffin was ultimately denied her own ascension and left alone in her normal state. According to series creator Jason Rothenberg in an exclusive interview with CBR, this decision was due to Clarke's character arc since the start of the series, growing more hardened and ruthlessly violent over time in order to survive.

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"We start Clarke in a place of pure heroism, almost too good, and obviously she ends in a place where she's the last human being on Earth because she was not allowed to transcend because of all that she's done. To me, that was always a fascinating challenge... she's not a villain, of course, she's our protagonist, but she's not a hero," Rothenberg told CBR. "She's a broken, flawed character who, ultimately, was doing awful things early on, and we were cheering for her because she was doing it to people we didn't care about or were rooting against -- Mount Weather, for instance, even though there were innocents there -- and kind of putting the audience in the role of Mount Weather by Season 7."

Over the course of the series' seven-season run, Clarke had gone from idealistic leader of the hundred wayward youths sent to recolonize Earth to warrior woman who had personally left a trail of dead in defense of herself and her friends. As Clarke began to make increasingly morally questionable decisions, she had turned on friends that had broken bad when they became a threat themselves. For Rothenberg, this provided an interesting creative challenge.

"We now know what it's like to be on the other end of Wanheda's gun, because she was killing people who we care about," Rothenberg observed. "I think there was something delicious and subversive about that -- and the audience has to be judge, of course -- but it was not your typical arc for the protagonist of a show, for sure."

The 100 stars Eliza Taylor, Marie Avgeropoulos, Bob Morley, Lindsey Morgan, Richard Harmon, Tasya Teles, Shannon Kook and J.R. Bourne. The series airs on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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