WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for The 100 Season 7, Episode 2 "The Garden," which Wednesday on The CW.
Season 6 of The 100 had the main cast arrive on the faraway world of Sanctum, a habitable moon in a distant solar system. Discovered some time before the nuclear armageddon that eradicated the majority of humanity and eventually rendered Earth uninhabitable, a group of colonists had lived on Sanctum for generations. As the last remnants of humanity joined the colonists at the start of Season 6, they discovered the moon had its own set of special properties and dangers, the most notable being a strange phenomenon known as the temporal anomaly.
Appearing as green cloud traveling across the moon's surface, the anomaly bends the laws of space and time, as experienced by Octavia Blake during the season. By the season's end, Diyoza had vanished within the anomaly after receiving a vision of her adult daughter Hope, while Octavia had developed strange symbols on her back from her own brief encounter with it. At the end of the Season 6 finale, an artifact was discovered bearing the same symbols, with Hope emerging from it stabbing Octavia with a strange device to teleport her away to an unknown location. By the second episode of Season 7, the true nature of anomaly is revealed, as Hope leads Gabriel and Echo to the other side of the phenomenon.
The anomaly is a portal to different worlds that all possess the artifact, with the one on Sanctum leading to faraway planet Hope named Skyring after the orbital ring visible from the planet's surface. The planet is the location where both Diyoza and Octavia were transported to, raising Hope after she was born as time moves at a slower rate on Skyring as it does on Sanctum -- while Diyoza had been separated from Octavia for a relative day, months had passed for Diyoza on Skyring before she was reunited with Octavia. Discovering a video recording on a tablet device on the makeshift farm left on the farm where Hope grew up, Gabriel learns more about the anomaly.
A scientist from the initial crew of the Eligius III, the spaceship that brought the colonists along with Gabriel, observes that the anomaly actually is a wormhole linking multiple different planets together. The objects with the strange symbols are the source of the anomalies on their respective worlds with Skyring having an artifact similar to the one discovered on Sanctum. Triggering the sequence of symbols on the artifact selects which world one can travel to next. However, Gabriel's attempts to decipher the symbols to find a way to return home are completely derailed when a man crazed by being isolated on the planet smashes the tablet.
The group learns that Skyring is used by a mysterious group as a prison planet, with individuals imprinted with a timestamp dictating how much time they have left in their sentence before returning to take them off-world. With the sequence of symbols on the artifact still undeciphered and the video recording destroyed, the group is stuck with the prisoner on Skyring for the remainder of his sentence -- multiple years which would only be a matter of days back on Sanctum. And with the ones that run the planetary prison visibly hostile against Diyoza and Octavia during their own encounter with them, Hope and Echo must devise a way to catch the prison overseers off-guard when they inevitably return in the future.
The 100 stars Eliza Taylor, Marie Avgeropoulos, Bob Morley, Lindsey Morgan, Richard Harmon, Tasya Teles and Shannon Kook. The series airs on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.