The popular post-apocalyptic series The 100 returns for its seventh and final season on The CW this month, bringing a close to the adventures of Clarke Griffin and her allies. With well over eighty episodes chronicling the characters as they endure warring factions, lethal gladiatorial games and even relocating to a completely different planet, there is quite a lot of material to recall in preparation for the show's return. With that in mind, here is a quick primer on what to remember ahead of the The 100 Season 7 premiere.
In The 100, a nuclear holocaust has ravaged Earth, wiping out the vast majority of the population and making much of the planet uninhabitable. However, a small segment of survivors move to an orbital space station. Approximately a century after armageddon, one hundred teenagers and young adults are forced to make landfall as the life support system and supplies on board the station begin to dwindle. From a makeshift community on a recovering Earth, the group quickly discovers, amidst all the internal drama and distrust, that there are other factions, who see them as hostile, living on the planet.
Led by characters including Clarke Griffin and Bellamy Blake, the ensemble makes increasingly desperate and brutal decisions as they struggle to survive. This is exacerbated by the station crashing on Earth at the start of Season 2, leading to a renewed conflict against the other factions on Earth. Along the way, Clarke discovers her blood makes immune to radiation, which is seen as a divine sign she should lead the more primitive tribes. This discovery presages a sweeping radiation storm forcing Bellamy to lead a group to survive on a ship in Earth's orbit for five years, while another group led by his sister, Octavia, takes shelter in an underground bunker, where she rules with bloody fist, forcing gladiatorial games to maintain order and instituting cannibalism to survive. Clarke remains planetside and survives while taking on a surrogate daughter named Madi, who similarly has radiation-resistant blood.
After Bellamy and his group return to Earth as Octavia and her people emerge from their bunker, the groups are immediately at odds once again, with Octavia having descended into power-maddened savagery. After Madi defeats Octavia, she is recognized as the rightful ruler of the surviving tribes, and has a device known as The Flame, containing the personalities of previous rulers, implanted within her; Octavia is largely shunned for her actions within the bunker but still commands a small group of loyalists. This is all complicated by the arrival of murderous criminals who had been cryogenically frozen in a prison ship that arrived on Earth at the start of Season 5. As conflict broke out again, the last habitable portion of the planet was destroyed, and the survivors entered cryosleep to travel over a century to a faraway habitable world known as Sanctum, at which they arrive in Season 6.
Early expeditions quickly discovered Sanctum contained its own lethal conditions, including an eclipse that drove those exposed to violent madness and a strange energy storm known as a temporal anomaly with the ability to send those engulfed through time. The survivors discovered the planet had been settled two hundred years ago, with colonists divided into two factions: The Primes, who commanded a community of religious zealots while secretly transferring their consciousness into new host bodies, and the Children of Gabriel, who lived in bloody opposition outside of the main settlement.
While Clarke and her survivors were able to overthrow the Primes, with only their leader Russell as the last apparent survivor living on as their prisoner, tension between the communities remains at an all time high, especially as the fellow survivors from Earth are brought out of cryosleep. The Flame was successfully deleted from Madi after a malevolent personality known as the Dark Commander attempted to take control of her body, though Raven Reyes detected it had uploaded itself to an unknown location. And a young woman claiming to be Diyoza's adult daughter Hope has since emerged from the temporal anomaly, stabbing Octavia while collapsing into an unconscious heap herself, setting the events of Season 7 into motion.
The 100 and stars Eliza Taylor, Marie Avgeropoulos, Bob Morley, Lindsey Morgan, Richard Harmon, Tasya Teles and Shannon Kook. The series will return for its seventh and final season Wednesday, May 20 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.