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"This is Earth, Clarke. Anything's possible."

"Who we are and who we need to be to survive are two very different things."

— Bellamy Blake

The 100 is an American Science Fiction series that aired on The CW. It is very loosely based on Kass Morgan's novel series of the same name.

The series begins in 2149, 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse devastated Earth. The only survivors were thought to be the inhabitants of twelve national space stations that were in orbit at the time, which have since joined into a single large station called the Ark. On this ship, laws are harsh and resources are dwindling — so the Ark's leaders turn to Earth as a potential solution.

One hundred juvenile delinquents are sent down to Earth in a dropship to see if it is fit for habitation again. Cut off from the Ark due to a landing mishap, the delinquents try to set up camp on the ground. But while the group's eventual leaders — Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor), a privileged young woman who was kept in solitary lockup because of the secret her father was killed for knowing, and Bellamy Blake (Bob Morley), a rebellious former guard demoted after the Ark learned about his illegal younger sister Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos) — find that establishing a functional society composed of teenagers on an unfamiliar planet is hard enough by itself, there's one other major complication: they aren't the only humans on Earth. The camp quickly comes into conflict with the Grounders, clans of people who also survived the apocalypse, and who aren't happy about the 100 crashlanding onto their territory.

On the Ark, its leadership scrabbles to maintain order. Clarke's mother Abigail (Paige Turco) alternately clashes and cooperates with fellow councilor Marcus Kane (Henry Ian Cusick) and the Ark's leader, Chancellor Thelonius Jaha (Isaiah Washington), as they try to stay on top of the Ark's ever-growing list of problems.

The series premiered in the United States on March 19, 2014 and all seven seasons of the show can currently be streamed on Netflix. It finished its run on September 30, 2020, after seven seasons and (aptly enough) 100 episodes.

There is also a character page and a recap page. Feel free to contribute.

In October 2019, it was reported that The CW was developing a prequel spin-off set 97 years before the start of the series. The cast was announced in February 2020, with the backdoor pilot being aired as part of The 100's final season on July 8, 2020. On November 5, 2021, it was confirmed that the spin-off was not moving forward.

Tropes present in this series:

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A-F

Aborted Arc: Many of them. In Season 1, Octavia kisses several characters without any development later. In Season 2, there were mutated humans who scared Octavia but were never seen again.
AB Negative: Invoked twice in one incident. Nyko has Rh-null blood, one of the rarest blood types in the world. This proves a problem when they can't find a match for him when he's dying of a wound. Octavia, not understanding the issue, asks Abby what the big deal is, seeing as all Arkers are universal donors.
Accidental Murder: When their radios do not work, the 100 launch flares in the hopes that the Ark will see them and realize that they are alive. Unfortunately the flares land in a Grounder village and burn it down, which the Grounders take as an act of war.
Action Girl:
- The Grounders do not appear to have any assigned gender roles, and women are trained as warriors and leaders alongside the men.
- Indra is the commander of the Woods Clan, who is hostile to the Ark but becomes a valued ally as they work together.
- Octavia is mentored by Indra in the second season, learning Grounder ways and how to fight. She becomes a capable warrior as a result of this, going on to out-think and kill Luna.
- Lexa is the Grounder Commander, who heads the Twelve Clans.
- Clarke who had a major fight with Anya in Season 2 and won. In Season 3, she killed a panther with just a knife.
- Anya is the first Grounder leader encountered by the 100, she is a leader of the Woods Clan and is the first recurring antagonist of the series.
- Major Byrne was a member of the Guard on the Ark, and becomes one of the combat/security leaders after the Ark returns to Earth. When the Ark begins to form an alliance with the Grounders, she is involved as a military advisor and Clarke's bodyguard. However, she's no match for a mutated gorilla.
- Raven who mostly fixes and makes the weapons and is capable of using them.
- Abby is capable with firearms and acts as a leader. She is also a doctor and because of this she hesitates to take lives, unless it is necessary.
Action Politician: Both Clarke and Lexa act as leaders of their people and are pretty much always on the front-lines where the action is.
Action Survivor: None of the 100 know anything about Earth and very few know anything about combat. Those who survive do so by slowly learning how to fight.
Actually, That's My Assistant: When Kane tries make contact with the Grounder Commander in order to negotiate peace between them and the Ark survivors, the large warrior Gustus locks him in a cage with Jaha and a Grounder slave woman. Jaha and Kane debate over how they can convince Gustus that their desire for peace is genuine, unaware that the slave woman in the cell with them is actually Lexa, the true Grounder Commander, who was scoping them out to see if they really did want peace. Gustus was actually her trusted lieutenant.
Adaptation Expansion: The books focus on little else besides the 100; the show does more worldbuilding by lending focus to the adults on the Ark and the Mountain Men, and goes deeper into Grounder culture.
Adaptation Name Change:
- From "The Colony" in the books to "The Ark" on the show.
- People who survived the nuclear winter are called "Earthborn" in the books while the show calls them "Grounders."
Adaptational Romance Downgrade: Note that the show is an In Name Only adaptation of the books.
- In the books, Wells and Clarke were in a relationship prior to his betrayal of her parents; in the show Wells clearly likes her but is offed before anything can come of it.
- In the books, Bellamy and Clarke get together fairly quickly and are an Official Couple. In the show, they are Just Friends and Platonic Life-Partners with the occasional Ship Tease that goes nowhere. Instead, both are paired with multiple different characters throughout the show, and by the end, Clarke kills Bellamy.
Adapted Out: Glass and her storyline are not present in the series, which focuses on Wells, Clarke, Bellamy (the other 3 POVs) and the rest of the 100. Conversely, a bunch of Canon Foreigners were created. Other characters to be cut from the novels include Thalia, Luke, Lilly, Asher, and Graham.
Advancing Wall of Doom: The main threat of Season 4, the Praimfaya wave. The nuclear reactors in Europe are finally breaking down, releasing huge amounts of radiation, which are estimated to reach the main setting in mere months. Everyone scrambles to find some way to survive it, as this is a force that simply cannot be beaten. The main solution turns out to be avoiding it by going down to an underground bunker and wait for five years, while another group, cut off from the others, manages to go over it by heading up to the remains of the Ark.
Aerith and Bob: It is the future.
- The Sky people; common names like Jasper, Monty, and Nathan exist alongside presently used but fairly uncommon names like Bellamy, Thelonius, and Sterling, as well as downright weird ones like Atom.
- The Grounders lean towards the more fantastical end of the naming scale. They have common given names like Anya, Tristan, and Luna, odd variants of common names like Lexa, Gustus, and Nyko, words that are not commonly used as first names like Lincoln, Echo, and Roan, and weird ones like Emori, Denae, and Semet.
After the End:
- Ninety-seven years after a nuclear war that spanned the globe. The Ark is a conglomeration of twelve space stations that were in orbit around Earth at the time, and to the knowledge of its inhabitants they were the only survivors. However, there are large populations of humans still on the planet which have developed their own societies after the destruction.
- Happens again after the Praimfaya wave devastates most of the planet and kills most of the remaining life. Clarke and Madi wander this environment for six years. Only a single valley is left untouched, and that gets destroyed when McCreary activates Damocles.
Alien Blood: Some of the Grounders have pitch black blood, after which they are called Nightbloods. It marks them as being eligible to become the next Commander. It's later revealed that black blood was engineered in pre-apocalypse times to let someone withstand high levels of radiation.
All Crimes Are Equal: On The Ark, all crimes are punishable by death unless you are under eighteen years of age. Juveniles are held in solitary confinement until their eighteenth birthday, whereupon a trial is held to determine if they should be executed or allowed to re-enter Ark society. This is for population control purposes, as there is limited life support on The Ark.
All Hail the Great God Mickey!: The Grounders' mythology is heavily influenced by Becca, who fled to Earth before Polaris Station was destroyed, and the AI she helped develop, which started the nuclear war. She redesigned it to be benevolent, and edited her genes so that she could control it herself. Nearly a century later, the survivors she encountered upon her arrival have long been organized into a formal society, with her their first Commander, after the badge on her pressure suit. Those who gain her ability to control the AI—Natblida, for their inky black blood—are groomed to become the next Commander, fighting to death in a violent Conclave. It's believed that when the winner consumes the chip containing the AI, they ascend, accepting that they're a reincarnation of Bekka Pramheda. There are more than a few rituals around this, the most prominent involving the recitation of the names of past Commanders. Additionally, Becca is worshipped, at least, by the keeper of the chip, with her dropship and its flag stored inside a cave whose walls depict a warped version of her story.
Alliterative Name: A recurring theme with Callie Cartwig, Bellamy Blake, Jasper Jordan and Raven Reyes.
Almost Dead Guy: Gina has been stabbed by a Grounder who activates a self-destruct in Mount Weather, but manages to tell Raven to get the deactivation code so that she can turn off the self-destruct. Though Raven does get the code, Gina has bled out in the intervening seconds and died before she could deactivate the self-destruct.
Always Chaotic Evil:
- Though the Grounders are revealed to be more complicated than as first appears, both they and the 100 regard the Reapers as unreachable murderous monsters. The Reapers are ultimately revealed to be Grounders harvested by the Mountain Men, turned feral by way of a Fantastic Drug.
- The show generally deconstructs and subverts this trope as even the Mountain Men are shown to be complicated and have reasons for their "evil" actions and the Grounders, Sky People, and Mountain Men all have shades of grey and the desire to do what is best for their people.
Anarchy Is Chaos: The 100 are a mess after Bellamy takes the reins and declares that they can do "whatever [they] want, whenever [they] want." It takes Wells' and Charlotte's deaths and Murphy's exile to make them realize they need laws.
And Starring: "With Isaiah Washington And Henry Ian Cusick"
Anyone Can Die: The series has killed off several supporting/minor characters and so far at least one main character per season and also isn't shy about high body counts even including children. The notable deaths per season are:
- Season 1: Wells, Charlotte, Atom, Myles, Diana Sydney, and Shumway.
- Season 2: Anya, Finn, Sterling, Fox, Maya, Dante, Cage, and Tsing.
- Season 3: Lexa, Lincoln, Monroe, Sinclair, Pike, Hannah, Titus, Nia, Ontari, Gina, and Shay.
- Season 4: Nyko, Ilian, Roan, Luna, Riley, Jasper, David Miller. Not to mention the millions who die in Praimfaya.
- Season 5: Jaha, Kara, Ethan Hardy, Vinson, McCreary, Monty and Harper.
- Season 6: Shaw, Delilah, Kaylee, Kane, Jade, Josephine, Ryker, Priya, Abby, and Simone.
- Season 7: Bellamy, Gabriel, Diyoza, Anders, Sheidheda, Cadogan, Russell, Nelson, Hatch, Orlando and Doucette.
Apocalypse How: Caused by a nuclear armageddon. The effect was "Planetary/Societal Collapse" for Earth and "Societal Disruption" for the Ark.
Arc Number:
- 100. It's the number of delinquents originally planned to be sent down to earth, the number of slots left in Arkadia in Season 4, and the number of representatives each clan gets to send to the bunker. Gabriel fills 100 notebooks in trying to decode the Anomaly Stone, and the show has exactly 100 episodes.
- 12 and 13:
  - The Ark was formed by 12 nations, each corresponding one of its 12 stations. It originaly had 13 stations, but Polaris, the 13th station, was destroyed.
  - The Grounders have 12 clans. Skaikru becomes the 13th.
  - There are 12 Primes. Gabriel, the 13th Prime, defected against them after his "moral awakening".
Arc Symbol:
- The infinity symbol. Not only is it seen on everything connected to Becca, including the Flame, and a flag in a shrine dedicated to her, it's the last digit of the password of the Anomaly Stone. It's almost fitting that it's input by her.
- The triangular logo of Second Dawn. It's ever-present in their bunker, and its successor group, the Disciples, gave it the features of a phoenix.
Arc Words:
- "My X, my responsibility," usually said by Bellamy in relation to Octavia.
- "May we meet again," said amongst the Sky People before they're separated—including through death.
- "Yu gonplei ste odon," ("Your fight is over" in the Grounders' language) said to a Grounder before they die. As the Sky People acclimatize to the Grounders, they begin using the phrase as well, translated or otherwise.
- "Now, we get our humanity back," or some variation. Usually said by Kane after the characters have done something awful to survive, such as choosing who can't wait out Praimfaya in the Second Dawn bunker. It makes such an impression on Abby, she begins saying it as well.
The Ark: The last bastion for the survivors of the nuclear winter. At least that's what they thought.
Artifact Title:
- In the first season, the realpolitik of the Ark and the struggles of its higher-ups was a secondary storyline to that of the titular 100 (technically 102, including Bellamy and Raven) surviving on Earth. The third season focuses more on exclusively on politics, worldbuilding, and war engineered by the Ark and Grounder leaders, with the surviving members of the 102 (except for Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia, Raven, Jasper, and Monty) getting put Out of Focus.
- It becomes somewhat relevant again in Season 4, with Arkadia only having enough space for 100 survivors. However, it becomes a moot point when Arkadia is blown up. Several episodes later, Octavia declares that each clan will get 100 spots in the bunker. In order to decide who gets to live Jaha and Kane use Clarke's list that she made earlier in the season for the potential Arkadia survivors.
Artificial Intelligence: It's eventually revealed that the nuclear apocalypse was caused, not by nations going to war, but by a rogue A.I. called A.L.I.E. hacking the world's nuclear weapons systems, in an effort to curb overpopulation. She becomes the Big Bad of Season 3, where she continues her misguided efforts to help humanity by turning all surviving humans into computer based consciousnesses as well, whose memories and emotions can be edited to create perfect happiness, free will be damned.
- The Commanders of the Grounders and the Primes of Sanctum are also revealed to be artificial intelligence's, albeit created by Brain Uploading human minds onto computer drives.
Artistic License – Biology: The Mountain Men.
- They are unable to metabolize the radiation outside their mountain home. They break out in instantaneous lesions and bleeding wounds when exposed to radiation, which are treated with blood transfusions from Grounders or members of the Ark. The blood transfusions not only prevent further damage, but heal what has already occurred. They then move on to bone marrow transplants from Ark members to cure their radiation weakness.
- Their bone marrow plot seems to be "take someone's bone marrow and stick it into anyone else." This is hardly the case in real life. Donor and recipient have to be matched, and with only 40-something donors for 400ish recipients, you'd be lucky to find even one match for people who are not directly related.
  - Possible justified, with a mention that Skaikru were all genetically engineered to be universal donors.
Artistic License – Engineering:
- In the second season, Jaha descends to the ground using a nuclear missile. We can assume that it wasn't specifically converted into a shuttle because the warhead is still inside, yet it has a braking parachute and enough internal room for Jaha to climb aboard.
- The entire concept of the Praimfaya death wave in Season 4 is pure fantasy. For starters, no nuclear powerplant in existence would last close to 100 years without any oversight or maintenance. In Real Life you could consider yourself lucky if they lasted 100 days before melting down. Furthermore, no meltdown, not even a simultaneous, collective one across an entire continent, would create a scorching plasma wave with enough thermal energy to cover the entire planet and incinerate human bodies before it even touches them. It would dangerously increase global radiation levels across the globe, leading to a surge of cancer patients, birth defects and similar radiation-induced illnesses in the surviving population, but it sure as hell wouldn't wipe out all organic life on Earth in one swoop.
Artistic Licence - Nuclear Physics: "Anaconda" shows the nuclear war from the perspective of Bill Cadogan's daughter. As Callie and her mom are taken to the Second Dawn bunker, D.C. is hit by a missile:
- The helicopter is unnervingly close to ground zero, yet it flies on, not damaged in the slightest.
- Despite not bothering to cover their eyes, neither Callie nor her mom are blinded by the light of the fireball.
Ascended Extra: Emori and Echo are separately introduced as secondary characters in the second season. By the end of the fourth season, they're firmly members of the main cast, flying to the Ark with Bellamy, Raven, and Murphy to survive Praimfaya, and spending six years together—more than long enough to become friends.
Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence:
- The entire City of Light plotline has shades of this in its recruiting pitch.
- The show ends with what's left of the human race transcending the physical universe on behalf of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, leaving behind their bodies and turning into immortal Energy Beings. That said, transcendence is voluntary, and the surviving core characters choose to stay mortal and live out the rest of their lives in peace, together.
"Ass" in "Ambassador": In Season 3, the Ice Nation has become belligerent and intends to break the Grounder Coalition. Their ambassadors are condescending and hostile to the other Grounder tribes and the Sky People. One of them gets himself thrown off a balcony for his arrogance, but that has no tempering effect on the others.
Assimilation Plot: A.L.I.E., an Artificial Intelligence, attempts to force all human beings to ingest a computer chip that will connect them to the City of Light: a Cyberspace reality where they will continue to exist as computer programs even after their physical bodies are killed, and where A.L.I.E. can use Emotion Control and Laser-Guided Amnesia to make them perfectly happy, whether they want to be or not.
Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
- Though the Grounders believe that their Commanders are chosen through Born-Again Immortality and are selected by the spirits of previous Commanders, they need to prove that they are worthy of retaining that power after they are in the position. Gustus, Lexa's bodyguard, fears that if she shows any weakness she will be deposed and killed by her own people.
  - To prove that the Spirit of the Commander has chosen you to become the next Commander in the first place, you have to win a Conclave in which you have to fight and kill the other potential successors.
- This becomes a major plot point at the end of Season 4 with regards about what to do with a bunker that can support 1200 people now that the approaching Praimfaya wave is unavoidable and it is the only hope for humanity's survival. In order to avoid a full-on war between every clan, Roan proposes that a Conclave should be held with a single Champion selected from each clan and that the winner will be allowed to utilize the bunker however they see fit. Octavia ends up winning the Conclave and, after declaring that all clans will be allowed to live in it together, is pronounced the leader of Wonkru.
Awesomeness by Analysis: Josephine is able to identify Trigedasleng as an English Creole and start picking up the gist of what people are saying after only hearing a few sentences.
Back for the Dead:
- After being Put on a Bus for much of the sixth season, Kane returns in a new body, and is killed at the end of the episode.
- Near the end of the sixth season, Diyoza enters a temporal anomaly, and disappears. While she's present in the next season, it's only in flashbacks. Her first appearance in real time is also the episode in which she dies.
Back for the Finale: The "judge" appearing as Lexa (for Clarke) and Abby (for Raven) in the series finale.
Back from the Dead: In the third season, when a person with the A.L.I.E chip or the Flame/A.L.I.E 2.0 chip dies, their minds are uploaded into a main frame and are technically still alive in a virtual world and they become part of the artificial intelligence. This makes it so that Lexa is able to appear in the finale after her death in the real world to help Clarke in the City of Light. Otherwise, it's a setting with All Deaths Final.
Badass Boast:
- Raven is very self-confident when it comes to her engineering skills. When Bellamy points out that the bridge she intends to destroy has survived nuclear war and one hundred years of weather, she is undaunted.
  Raven: It won't survive me.
- In the second season, despite the resumption of political rule by the Ark survivors, Clarke retains her power from her influence with the Grounders.
  Clarke: You may be the Chancellor, but I'm in charge.
- In the third season, when Lexa is prodded as to who she will select to be her champion in her trial of combat:
  Lexa: I am the Commander. No one fights for me.
Batman Grabs a Gun: Grounders are so adamant against using guns, anyone who does is no longer one of them. This rule is broken onscreen in two episodes of the third season:
- In "Thirteen", Titus attempts to shoot Clarke for allegedly corrupting Lexa. Unfortunately, he hits Lexa instead, quickly killing her.
- In the first part of the finale, Indra shoots at people possessed by A.L.I.E., providing time for Bellamy and Murphy to save Clarke.
Battle in the Centre of the Mind:
- In the sixth season, [[spoiler:Clarke is subject to a Grand Theft Me by Josephine Lightbourne, one of the Primes who rule a compound on Sanctum. She survives thanks to A.L.I.E.'s neural mesh, and while Josephine is sleeping, fights her inside their conjoined mind spaces. As Clarke's body deteriorates, coming close to a stroke; they're forced to work together to purge Josephine's memories.
- Sheidheda plays mental games of chess with those he wants to control. Madi barely wins, needing exterior help, while Russell isn't so lucky, being slashed in the throat before he can react.
Beard of Sorrow: Jasper starts Season 3 in a depressed funk with a goatee. This is in stark contrast with the preceding seasons, in which his clean-shaven face emphasized his innocence.
Beautiful Dreamer: When Lexa has fallen asleep on her couch in the opening of "Bitter Harvest", Clarke sits across from her and sketches a portrait of her sleeping.
Behavioral Conditioning: Reapers, mindless cannibals who wander the tunnels near Mount Weather Command Center, are brainwashed Grounders. Grounders are kidnapped to Mount Weather, selected for the Cerberus Project instead of being harvested, and conditioned to be addicted to a red-tinted drug, and deathly afraid of a certain tone.
Beneath Notice: At the start of Season 3, Clarke is hiding in the wilderness and avoiding both Arkadia and the Grounder Coalition. Since she is living as a normal Grounder, speaking Trigedasleng and hunting for her own food, occasionally exchanging animal meat and skin for goods at a trading post, nobody thinks that she might be the person everybody is looking for. Roan sees through the disguise and captures her regardless.
Better the Devil You Know: Chancellor Jaha is perfectly willing to accept the Ark's code of laws which require the execution of all criminals over age eighteen, even those who have committed minor crimes. That said, Abigail, whose husband was executed under Jaha's administration because he knew too much, says she prefers having Jaha in power over Kane and even risks being executed herself to keep him alive.
Big Brother Instinct: Bellamy and Octavia's relationship in spades. Bellamy's one redeeming character trait before Character Development is his care and protection towards Octavia (and even then, he was overprotective). His protection of Charlotte is also suggested to be due to his big brother instinct.
Big Damn Heroes:
- At the end of the third season, Clarke is pressured into giving into A.L.I.E.'s control. Indra picks up a gun, and shoots others under her thrall, providing time for Bellamy and Murphy to break into the Commander's throne room, and save Clarke.
- Rarely for this show, Played for Laughs in "Ashes to Ashes". Before Echo can be mind wiped, and subject to a Grand Theft Me, Miller and Gaia enter the machine shop where she's being held, freeing her from her restraints. She believes they set out to rescue her, but they were just looking for Becca's notes on the Flame.
- In "A Little Sacrifice", Indra fights Sheidheda, and loses. Just before she's killed, Madi jumps onto him, scratching his face badly enough to blind him.
Bilingual Bonus: The name "Wonkru," meaning "one people," sounds like "wankru," which would mean "people of death," hinting at what happened in the bunker.
Biological Weapons Solve Everything: The Grounders send Murphy back to the 100 after infecting him with a virus that will render his people feverish and weak by the time the Grounders invade two days later. It doesn't quite work, but only through quick thinking on the 100's part.
Bittersweet Ending:
- The Season 2 finale is more a Downer Ending, see below. But it is also bittersweet since Clarke and Bellamy do accomplish the goal of saving their people from Mount Weather, and the prisoners get to reunite with their loved ones.
- The Season 3 finale. The City of Light is destroyed and people reunite with their loved ones, but Clarke has to finally say goodbye to Lexa, and A.L.I.E. reveals to her that radiation from nuclear plant meltdowns is going destroy the earth again in about six months.
- Season 5 concludes with the Earth destroyed once again. The survivors go into cryosleep for what is supposed to be 10 years to wait for it to recover, but when Bellamy and Clarke are awakened, they discover it was actually 125 years and that Monty and Harper stayed awake to live together in peace and had a son. In a heartwrenching video log, Bellamy and Clarke learn that Monty spent his entire life searching for a new home for humanity and sent them to a faraway planet, where he hopes that they will do better than they did on Earth. The season ends with Bellamy and Clarke in tears, holding each other and gazing at their new planet, sad for the loss of their friends but hopeful for their future.
- Season 7 and the series ends with Sheidheda and Cadogan dead, and the Judge ascending humanity after Indra and Octavia convince both sides to stop fighting. However, Clarke is barred from ascending as she killed Cadogan during the test, leaving her the last human left in existence... or so it seems. In an interesting turnaround, however, Clarke's friends (Raven, Octavia, Gaia, Indra, Jordan, Echo, Hope, Murphy, Emori, Jackson, Nathan, Niylah, and even Levitt) all rejected transcendence in order to be with her again despite knowing that they won't be allowed to create children to continue the species and they won't be able to transcend with the rest of humanity after they die. With no one else to fight, their fight is finally over.
Black-and-Gray Morality: To the point that "there are no good guys" becomes a frequent phrase used by the main characters.
- The Ark enforced draconian laws which execute offenders for even minor offenses, but it is made clear that this is viewed as a necessity to preserve resources as long as possible.
- The 100 commit numerous acts of war against the Grounders, initially through ignorance, but later decide that the best way to deal with the situation is with increased violence, particularly by killing off Grounders by the hundreds using bombs and rocket fuel. They are just trying to survive, though.
- The Grounders have a warrior culture that is quick to bloodshed and endorses grueling torture as execution, even from characters that are portrayed as especially "good" or honorable. This is portrayed as just the way they have learned to survive after a literal Apocalypse.
- The Mountain Men engage in sadistic medical experiments upon the innocent and will not even discuss potential alternatives, not hesitating even when a peaceful solution is literally shouted into their faces. This also doubles as Gray-and-Gray Morality because the atrocities are carried out because they are genuinely the only way for them to survive — the Mountain Men have no tolerance for the surface radiation on the earth, and the only treatment is derived from the blood of kidnapped grounders. Later, they find that the people of the Ark can potentially cure them completely, but only with their bone marrow — leading them to attempt to kill dozens of teenagers in an attempt to protect themselves from radiation.
- Played straight with the conflict with Nia the Ice Nation Queen because her actions were just so she can gain more power by her hunting for Clarke because she believed that if she kills her she will gain power from all the people she has killed and her organizing the bombing of Mount Weather that kills several innocent people just so she can make a play for Lexa's throne. Also with Ontari who also seeks power and even murdered children in their sleep to get it.
- Pike and the people of Farm Station adopt an excessively aggressive stance toward the Grounders because they landed in the midst of Azgeda, a particularly brutal Grounder clan, and have experienced nothing but atrocities at the hands of Grounders. However, this leads to Pike and the rest of the Ark people committing a number of unprovoked atrocities against their own Grounder allies.
- Clarke herself walks headlong into this trope several times. First, when she slaughters the entirety of Mount Weather — including allies and children — to save her people from being harvested for their bone marrow. Then, when she forcibly harvests bone marrow from Luna and nearly tests it on Emori against her will in a last-ditch effort to save everybody from radiation, and again when she locks all of the Grounders and some of her own people out of the Second Dawn bunker as Praimfaya is approaching because she genuinely believes it is the only way to ensure the survival of the human race.
"Blind Idiot" Translation: The Disciples' translation of the Anomaly Stone is accurate save for multi-syllable symbols. The biggest mistake is "Last War"—closer to "Last Test"—since it's triggered them to train for a conflict, when they should've been studying for one of the tests through which they put recruits.
Blood from Every Orifice: The virus the Grounders send the 100 has people bleeding from the eyes, mouth, and nose.
Bloody Horror: After discovering Clarke's plan to kill her, Nia has Ontari cut her own hand and cover Clarke's face with her blood. Clarke is still covered in her blood in the following scene, shocked by the event and by the color of the blood as well, as Ontari is a black-blooded "Nightblood".
Blue-and-Orange Morality: In Season 3, we are introduced to A.L.I.E., an artificial intelligence whom Jaha is helping to shepherd the citizens of Arkadia to the "City of Light," a rumored promised land. To enter, a person must swallow a device that hardwires the brain into feeling absolutely no pain, physical or otherwise, wiping entire sections of memory and essentially turning people into drones for her. As an artificial intelligence, she has no human emotions or human understanding of right and wrong and is just following her core command, which is to "make life better for humanity." She takes drastic measures to accomplish this, including wiping out most of mankind before the events of the series to prevent a potential overpopulation problem. It is later revealed that her purpose for the City of Light was to "save humanity" from a coming nuclear deathwave that will irradiate the ground in six months' time. Taking away pain was an attempt to give people happy lives, and after the end came, their minds would have lived on in the city, but as a machine, she couldn't understand what exactly was wrong with the violent ways she went about getting people to enter.
Bluff the Impostor: In "Welcome to Bardo", an episode featuring two impostors:
- At the end of the sixth season, Murphy and Emori, intended to become hosts for Daniel and Kaylee Prime, begin impersonating them instead. Here, suspicious, a follower of Russell who's preparing the latest Self-Immolation makes Murphy recite Sanctum's four pillars. Another follower, equally wary, covers for Murphy, reciting the wrong pillars. When Murphy thanks Trey, the followers realize they're being duped, and begin preparing to immolate him instead.
- Sheidheda unknowingly reveals that he's subject Russell to a Kill and Replace when he orders Russell's followers to kneel or die, something Indra heard as a child. She confirms her concerns by warning him, in Trig, that there's a spider on his back. He flinches and checks, and she metaphorically pounces.
Body-Count Competition: Grounders keep track of their kills through scars/tattoos on their body, often bragging about them. Niylah observes in surprise that Clarke does not have any tally marks on her back, but Clarke responds that there is not enough room.
Body Snatcher: The Primes of Sanctum are actually the centuries-old consciousnesses of the original colonists, stored on computer drives and inserted into new bodies as their old ones die. This process erases the mind of the body's original owner and allows the Prime to take control. Happens to Clarke, when she's made a host for Josephine Prime.
Bookends:
- Clarke starts and ends the first season alone, locked in an empty room with a painting of the night sky.
- The above poster from Season 1 contains the eponymous 100 juveniles falling from the sky. For the last season, its poster has what's left of the 100 levitating towards the sky.
- The pilot sees the 100 arrive on a wilder, radiation-free Earth; the fourth season ends with some of them escaping as it's flooded with radiation. At the end of the fifth season, this happens again, with almost everyone left on the planet, and with what remains of its habitable land being destroyed by a powerful bomb.
- In the first episode, Abby is nearly floated by Kane for wasting medical resources on Jaha. She faces her potential death with dignity, is was saved Just in Time by Jaha, recovering from his surgery. In their last episode together, the roles have switched, and not only does Kane request that he be floated, the process goes through uninterrupted.
Born-Again Immortality: The Grounders believe this is what happens to the Commander: when they die, their spirit chooses the next Commander, who emerges as the winner of the Conclave. "Thirteen" reveals that the Commander's spirit is really the A.L.I.E. 2.0 chip, also called the Flame, which is implanted in each Commander's brainstem and passed on from one Commander to the next.
Bound and Gagged: Happens to almost every major character at least once, especially in Season 3.
Boxed Crook: All 100 of the juveniles sent to Earth. If they succeed in their mission to Earth (read: survive, thus proving the habitability of the planet), then they will be pardoned for their crimes.
Brainwashed and Crazy:
- The Reapers, who are Grounders forcibly given a drug to turn them feral.
- People chipped by A.L.I.E. harm themselves and others to coerce more people to join the City of Light.
Break the Badass: A.L.I.E., the evil AI who's the villain of the third season, does this thrice:
- Raven is so damn tough, she agrees to undergo surgery without even anaesthetic to remove a bullet which could keep her from walking again. Midway through the season, she's given a chip which puts her under A.L.I.E.'s thrall. The spell is broken when Jasper notices she's forgotten critical things, leading Jaha, who's working with A.L.I.E., to recommend that she remind Raven what was taken away. With terrifying force, Raven repeatedly remembers unpleasant memories, including the surgery, and the Mercy Kill by Clarke of Finn. She collapses and begins to scream in agony, being taken by Abby to the medical bay. Violently writhing on the gurney she's strapped to, she screeches that she's giving in.
- Kane remains resolute as he orders that 300 Ark residents be culled to preserve oxygen. Understandably, he refuses to surrender to A.L.I.E. To break his spirit, she has him crucified, complete with nails being driven into his hands. In short order, he's in as much anguish as Raven; he agrees to be chipped when Abby's life is threatened.
- Over her first months on Earth, Clarke becomes a fearsome leader, being dubbed Wanheda, the Commander of Death, by the society which emerged from the Apocalypse How. So that A.L.I.E. can steal a chip containing an AI which could stop her, Clarke is tortured by her mom, who's possessed by A.L.I.E., then Forced to Watch while her mom hangs herself—the latter act, calculated to break her. While Clarke holds on until help arrives, even she isn't immune to being rattled by A.L.I.E., sobbing for her mom to stop, and giving her friends orders with an anxious edge.
Brutal Bunker: As a result of the nuclear cataclysm in season 4, a group of survivors selected from among each clan are forced to spend six years sheltering in a large bunker complex built by doomsday preppers centuries earlier, where they are collectively known as Wonkru (One Clan). Unfortunately, old enmities combined with the need to maintain order fuel internal dissension, culminating in an attempted coup. This is defeated by the leader of Wonkru, Octavia, who personally kills several mutineers, telling them, "You are Wonkru, or you are the enemy of Wonkru. Choose." In order to maintain discipline, she institutes draconian measures: anyone who breaks the law is forced to engage in gladiatorial fights to the death, with the winner being freed. It gets worse during the Dark Year, when a fungus destroys much of their food supply, and to survive until they can grow more, they have only one option. Some express a desire to go without, but Octavia cannot allow this, as making sure everyone is kept well-nourished is the only way to keep their new food supply sustainable. She ends up forcing people to eat human flesh at gunpoint, personally executing those who won't, cementing her transformation into the ruthless ruler Blodreina, the Red Queen.
But What About the Astronauts?: The entire surviving human population is descended from the astronauts who were living on space stations at the time of the nuclear war...or so they thought. Turns out Earth is a bit more populated.
Calling Parents by Their Name: In "Anaconda", Bill Cadogan and his daughter come into conflict. He wants to lead the members of Second Dawn through the newly opened Anomaly, while his daughter, having seen how terrified Becca was by whatever she saw on the other side, proposes that they take her Nightblood serum instead, and eke out a healthier life outside. Refusing, Bill calls her Calliope, not Callie. "I'm not ten, William!" is her retort. "Using my full name won't stop me."
Canon Foreigner: The rest of the 100 that aren't Wells, Clarke, Octavia, and Bellamy were not identified by name in the book, let alone given personalities.
Cargo Cult: Played With. The Grounders have created an entire religion around the Flame, the second iteration of artificial intelligence created by Becca Franco after A.L.I.E. It holds the memories of all of the people who are able to have it implanted and one needs to have Nightblood in order for the body not to reject it. By the time the 100 reach the ground, the Grounders have been using it since Becca to choose their leader, believing it has divine knowledge and is omnipotent in determining who will win the Conclave and be the next Commander.
The Chains of Commanding:
- A running theme of the series is that the job of "leader" is not an easy one: Sometimes you have to do things that go against everything you stand for in order to protect your people. Jaha had to execute people on The Ark just to ensure Population Control and conserve dwindling resources, which clearly took a toll on him. Kane, a Well-Intentioned Extremist, had to deal with the guilt of knowing that the people he had killed didn't need to die. Clarke, The Medic and an All-Loving Hero, could not handle the strain of being forced to kill in defense of The 100 and left Camp Jaha for parts unknown because of it.
- In Season 3, the concept gets an explicit discussion between Clarke and Lexa when they both wonder if, someday, they might not be able to lead their own individual lives without needing to worry about the needs of their people as well.
Challenging the Chief: There is a variation in Season 3. Queen Nia of the Ice Nation challenges Lexa's position as the Grounder Commander and selects her son to fight Lexa in a Trial by Combat. However, neither Nia nor Roan can become the new Commander if Lexa is defeated: the title will instead descend onto one of the Nightbloods. Nia hopes that Ontari, an Ice Nation Nightblood, will become the new Commander.
The Champion: Deconstructing the concept of the Champion is a recurring theme throughout the series, as Champions often perform morally ambiguous or directly-amoral actions for the protection of the one being championed. In each instance, the one being championed resents having the responsibility being placed on them for the actions of the Champion, or opposes the Champion's actions directly. Every Championed pair either learns to leave that dynamic behind, or is destroyed by it.
- Best example is Bellamy as Octavia's Champion. This trope embodies their relationship (at least, at first) to the point that his refrain throughout much of the series is "my sister, my responsibility." Since he was six years old and she was placed into his arms moments after she was born, Bellamy's goal has been to protect Octavia at all costs. To wit, Bellamy shoots Jaha to get on the dropship taking Octavia to the ground. She is horrified when he tells her in "Twlight's Last Gleaming":
  Bellamy: I did this for you! To protect you. (reveals that he shot Jaha)
  Octavia: I didn't ask you to do that.... I didn't ask for any of this.
Character Development:
- Clarke goes from a naive All-Loving Hero into a Pragmatic Hero willing to do morally ambiguous things to survive.
- Bellamy starts as a selfish anarchist whose one redeeming trait is his care for Octavia, but grows into a dependable leader who genuinely cares about the others.
- Finn begins the series as a charming, devil-may-care rebel but becomes The Conscience of the group, before descending into obsession in Season 2.
- Octavia is impulsive, spontaneous, and rebellious, but matures considerably into someone willing to put her life on the line for those she loves.
- Kane's initial characterization focuses on his willingness to do whatever pragmatic action was required in order to safeguard the Ark, but he gradually learns that a more caring approach can have even more beneficial results.
- Jasper is awkward and dorky at the beginning, but is forced to grow up considerably in Season 2 after becoming the de facto leader of the 47 survivors in the Mountain. The events of the second season finale were especially hard on him. The third and fourth seasons continue following his downward spiral due to the copious character deaths in the series.
- Raven's character development focuses on how she starts to depend less on Finn and more on herself.
- Murphy starts out as a sadistic bully, is banished for it, and returns from his exile as a violent sociopath. But throughout Season 2 he learns to appreciate the help of others and skills he can offer them in turn, and by the events of the third and fourth seasons, he gradually becomes a mostly trusted main character - albeit a somewhat amoral one.
Characters Dropping Like Flies: Characters in this show die rather frequently thanks to the After the End setting and each season features at least one main character death along with several recurring and minor characters. And if you thought children were save on this show, a twelve-year-old Charlotte commits suicide by jumping off a cliff when she realizes she killed one of the delinquents.
A Child Shall Lead Them:
- After the 100 are joined by other members from the Ark, they are absorbed back into the official political structure headed by the Chancellor. Clarke, however, retains a position of power due to her history and influence with the Grounders. It culminates in a standoff in Season 2, where she speaks the line "You might be the Chancellor, but I'm in charge". In Season 3, her reputation as Wanheda, "The Commander of Death", continues to give her elevated standing with the Grounders and the Ark.
- Season 2 introduces the the mysterious figure of "The Commander", who rules over all the Grounders. Though it is initially implied to be the older Gustus, it is actually Lexa, a young woman who has already been in command for years.
- By the end of Season 4 Octavia ends up becoming the leader of Wonkru, comprised of what is essentially the last remnants of humanity (as far as they know anyway).
- In Season 5, the Flame passes to Clarke's preteen adopted daughter Madi, the last known natural nightblood, and she leads Wonkru in the last episode.
Cliffhanger: After wrapping up the main storyline of each season, they love to leave a little cliffhanger to introduce the Big Bad of the next season:
- Season 1 ends with many of the main characters knocked out with gas grenades by what look like special ops troops. When Clarke wakes up, she’s in an all white quarantine room inside Mount Weather, revealing that they’re the Mountain Men the Grounders have been afraid of.
- Season 2 ends with Jaha and Murphy having made their way to an oddly intact mansion on an island. Murphy sees a video telling how an AI got nuclear launch codes nearly a century ago, while Jaha meets the AI itself.
- Season 3 has the revelation that A.L.I.E. was uploading human minds to the City of Light in order to make sure they would survive Praimfaya, a wave of fire and radiation that would likely kill everyone within six months.
- Season 4 ends with a time jump. Even though Earth was supposed to be survivable again after 5 years, it's been a bit more than 6 years later and no one has come down from space or out of the bunker. What Clarke thinks is her friends coming down from space turns out to be a prisoner transport ship coming back to Earth.
- Season 5 ends with the destruction of Earth, for good this time. Rather than waking up from cryosleep after ten years, it's been 125 years, Monty and Harper died but left a son, and he shows Clarke and Bellamy the new planet that Monty found, which might be somewhere they can survive and do better.
- Season 6 ends with two big ones:
  - Sheidheda has been removed from the flame, saving Madi, but escapes to who knows where, and setting him up to be a major player next season.
  - Diyoza's previously unborn daughter, Hope, comes out of the anomaly as an adult. She talks to Octavia, who recognizes her even though she remembered nothing from her time in the anomaly just minutes before. Hope stabs Octavia in the stomach then passes out. Bellamy tries to hold Octavia up as she's bleeding out, until the anomaly comes in to the room and she disappears in a flash of green.
Cold-Blooded Torture:
- The 100 torture Lincoln when they are trying to find the cure for a poison. He refuses to break under the direct pain, but gives up the cure when he sees Octavia infect herself in front of him.
- Murphy gets captured and tortured by grounders on no less than three separate occasions.
- Lexa relates to Clarke a story about the death of her girlfriend in the backstory, who was kidnapped and tortured by a rival clan who thought she knew Lexa's secrets.
- The Grounders have a tradition of subjecting criminals and their enemies to this when they execute them and for those who are guilty of doing mass killings they make them feel pain for each life they took which is shown to be by cutting them, but as stated by Lincoln they also will burn and dismember them also but the victims usually die before the torture gets that far. This was almost the fate for Finn because of when he massacred 18 villagers if Clarke didn't mercy kill him.
Cold Equation:
- With only four months left of life support for the Ark's current population, the option is quickly raised to "reduce" the population to buy time to repair it. It is determined that three hundred people need to be removed in order for the remainder to have sufficient oxygen to survive. The original plan was for there to be an "accident" in crew quarters, but when the general population learned of the danger, three hundred people volunteered so that their families could live.
- The Ark only has a single dropship ready to return to Earth, and it can only hold 700 people. The Ark's total population is over 2,000; who gets to go? The question is rendered moot when the dropship is stolen after a failed coup d'etat, and crashes during its atmospheric entry.
- Comes up again in Season 4, where Clarke has to decide who can shelter from Praimfaya inside the Ark. She prioritizes doctors, experienced engineers, and women of childbearing age, and doesn't wish to have too many guards. This angers Monty, an apprentice engineer, and Riley, a guardsman.
- In Season 5, the survivors in the bunker quickly realize that the hydroponic farms will not be able to feed everyone. A group tries to seize the floor with the farms and lock the others out and they are only stopped due to Jahu's Heroic Sacrifice. The population is then reduced by having criminals fight a Duel to the Death. When there is a bad harvest and the food situation turns critical, the leaders order the cannibalization of the dead for food.
Commuting on a Bus:
- [[spoiler:In the first scene of the premiere of the seventh season, Bellamy is kidnapped by the Disciples. He returns in the eleventh episode, making cameos in the fifth and seventh. This was done to accommodate a break requested by his actor.
Conlang: Trigedasleng, the other language spoken by the Grounders, which seems to be at least partially based on English. The creator of the language, David J. Peterson, says that it is derived from English, specifically from codes used by survivors to identify if someone was friend or foe. If you understood the words you were presumably a member of the group; it then developed into a language of its own with distinct rules.
- Revealed to have been created before the apocalypse by Callie, the daughter of the Second Dawn's cult leader.
"Could Have Avoided This!" Plot:
- The conflict between the Grounders and The 100 because the whole thing got started because of mutual misunderstandings and it is later shown that the Grounders could been reasoned with from the start when Anya agreed to meet with Clarke to negotiate peace, but the reasons the negotiations fail is that the 100 have unknowingly and accidentally burned down one of their villages when they shot up the flares to contact the Ark which made the grounders start to believe that the 100 are invaders who want to wipe them out and Jasper who was with Bellamy and others to secretly back up Clarke if something went wrong shoots at the grounders because he thought that Grounder bodyguards who were also secretly their with the same goal but to protect Anya, were planning to attack Clarke and that the negotiation was really a trap and this makes the conflict worse. Main point is that it is shown if one or both sides tried to talk to each other earlier the whole conflict possibly could have been avoided.
- When Cage is ordering the Ark prisoners killed for their blood and bone marrow, Kane tells him that this is not necessary. When Cage ignores him, Kane screams how they can donate bone marrow and that there is no need to continue the slaughter. This lampshades that if Cage wasn't in such a hurry resulting in forced experimentation on the 100 and actually tried to explain the situation with his people to Clarke or Kane, they could have negotiated a way of getting bone marrow without killing and the whole conflict would have been prevented.
- The conflict in Season 5 is completely unnecessary as the valley could support both populations. However, Wonkru and the convicts do not trust each other and each fear that if they lay down their weapons, the other side will enslave them. Clarke, Bellamy and Kane try to find a peaceful solution but cannot convince the leaders of the two groups.
Cradling Your Kill:
- In "Thirteen", Titus accidentally shot Lexa while attempting to kill Clarke. Horrified at his actions, he helped carry her to a bed for treatment and cradled her afterwards.
- Luna cried over the body of her chipped lieutenant and apparent lover, whom she was forced to kill.
Crapsack World: The Ark is barely maintaining long-term life support, to the point where population control is in effect, adult criminals are executed regardless of the severity of the crime, and in times of emergency people are culled to reduce the load on the systems. Earth, while habitable, is a dangerous place even before the 100 discover that it is already inhabited by people who regard them as invaders. Survival — for those who manage to survive — often comes at the cost of great personal sacrifice and/or committing horrible acts against other people when their attempts to survive come into conflict with yours.
Crapsaccharine World: Planet Alpha, per the Eligius Corporation, and Sanctum, per its colonizers, is a beautiful place with breathable air, excellent weather, edible food, and colourful, leafy landscapes. Just don't spend much time outside, especially when the twin suns eclipse each other. Everything will be driven mad by a toxin released into the air, and start joining the trees in trying to kill you, and you yourself could have hallucinations which, at worst, will make you die by suicide. The compound run by the Primes is equally nice, having interesting architecture and lovely people, but good luck to you if you're a Nightblood, and not a child. The second someone notices, you'll have a mind drive slipped into the back of your head, then will undergo a Grand Theft Me by way of Brain Uploading. If you're red-blooded, and you stir up trouble, you'd better hope you aren't adjusted—which is to say, heavily drugged, and questioned about your faith in the Primes. Bad things happen if you say you don't have any. Even if you keep to yourself, someone else could trigger the adjustment protocol, getting the other residents sprayed with the toxin, and causing a Hate Plague in which "nonbelievers" are killed. Did we mention that at one point, native infants without Nightblood were left outside the forest, for the trees to choke out?
Cruel Mercy: When Lexa holds Emerson prisoner, she offers Clarke the final decision on his fate: Death or banishment. Emerson taunts her over the situation, reveling in the fact that though he will die, Clarke will have to live with her demons haunting her for years. Clarke decides to spare his life in order to help break the Cycle of Revenge which is threatening to lead to all-out war between Arkadia and the Grounders, but she also makes it clear that she knows this is worse for Emerson since now he has to live with his demons for the rest of his life. This ends up becoming a deconstruction of the trope when he comes back later in the season and almost kills her and all her friends as part of his revenge for what Clarke did to his family and his people. Clarke ends up admitting that she should have killed him when she had the chance because of this.
Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Grounders' religion takes inspiration from Christianity. New Commanders are chosen in a conclave—a violent fight, not a vote—and they must baptize themselves, essentially, before ascending.
Cult: The series introduces at least four over the seasons. ALIE and the City of Light, Wonkru, Sanctum and the Primes, and the Disciples of a Greater Truth (actually an offshoot of another cult, The Second Dawn).
Cult Colony: Two:
- Season 6 gives us Sanctum. It wasn't meant to be one; at least a couple of the original colonists were staunch atheists. But when the Primes discovered a form of Immortality by uploading their Mind Drives into new host bodies, they started raising all future generations of the colony in a cult that worshipped the Primes, grooming them to willingly give up their bodies for the Primes' use.
- Season 7 introduces Bardo, a planet inhabited by the Disciples. Unlike Sanctum, it very much started out this way, being founded by cult a cult escaping the devastated Earth.
Culture Clash: A large part of the conflict between Grounders and Sky People involves this. This is mostly because of how violent and disturbing most of Grounder culture is compared to the way the Sky People/Ark people do things.
Curb-Stomp Battle:
- Bellamy's rescue team vs. Grounders. A group of juveniles up against hardened warriors born and raised in a hostile and lethal forest on the Grounders own territory. The rescue party is slaughtered almost to a man.
- Octavia tries to go up against a seasoned Grounder warrior in "Survival of the Fittest." The end result is...not pretty. Fortunately for Octavia, her determination and spirit merited her training to improve her skills.
Cyberspace: The City of Light, created by Alie as a paradise for all human minds. It looks astonishingly like Vancouver.
Cycle of Revenge:
- The source of the continuing conflict between the Grounders and the Sky People. Their initials conflicts came from mutual misunderstandings that lead to violence, and each side retaliated (Or were associated with retaliations by rogue members) in an ongoing cycle that outstripped any peace negotiations.
- The cycle is mentioned in the third season when the Grounders and Arkadia seem ready to finally embark on their all-out war. After Pike launches an attack which kills three hundred Grounders that had been nearby to protect Arkadia, Clarke asks Lexa to simply forgo revenge. She admits that there is no justification or excuse for what has passed, but points out that no matter how justified retaliation will be it will only lead to more revenge, and the only way for Lexa to create peace is to decide not to participate. Lexa accepts and decides to break the cycle of revenge.
- In the fifth season finale, Bellamy implores Madi to end the cycle of violence.
Dare to Be Badass: After she was wounded during the Arkadia attack on her army, Indra was physically debilitated and regarded herself as weak. When Octavia asked for her help and was rejected, Octavia dared her to either waste away or stand up and take her revenge.
Days of Future Past: The series is set in the future, and advanced technology like the Flame chip and the Ark's resources coexist with the Grounders, who have reverted back to a society comprised of tribes on the verge of war.
Deadly Graduation: Each generation of potential successors to the Commander's throne are trained together as children. They then fight to the death to see which one of them gets to be the next Commander.
Deadpan Snarker: Almost every character has their moment in the sun to snark. More often than not it's Bellamy, Raven and Murphy; especially when they all have scenes together.
A Death in the Limelight:
- "Spacewalker" focuses on Finn and Raven, showing part of why Raven is so devoted to him, and ends with his death.
- The episode "Thirteen" takes place entirely in the Grounder capital Polis, with no scenes set in Arkadia. It gives more screen time to Lexa and Titus, and reconnects Murphy to the Polis/Arkadia plot. Lexa is shot and killed by Titus, who hoped to kill Clarke and frame Murphy for the murder in an attempt to spur Lexa to declare war on Arkadia.
Death of a Child: Not even kids are safe on the Death World. Preteen Charlotte is Driven to Suicide and young Artigas is shown to be one of the victims of the Grounder massacre. Bellamy is notably conflicted about killing off the innocent kids in Mount Weather, but he and Clarke end up doing it to keep the Sky People safe.
Death of Personality: What the Primes inflict on the hosts they upload their minds into. Done to Clarke by Josephine, but she survives due to A.L.I.E.'s neural mesh still being in her head.
Death of a Thousand Cuts: One Grounder punishment for particular crimes is for a criminal to be staked out in the open, then for every one of the victims or relations to give a single cut until death.
Death Is Not Permanent:
- Finn returns as a hallucination after Clarke mercy kills him.
- Jaha has an hallucination of his dead son Wells when he is alone on the Ark trying to find a way to get to the ground.
- Lexa returning as an avatar of herself to help Clarke in the City of Light.
- Monty appearing in Clarke's mind-space after Josephine takes control over Clarke's body. He convinces Clarke to examine Josephine's memories.
Decapitation Presentation:
- After the Ice Nation killed Costia to strike at Lexa, they had her severed head delivered to Lexa's bed.
- Ontari kills and presents the heads of all the nightblood children and to declare her victory in the conclave and become the Commander.
Dehumanization: Mount Weather turns people in to cannibalistic animals they call Reapers.
Demonic Possession: A.L.I.E. possesses Raven and uses her body as a her own.
Destination Defenestration: Lexa tosses the Ice Nation ambassador off the high Grounder tower when the Ice Nation belligerence becomes too transparent.
Died in Your Arms Tonight: Clarke held Lexa and comforted her as she died.
Disney Villain Death:
- In "Earth Kills", Charlotte takes Bellamy's advice to slay her demons to heart, fatally stabbing Wells as retribution for Jaha having her parents floated. Rather than face the consequences, in the next episode, she throws herself off a cliff above a river.
- In "Many Happy Returns", Sterling rappels down a cliff to rescue his friend from the Ark, hanging onto a branch. Nobody holding the rope is checking whether it's securely tied to a nearby stump. Consequently, the knot comes undone, and Sterling falls off the cliff, presumably dying when he hits the ground.
- Subverted in "A Lie Guarded". Octavia, fighting a member of the Ice Nation sent to capture her, falls into a river gorge, and is assumed to be dead. The last scene reveals that she miraculously survived.
Divide and Conquer: The Mountain Men recognize that the danger comes from the union of Clarke's motivation and planning with Lexa's numbers and martial might, so they work to split the alliance between the Ark and the Grounders. They succeed in splitting them apart, but without the luxury of a dominant position Clarke is forced to kill the entire Mountain population instead of allowing the civilians to survive unharmed as she had originally planned.
Dizzy Cam: The Sanctum character's temporary madness is visually demarcated in "Red Sun Rising" by odd camera angles and zooms as the camera spins around their heads.
Don't Make Me Destroy You: Through the back half of Season 2, Clarke emphasizes to Lexa and the Grounders that their war with the Mountain is against its leaders and its policies: They will not slaughter its entire population. Once the engagement begins in earnest, she repeatedly asks their leaders to stand down or surrender instead of forcing her to kill them all. The Mountain refuses to negotiate, and she is forced to kill everybody.
Don't Split Us Up: When Bellamy's sister, Octavia, is arrested, he volunteers to be exiled with her so they won't be separated.
Don't You Dare Pity Me!: In the seventh season, the protagonists are led to assume that Bellamy is dead. Imprisoned with Echo, and hearing her quietly cry, Octavia offers to hear out her grief. Echo is appalled by this, telling Octavia that she doesn't want to talk about it, reminding Octavia of her negative portrayal of Echo in her stories to Hope, and, when hugged by Octavia, who wishes she'd hugged Bellamy after Lincoln's death instead of fighting him, brusquely orders her to get off. Octavia stays firm, and soon, Echo breaks down.
Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Octavia's beating of her brother in 3x10 is framed in many ways as cathartic for the audience after Bellamy's actions in Season 3a, but the incident (and the lack of stronger intervention by bystanders) would not have been accepted, much less celebrated, by the audience had their roles been reversed.
Double Standard: Rape, Female on Male: Ontari forces Murphy into having sex with her, by implicitly threatening to kill him if he displeases her. It's handled fairly lightly because he responds by smirking and sarcastically saying "the things I do to survive", and visibly finds her attractive. But of course if the roles were reversed it would be a lot more disturbing. Slightly subverted when he later tells Emori very emphatically that he had no choice, and she appears to sympathize.
Downer Ending: The two-part Season 2 finale has Mount Weather releasing their Grounder prisoners as part of a deal with Lexa which results in her taking her army and going home, leaving Clarke and the others to fight Mount Weather alone with some of their people about to have their bone marrow extracted and killed in the process. This forces Clarke into an escalating duel of wills with Cage Wallace, which eventually leaves her with no choice but to flood the mountain with radiation and kill all within, including Maya and several other innocents and allies. The remaining Sky People finally return home but Clarke can't bring herself to join them. In the B-plot, Jaha discovers that the nuclear warhead from the missile he rode to the ground has fallen into the possession of the insane A.I. that started the nuclear war in the first place and she wants his help with a unknown goal that will effect everybody.
Dramatic Irony: Having kidnapped Octavia, the Disciples skim through her memories, learning that the Flame, which they believe is the key to triggering the Last War, is inside Clarke. Since Octavia wasn't present when the Flame was removed, they presume that Clarke is still its bearer, and are unaware that it's inert, stored inside a box buried beneath a garden on Sanctum.
The Dreaded:
- The "Reapers", a breed of Grounder so terrifying that even Anya and her tribe of hardened warriors don't dare venture into the tunnels that the Reapers call home.
- Sheidheda is considered a demon by at least one Grounder, and Flamekeepers will put new Commanders through a ritual which strips him of his influence over them. When this fails with Madi, even Gaia, she of sheer belief, is willing to destroy the Flame, urging Raven to purge the "son of a bitch."
Dreaming of Things to Come: "Bitter Harvest" opens with Lexa being woken from her sleep by a nightmare of the deaths of the previous Commanders. Clarke assures that it was just nightmares, but Lexa believes that it is a warning from the Commanders: They believe she is betraying their legacy.
Driven to Suicide:
- Pre-teen Charlotte (the youngest of the young convicts sent to Earth), guilt-ridden over having killed Wells in a misguided attempt to quiet her inner demons and unwilling to be the cause of any more bloodletting, jumps off a cliff to her death.
- In the sixth season, Kane is healed of serious injuries sustained in the finale of the fifth season by being placed in a new body, courtesy of the Primes. He can't stand literally living in someone else's shoes, someone with a loving wife, and asks Indra, Abby, and Raven to float him.
Dropped After the Pilot: In the pilot, Cece Cartwig, Abby's friend, liaises between the Council and the residents of the Ark, and openly confronts Kane over his actions. Kelly Hu, her actress, couldn't commit to more episodes, so she was floated offscreen.
Duel to the Death:
- Phase 2 of the Cerberus Program involves two Grounders killing each other for another dose of the Psycho Serum, which they're addicted to. Those that kill the loser go on to become Reapers.
- This is the way a new Commander is chosen; all available Nightbloods are pitted against each other in combat, and the last survivor is made Commander. Often, the Nightbloods involved have all been raised together, and can include children or siblings.
- According to the laws of the Grounder Coalition, only a unanimous vote by the ambassadors or death can remove the Commander. When Queen Nia is unable to secure all thirteen votes, she challenges Lexa instead, choosing her son Roan as Champion to fight in her stead in single combat with Lexa. Lexa wins the fight, but instead of delivering the killing stroke against Roan she turns and hurls her spear into Nia on the sidelines.
Due to the Dead:
- The full Ark funeral prayer is "In peace, may you leave the shore. In love, may you find the next. Safe passage on your travels, until our final journey to the ground. May we meet again." It is often shortened to simply "May we meet again" as a traditional farewell between two people who are unsure if they will ever reunite.
- The Grounder society is so wound up in combat that they only acknowledge an end to fighting when somebody dies: Their death prayer/blessing is "Your fight is over" (or, as is more commonly said, "Yu gonplei ste odon," which translates to the same thing). Clarke's use of the phrase is a show of respect and is one of the first things to get Lexa's notice that she is more than just a 'normal' member of Sky Crew.
- The Ark has a tradition of 'speaking' for the dead in a memorial service, where friends and loved ones of the deceased say a brief statement and leave an item of significance behind. When a memorial service is for multiple people, they are called up one after the others.
- During his drunken depression in the beginning of the third season, Jasper stole the urn with Finn's ashes and took it back to the original camp the 100 had made around their dropship. What he ultimately intended to do with them is unknown, as he was extremely drunk at the time, passed out soon after his arrival, and accidentally spilled the urn after an argument with Monty. After the spill he collapses to the ground in tears.
- "From water we are born, to water we return" is this for the Boat People/Floukru.
Dwindling Party:
- The 100 don't number a hundred for very long, much to the chagrin of their leaders. They were actually "the 98" within the first twenty minutes of the show. The producers have joked that by the end of the first season, they should be called "The 50". In the first season finale, Bellamy notes that 18 people have died out of the population of 102...and that's before the battle with the Grounders. In the second season, they have the additional threat of the Mountain Men wanting their ability to withstand radiation to contend with. By the second season finale 48 of the original 102 are left according to the staff.
- The band of followers Jaha takes with him to find the City of Light. By the second season finale's end, only he and Murphy are still alive. This is acknowledged by Abby in Season 3 when only Jaha returns.
Dysfunction Junction:
- Clarke's mother directly had a hand in her father's death and Clarke herself spending a year in solitary confinement for simply knowing what her dad knew.
- Bellamy and Octavia's mother kept Octavia hidden under the floor of their quarters for years, because her existence was illegal due to strict Population Control. When this was found out, she was executed, Octavia was imprisoned, and Bellamy lost his spot on the guard.
- Raven's situation is not too expounded upon, but it's mentioned that her mother was an alcoholic and neglectful and that it's somehow messed up enough that she considers Finn the only family she has.
- Murphy had two loving parents until his father got floated stealing medicine for Murphy's illness and his mother spent the rest of her life blaming him, while drinking herself to death.
- Monty is reunited with his mother in Season 3, but she has a deep hatred for Grounders and she backs up Pike's plan to rage a war on them, that even leads to her betraying Monty.
Dystopia: The Ark isn't a great place to live, what with harsh laws and the tight restrictions on resources and population, but it's mostly just a matter of trying to survive on limited resources. It's not without reason that the kids are happy to be seemingly left to their own resources on Earth.
Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season, particularly early on, is incredibly sensual, with multiple characters seen in their underwear, and even more depicted as having sex. Though both are seen going forward, considerably more emphasis is placed on the story. Half of the time, such as when Bellamy is stripped in preparation of having his blood harvested, moments like this are Fan Disservice.
Earth-That-Was: In the last scene of Season 5, it is revealed that Monty didn't think Earth would recover again from the Damocles strike in their lifetimes, so he redirected the Eligius ship to a new habitable planet. By the time the survivors wake up from cryo, they've been gone from Earth for 125 years.
Elaborate Underground Base: Mount Weather, as in Real Life.
Emotions vs. Stoicism:
- A difference between Clarke and Lexa. Lexa believes that Love Is a Weakness and that Clarke should follow her example if she wants to be an effective leader. Clarke tries and comes to the conclusion that closing yourself off to all feelings is pointless.
- A significant difference between Clarke and Bellamy, to the point where they often say, "The heart and the head." Clarke is the head, making decisions based on logic and pragmatism, while Bellamy, the heart, tends to rely on instinct and emotion. Flipped around a bit in Season 5, where Clarke points out that she's now the more emotional decision maker between the two of them.
Empathy Doll Shot: Dolls or toys are sometimes found and focused upon in pre-war ruins, calling to mind the children's death. The second season finale has the soccer ball that some of the Mountain Men children were seen playing with - in the scene where they have all died from radiation, it makes a reappearance at the very edge of the screen, hinting at the children's corpses just beyond it.
End of an Age:
- By the end of Season 4, the status quo of the first three seasons is broken completely. Due to the Praimfaya wave all remaining twelve clans are forced to become one (called Wonkru) and 100 survivors from each clan band together to survive the radiation. Not only does this remove all of the individual clans from the equation but for the first time in Grounder culture the leader of their new people is no longer a Nightblood but instead a former member of Skaikru Octavia. Indra even lampshades this noting that the time of the Commanders has passed.
- Done again at the end of Season 5 — this time, the survivors — Clarke and Madi, Bellamy and the characters sent to space, Wonkru, and Eligius — aren't coming back to Earth at all.
- By the end of Season 6, with Abby and Kane's death, none of the original "adults" are left.
Enemy Mine:
- Clarke works with Anya to escape Mount Weather in "Reapercussions," and despite their conflict throughout the escape Anya agrees to propose an alliance to the Grounder Commander against the greater danger of the Mountain. Unfortunely, Anya is mistaken for an attacker by Ark security personnel and killed before she can return.
- Camp Jaha and the Grounders are mistrustful of each other, but are willing to work together to take down Mount Weather because they both have people trapped inside. The Grounders break the alliance when they make a separate deal with Mount Weather.
- Queen Nia of the Ice Nation allies herself with Emerson, Last of the Mountain Men in order to go after Clarke and the Coalition.
- Everyone especially Octavia are forced to work with Pike who caused problems for them earlier in the season and is also responsible for Lincoln's death to take on A.L.I.E.
- Diyoza, none too fond of the Sky People, nevertheless helps them fight McCreary and those Eligius IV prisoners loyal to him.
Establishing Shot: The last shot of the Title Sequence is an exterior view of the location of the first scene of the episode—or, at least, somewhere related. Additional circumstances are accounted for, such as whether the scene takes place at night.
- In the second season, this is usually Camp Jaha or Mount Weather.
- In the third and fourth seasons, this is usually Arkadia (renamed from Camp Jaha), Polis, or A.L.I.E.'s island.
- In the fifth season, this is usually Polis or Shallow Valley.
- In the sixth season, this is usually Sanctum or Eligius IV.
- In the final season, this is either Sanctum, Skyring, the interior of the Anomaly, or the Disciples' facility on Bardo.
Eternal English: After a hundred years of mutual isolation, the Sky People, Grounders and Mountain Men can all understand each other perfectly fine in English, although the Grounders do have their own Conlang as well.
Everything Trying to Kill You: Subverted. The characters believe this to be the case. But despite talks about how "everything" is toxic on Earth, plants and animals do not seem to be any more or less dangerous than the natural flora and fauna of the real world. By the second season the Sky People have learned how to naturally survive, and most of the conflict is actually interpersonal.
Everyone Has Standards:
- Even the strictly controlled dystopia of the Ark is reluctant to kill children, holding them until they are eighteen to receive a trial then.
- Murphy has shown himself to be a general Jerkass, who is quite comfortable with cold-blooded murder when he's not out being the local bully. But even he is horrified when Finn attacks a village, starts threatening them, and then cracks and starts slaughtering them. Likewise, later when Jaha sacrifices their companion to a sea creature to keep him and Murphy from getting eaten, Murphy is horrified and refuses to continue traveling with Jaha.
- The President of Mount Weather, for all that he appears to be somewhat shady and cagey, does refuse to countenance forcing the teenagers in the complex to be experimented on.
- Whatever Josephine's eugenics proposal entailed, it was too heartless and dehumanizing for the other Primes to support it. They're fine with the adjustment protocol, something which Kaylee isn't fond of.
Evolving Credits: The Establishing Shots which end the credits account for developments in the show. When Arkadia is torched by Ilian, and partially destroyed, it henceforth appears without its top half. After the castle on Sanctum is similarly set on fire by Clarke, it appears with visible scorch marks.
Exact Time to Failure: In Season 2, one of the Mountain Men is kept alive to deliver a message by foot to Mount Weather. He is given 6 hours of oxygen to make an 8-hour walk.
Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Finn and Clarke were talking about how her friend Wells betrayed her.
Finn: Are you sure Wells told his dad?
Clarke: He's the only person I told.
Finn: But is he the only person who knew?
[Clarke stops to think for a moment. The only other person who knew was... her mother.]
Eye Scream:
- After Lexa's death and Ontari's murder of all the other Nightbloods, the latter gouges a Grounder ambassador's eyes out in retaliation for him having challenged her rule one too many times.
- After being crucified by the Disciples, Diyoza kills one of her captors, then scoops out his eye to use on a retinal scanner.
Extremely Short Time Span: Each season covers a relatively short amount of time. Happens in a more extreme way in later seasons. Can make the time skips a little awkward, since they cover a lot of character development we don’t get to see.
- Season 1: 29 days
- Season 2: 23 days (followed by an 83 day time jump)
- Season 3: 29 days
- Season 4: 36 days (followed by a 6 year, 7 day time jump)
- Season 5: 20 days (followed by a 125 year time jump, though the characters are unaffected due to the cryopods)
- Season 6: 11 days
- Played with in Season 7. While the events on Sanctum take place over a few weeks, at most, because of black hole-related time dilation, events on other planets span months, if not years.
Face Death with Dignity: Pike is spared from death for his crimes against the Grounders on the understanding that he can help defeat A.L.I.E. As soon as this is achieved, he calmly allows Octavia to stab him in the stomach.
Face–Heel Turn: While a lot of the characters deal with the Heel–Face Revolving Door, Luna actually goes through this. She goes from a non-violent pacifist to being fully ready to let the entire human race die, including herself, after crossing the Despair Event Horizon. She goes about this by entering the final conclave to violently make sure no one gets the bunker.
Facial Markings:
- The Grounders bear both facial tattoos and heavy makeup around their eyes. Their exact meanings have not been revealed, but they seem to indicate origins of clans and ranks within them.
- Later, Ice Nation (Azgeda) members are seen to be identifiable by large decorative facial scarification and white face paint.
Fake-Out Make-Out: Jasper and Maya do this in "Remember Me" to cover up that they were sending out a radio message to the Ark survivors.
Faking the Dead: Removing the wristband monitors makes the wearer appear to be dead as far as the people back on the Ark know. After the landing, Bellamy wants to make it appear that The 100 all died so the Ark won't send anybody else down, leaving them free to live by their own (lack of) rules. After realizing that this was a terrible idea and learning that the Ark is going to have another culling soon due to the ground apparently being confirmed uninhabitable, it's a race to signal the Ark that they're not dead.
False Prophet: Because it's not obvious they're keeping themselves alive with mind drives and Nightblooded hosts, the Primes are treated as gods by the people of Sanctum. Appreciating being able to marinate in luxury, they further the deception, drugging their followers whenever they show signs of defiance. Kaylee is the most resistant, dating a man without Nightblood, and killing Josephine for seeing people as mere hosts.
Family of Choice: Because of their time on the ground away from the adults in space and the hardships they undertook to survive, the 100 become fiercely protective of each other and consider each other family.
Fanservice: The initial episodes had Octavia and Bellamy frequently in revealing clothing as they reveled in being free on Earth, but this aspect was dropped from the show before the end of the first season. All characters are dirty, wounded and swathed in armor and makeup as required by their station.
Fan Disservice:
- Midway through the second season, Bellamy infiltrates Mount Weather by blending into a crowd of Grounders being rounded up. He's chosen for blood harvesting, and is stripped to his underwear in preparation.
- "Perverse Instantiation – Part 2" includes a scene where Ontari's shirt is cut open as is her chest, because she's brain-dead, and Abby and then Murphy have to manually keep her heart beating and send Nightblood from Ontari to Clarke so she can complete her mission.
Fantastic Racism:
- The conflict between the members of the Ark and the Grounders are that both sides having a negative opinion of each others culture and beliefs and the fact that both sides have killed members of the other.
- Mutants known as Nomadic Grounders are shunned in Grounder society, traditionally killed in infancy. If a parent chooses not to kill the child they must be exiled from the community and sent to the wastelands.
- Most of the residents of Mount Weather see the Grounders as savages and this is why they didn't have a problem with the experiments on them.
- The Farm Station survivors hate and distrust all Grounders after spending months on the ground being attacked by the Ice Nation and only having the knowledge that they were at war with the Grounders while having no contact with the other Ark survivors. This keeps up even after relocating to Arkadia and learning that there are friendlier Grounders, culminating in now-chancellor Pike slaughtering a Trikru army, which was supposed to be an ally.
Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Grounders are increasingly looking like the First Nations, especially in relation to the would-be colonizers from the Ark.
Fantasy Gun Control: The Grounders do not have any technology resembling firearms, not even primitive explosives. Season 2 reveals that this is enforced by the Mountain Men; they destroy the entire village of any Grounder who so much as touches a gun, so the Grounders live in superstitious dread.
Felony Misdemeanor: Due to All Crimes Are Equal on the Ark, the tiniest misdemeanor is the same under the law as cold-blooded murder. However, although they are punished equally by the law, Ark society hasn't come to view misdemeanors as death-worthy offenses and instead resents the laws, at best accepting them as a brutal necessity.
Fighting Your Friend: As a child, Echo trained with her friend to become a spy for the Ice Nation. Her friend, tasked with infiltrating Sangedakru, was made by Queen Nia to kill a captured spy in preparation. She couldn't do it, so she was given a last chance: kill Echo in a fight. Here, too, she hesitated, allowing Echo to fatally stab her, and infiltrate Sangedakru in her place, and under her name, not Ashe.
Fire-Forged Friends: The six years between the fourth and fifth seasons, as the Earth recovers from Praimfaya, are whiled away on the Ark by Bellamy, Monty, Murphy, Raven, Echo, and Emori. It's not a pleasant stay, with them subsisting on shitty-tasting algae, and anxiously searching for ships which could return them to the surface. Despite this, they become quite close, regularly joking with each other, and, back on Earth, doing whatever it takes to keep each other safe. Bellamy and Echo go so far as to get together.
First-Episode Twist: The reason the 100 were sent to Earth is because the Ark is dying, a fact those in charge are trying to keep from the general populace. The Earth is also not as empty as they Ark had believed.
For Your Own Good: A recurring theme in the Grounder story-arcs is Lexa's loyal subordinates believing that her working with the Sky Crew will bring about her own destruction, so they attempt to trick her into breaking away.
- Gustus, Lexa's bodyguard and close confidant, poisoned himself in an attempt to frame Raven as attempting to assassinate Lexa. He feared that working with the Sky Crew would lead to a weakening of Lexa's position and risk her death, and he wanted to preemptively destroy any potential alliance so that she would be safe. His plan was exposed and, in Grounder custom, he is tortured to death.
- Titus, the Flamekeeper and Lexa's teacher and advisor as Commander, opposes Lexa's admission of Arkadia as the thirteenth clan and argues strenuously against all of Lexa's attempts to forge a peace. He believes that such actions will only weaken her position and lead to her death at the hands of her own people and the fracturing of the Grounder Coalition, so he does everything he can to push her to a more violent path. Ultimately, he attempts to murder Clarke and frame Murphy for the deed so that Lexa will be spurred to vengeance against Arkadia, but he accidentally kills Lexa instead.
Forgiveness: Clarke and Bellamy are good at forgiving each other for the heinous crimes they've committed, but cannot forgive themselves.
Four Lines, All Waiting: This is common, but is most prominent in the second and seventh seasons:
- In the second season, the 48 spend time inside Mount Weather, while those outside mount an attempt to rescue them, Abby and Kane struggle to lead Camp Jaha, and Octavia, trying to find Lincoln and the others, comes into conflict with other Grounders.
- The seventh season flips between Clarke, Raven, Miller, Niylah, and Jordan, hopping planets in the hopes of finding their kidnapped friends, and Echo, Hope, and Gabriel, who are stranded on Skyring together, then travel to Bardo to rescue Octavia and Diyoza. Amidst all this, Indra, Murphy, and Emori must manage a fragile peace on Sanctum. It's to the point where until the end of the season, Clarke essentially appears in every other episode.
Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- Pausing shots of the drawings present in Clarke's drug-induced hallucination in "Day Trip" show future developments like the Polis skyscraper and the "backpack" A.L.I.E. is contained in.
- Computer screens throughout Season 4 contain references to an Eligus Corporation and their deep-space operations, which foreshadows the Eligus ship that returns at the end of the season.
- Diyoza's list of baby names, briefly seen in "How We Get to Peace", is also a list of female crew members of the show.
Friend-or-Idol Decision:
- There is a possible truce between the Grounders and Camp Jaha in order to deal with Mount Weather. But, to solidify it, the Grounders want Finn to die for killing all of the innocent people at the village. Clarke chooses the alliance.
- At the climax of Season 2, Cage offers Lexa a deal: He will let all of the Grounder prisoners be released in return for her abandoning the Sky People. Lexa chooses her duty to her people—even though she's obviously in pain, and official commentary says she had genuinely fallen in love with Clarke.
Future Slang: Averted. Slang doesn't appear to have evolved much at all during the last 97 years. A single exception is the term "floated"; used to refer to spacing, it has come to be a catch-all term for being killed that persists even after returning to Earth. It's also used as a slur, as in "go float yourself".

G-L

Gender-Blender Name: Main characters Clarke (female) and Bellamy (male).^note This also applies to some other characters like Indra (named for a generally male Hindu deity).
Genocide Dilemma: This comes up in both the second and fourth seasons.
- The end of the second season comes down to a question of whether Clarke will kill the entire population of Mount Weather, including those who aided her friends, or allow the Mountain Men to kill her friends. She and Bellamy ultimately go through with it, killing off the entirety of the Mountain Men population.
- In Season 4, Clarke is made to choose whether to save only her own people from Praimfaya, a massive wave of radiation that will kill everything on Earth that isn't protected by a bunker and doom every single Grounder to death, or to save some Grounders and possibly cause the death of her own people. She chooses to allow the Grounders to be wiped out, but Bellamy takes the decision out of her hands.
Gilded Cage: How Clarke sees Mount Weather, contrasting Jasper's view of it: They have great facilities, they are cared for, and the president actually seems like a pretty stand-up guy, except that the 100 are not allowed to leave and Clarke fears that they have an ulterior motive. Ultimately, the Mountain Men begin to kill the Sky People to harvest their blood and bone marrow.
Give Me a Sword: While engaged in a Duel to the Death with Lexa, Roan's sword is taken away and used against him. Without a weapon of his own, he runs up to one of the guards overseeing the event, punches him across the face, and takes his spear to use.
Gladiator Games: Inspired by the books Bellamy used to read her as a child, Octavia models her rule of Wonkru on that of Roman emperors. Including using Colosseum-esque cage fights to deal with trangressions. Takes a horrific turn when it's revealed in "The Dark Year" that those who died in the fighting pits were used as food during a year when blight hit the soybean farm.
Greater-Scope Villain:
- The second season reveals that the Mountain Men, referenced throughout the first season, are armed soldiers from the Mount Weather bunker, which the 100 failed to reach in the pilot. For years, they've been kidnapping Grounders, and either draining them of their blood, or turning them into crazed, cannibalistic Reapers.
- The apocalypse was caused by A.L.I.E., and before and after, the situation on the ground was exacerbated by Bill Cadogan, leader of a doomsday cult. The former doesn't appear until the third season, and the latter is an antagonist in the last.
Green-Eyed Monster:
- Raven is very jealous after she risks her life to come down Earth to find Finn, only to find that he has slept with Clarke and continues to prioritise his feelings for her. This isn't helped by people repeatedly drawing attention to it.
- The trope is downplayed in Season 2, as Monty is noticeably irritated that the budding romance between Jasper and Maya is driving a wedge between Jasper and Monty's old friendship.
Hair-Contrast Duo: Blonde, idealistic, caring Clarke with, well, pretty much everyone she interacts with at first, especially her more pragmatic mother and the older, moodier Bellamy. After she has made the damning moral compromises at the end of Season 2, her hair has been artificially darkened at the start of Season 3.
Hard Truth Aesop: In "Murphy's Law," it's flat-out stated by Clarke that sometimes you should lie to people because at times telling the truth might cause too much misery.
Hate Plague: On Sanctum, the eclipse of the two suns causes plants to release a chemical that turns any animal who breathes it (humans included) insanely delusional and violent. Everyone is affected differently, with most people trying to hurt each other: Emori tries to murder everyone, Echo is in so much pain she sedates herself, Bellamy becomes so paranoid he wants to kill Clarke, Nathan and Eric both believe that bugs are trying to eat Nathan resulting in Eric attacking Nathan in the belief he is saving him, Clarke thinks her mother is telling her to kill herself, and Murphy is totally unaffected, though the toxin does enter his veins. As the social glue holding together their compound melts away, the Primes institute what they call the adjustment protocol, releasing the toxin into the courtyard around their castle, and having the believers in their divinity kill the nonbelievers.
Head Crushing: McCreary, an antagonist in the fifth season, is killed when Clarke stomps in his face.
He Knows Too Much: Clarke's father was executed because he found out that The Ark was running out of life support systems and tried to go public with the information. Clarke herself was imprisoned, as her dad told her about this before getting arrested.
Hereditary Republic: The Wallace family has held the Presidency of Mount Weather for three generations.
Heroic Second Wind: In "Matryoshka", Clarke, still fighting to reclaim her body from Josephine Lightbourne, is slashed with a sword by Josephine, beginning to shatter. In the real world, she flatlines, leading an anguished Bellamy to slam her chest, and beg her not to give up. Hearing this inside her mind space, she's renewed enough to grab the sword and stab back Josephine, shattering her instead.
History Repeats:
- "Unity Day" in the first season revealed that the twelve space stations only came together to form the Ark after a thirteenth station had already been destroyed; in Season 3, the Arkadian settlement is offered a chance to join the Twelve Tribes in the Grounder coalition. Clarke explicitly states that they have a choice of either becoming the thirteen tribe or being the thirteenth station again. The Arkadian leaders defy a repeat of history and choose to join the coalition.
- In the first season, 100 prisoners arrive on Earth to jumpstart its colonization, and are confronted by some of the survivors of the nuclear war. At the beginning of the fifth season, 400 prisoners arrive for the same reason, and are confronted by some of the survivors of Praimfaya.
- In the second season, many of the characters find themselves in the Mount Weather bunker, an oasis in a horrible location. It turns out that the idyll has an ugly underbelly, as Grounders are being drained of their blood to provide the residents with immunity to the radiation outside. An attempt is made to do the same with the Sky People's bone marrow, with mixed results. Aided by sympathizers, and stupidity on the part of Cage Wallace and his team, the protagonists ensure that the utopia implodes. Come the sixth season, and many of the characters find themselves inside the compound on Sanctum, an oasis in a horrible location. It turns out that the idyll has an ugly underbelly, as Nightbloods are subject to a Grand Theft Me by the compound's ruling families, desperate to live forever. An attempt is made to do the same with a Nightblood's bone marrow, with mixed results. Aided by sympathizers, and stupidity on the part of the Primes, what was supposed to be a utopia implodes. This time, however, the residents aren't killed, as Clarke has learned a valuable lesson from Mount Weather.
- In the fourth season, Echo disrupts the Final Conclave by hiding in a nearby building, and assassinating Ilian with a well-timed arrow. At the end of the sixth season, her friends are set to be burned at the stake for their alleged crimes against the Primes. Having avoided arrest, she hides in a nearby building, preparing to assassinate Russell Lightbourne with a well-timed arrow. Just before she takes the shot, she's stopped by Ryker, who doesn't want Russell dead.
- Also in the fourth season, Ilian, grieving his mom, and blaming the Sky People for her death, sets the Ark on fire. In the seventh season, Clarke, grieving her mom, is so angry at being offered her mom's possessions by Russell Lightbourne, she beats him unconscious, and accidentally sets his impromptu cell on fire. She doesn't bother putting it out, deciding that the Primes' castle should burn.
- The fifth season climaxes with Vinson invoking Man Bites Man, chowing down on Kane's neck, and injuring him to the point of death. In a flashback in the seventh season, Diyoza, another prisoner aboard Eligius IV, does the same to a Disciple watching as she's crucified. While Kane survived by the skin of his teeth, the Disciple has no such luck against Diyoza.
His Story Repeats Itself:
- As a child on the Ark, Octavia regularly hid under the floor of the Blakes' apartment to avoid detection by security officers, and consequences for her mom for having a second child. Many years later, she did the same to Hope, hiding her behind a wall of the cabin of Skyring to avoid detection by the Disciples. Thanks to her foresight, Hope was spared from kidnapping, though she's heavily traumatized a decade later.
- Merely for having two merged fingers, Emori was cast out of her clan, becoming a nomad. She aims to remedy things for the Children of Gabriel, who suffered the same for similar reasons, by reuniting them with their parents.
Hoist by His Own Petard:
- In the finale of Season 2, Cage dies from the very drug he used to turn Grounders into Reapers, and the very syringe he was about to inject Lincoln with. The event even comes with an Ironic Echo.
- Through a mind drive, and Grand Theft Mes of numerous people, Russell Lightbourne has lived for years longer than he should've. He finally bites it when Sheidheda, who's found his way into the mind drive, commits a Grand Theft Me of his own.
Honor Before Reason: Particularly in seasons 1 and 2, Grounder characters' decision making frequently goes against their own best interests because of their often blind adherence to tradition, extreme hostility to outsiders, and resistance to change.
Hourglass Plot: With the Ark losing oxygen quicker than predicted, Kane pushes Jaha to start culling people, something which he believes respects The Needs of the Many. He's gently yet firmly rejected by Jaha, who agrees with Abby that nobody should have to die, and he's vindicated when the plan is leaked. At the end of the fourth season, it's clear that the dynamic has reversed, a consequence of his guilt over causing the deaths of 300 innocents, and Jaha's religious awakening and time with A.L.I.E. Thousands are hovering around the Second Dawn bunker in Polis, wondering whether they'll survive Praimfaya. Jaha advocates for being harsh to save lives, claiming the bunker for the Sky People without consulting Kane, while Kane fights to keep everyone inside, even the Grounders, until it becomes clear that this is impossible. He's not happy about having to kick out so many Sky People, crying as he chooses who'll be leaving.
How We Got Here: In the sixth season, Octavia follows Diyoza into a temporal anomaly, and is quickly spit out, with no memory of what happened, and Diyoza still missing. Flashbacks throughout the final season reveal what she forgot. Three months after Diyoza ended up on the planet her daughter would call Skyring, as she was in labour, Octavia arrived, helping to deliver Hope. She was forced to stay and raise Hope, as the Anomaly is too deep to be reached without a suit—one of which was destroyed by Diyoza. A message in a bottle placed in the lake, intended for Bellamy, reached the Disciples, who stormed the trio's cabin, kidnapping Octavia and Diyoza to the planet Bardo, a decade after Octavia's arrival. Ordered to hide by Octavia, Hope was left behind, meeting Dev, a prisoner sent by the Disciples, and being trained by him. Another decade on—hours on Bardo, thanks to the time dilation between the planets—she travelled to Bardo, and rescued Octavia, sending her through its Anomaly to Sanctum.
Hufflepuff House: The Grounder Coalition is made up of 12 Clans, but the only ones that get any development or screen-time are the Woods Clan (The Tree People or Trikru), the Ice Nation (Azgeda), and the Boat People (Floukru). The creators have named and given logos to the other 9, but they ultimately play relatively minor roles.
Human Resources: Season 2 reveals that the Mountain Men have used Grounder blood to treat their weaknesses to radiation, and in Season 2 begin to harvest bone marrow from the Sky People as well.
Humans Are Bastards: Although the 100 initially believe that the environment will be their biggest challenge, it quickly becomes apparent that the humans on the show are constantly at each other's throats, with progress towards peace always getting derailed. This is part of why Jasper decides to kill himself, having given up on humanity. Monty calls back to this in the Season 5 finale, asking Clarke and Bellamy to defy this now that the survivors have been given a second chance on a new planet.
I Cannot Self-Terminate: Clarke punctures Atom's jugular to spare him a more drawn-out death after he's burned so badly by acidic fog that he can barely move and is begging to die.
I Did What I Had to Do: Multiple people on the Ark claim they alone are doing what must be done. This becomes a recurring theme throughout the series as multiple characters on all sides of the conflict find themselves forced to unfortunate actions.
- Kane uses it to justify ordering Abby's execution for breaking a minor law to save Chancellor Jaha, while she says she did what she had to do to save Jaha so Kane would not become Chancellor.
- Bellamy and Pike use this to excuse slaughtering three hundred friendly Grounder soldiers in their sleep.
- Clarke uses this exact phrase to excuse an increasing number of morally dubious choices that tend to result in a lot of people dying.
  President Wallace: None of us has a choice anymore.
- In Season 5, when the soybean crops die, it's not just cannibalism but forced cannibalism, on penalty of death, that is what gets Wonkru to survive. No wonder they call it the Dark Year.
- In season 6, this comes back to bite Clarke when she's confronted by the Primes about her history of violence, as she is trying to liaise with them so those from Earth can stay on Sanctum. Her justification of "I Did What I Had to Do for my people" is not at all reassuring to the Primes, because the people of Sanctum are not Clarke's people and it tells them everything they need to know about how Clarke would react should she be placed in that situation again.
I Have No Son!:
- When Octavia chooses to stay and help Bellamy rather than retreat with the rest of the Grounders, Indra says that she is no longer her second.
- Octavia outright tells Bellamy that "[he's] dead to [her]" due to his indirect role in Lincoln's death.
- A chilling example is when Jaha talks about the pills to "the City of Light" and how they take away pain by making you forget the thing that causes it. Thus, when Abby asks how Jaha's son would feel about this, Jaha honestly doesn't even remember the boy's name.
- In Season 5, Bellamy tells Clarke, "That's not my sister" after seeing how the bunker has changed Octavia. After she puts him in the fighting pit and sentences him to death, he outright tells her that he wishes she were dead. Later, during the march to Shallow Valley:
  Bellamy: I'm not doing this for you. I'm fighting to get back to my family.^note
- Bellamy takes this a step farther in Season 6, telling Octavia, "My sister died a long time ago."
I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: In "Thirteen", Titus attempts to kill Clarke and uses a gun in the hopes of framing the Sky Crew. Since the Grounders have no firearms he is unfamiliar with its use, and when he is firing wildly he kills Lexa instead.
"I Know You Are in There Somewhere" Fight: When Bellamy sides with Pike over Kane, Clarke believes that if she can reach him she can convince him that peace with the Grounders is the best option. She pleads with him not to turn into somebody who believes that war is the better option and to work together to find a solution for everybody. Bellamy refuses her call, claiming this is who he always ways, and that his better actions with Clarke and Octavia were when he was acting out of character. Double-subverted in the back half of Season 3, where he admits that he regrets his actions and now has to live with the consequences.
- Bellamy has a similar conversation several times with Octavia throughout Season 5. She tells him, "You can't save someone who's already dead."
- Clarke crosses this with Stop, or I Shoot Myself! in the Season 6 finale. When she sees that Sheidheda has taken over Madi’s body, she threatens to shoot herself if Madi can’t take back control. It works just long enough for Madi to order Russell taken hostage, at which point Sheidheda starts killing her from the inside.
I'm a Humanitarian: Two years into a five-year stay in the Second Dawn bunker, a fungal infection renders the soybean crops in the hydrofarm unusable. While the residents can recover the crops after one year, that leaves a year of the "other, other white meat" as their only protein source. On pain of death, Octavia forces them to consume the cubes.
The Immune:
- The Grounders and the Ark-survivors are able to live on the surface because they had adapted over time, with natural selection ensuring that immune grounders passed it on and the Ark-survivors grew up with solar radiation, which is even stronger. The people who live in the underground base didn't, so any exposure to the outside world could kill them.
- Octavia, Jasper, and Finn are immune to the virus the Grounders send to weaken the camp.
- The Nightblood are the only ones able to survive the radioactive Black Rain though they're in a lot of pain in the first exposure. As it turns out, they can also survive the increased radiation from Praimfaya, though not the front wave of it.
In Name Only: The show keeps the basic premise of the books (a hundred juvenile delinquents sent down from space, four of whom are named Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia, and Wells) and very little else. Justified as, when the series was commissioned, the first book hadn't yet been published (though the premise was known).
Incredibly Obvious Bomb: A grounder sets a dramatically ticking bomb in Mount Weather.
Infodump:
- The pilot starts with a rather massive one that manages to load the main backstory into a couple of minutes of narration and As You Know conversations.
- There's another one at the end of Season 4 after a Time Skip. Clarke, in a daily transmission to Bellamy, lays out the state of the world after Praimfaya, though she's aware that she might be talking to no one.
- In the premiere of the final season, we get one from the protagonists as they return to the castle. The remaining passengers on Eligius IV were woken from cryosleep, and tasked with repairing the damage from the adjustment, then enlarging the compound so that more people can live in it. Their arrival, combined with the loss of every Prime but Russell, and Russell's imprisonment, has brought the compound perilously close to conflict.
Intergenerational Friendship: Murphy and Jaha on their journey in Season 2. They do grow closer, but it's also happening in the middle of Jaha's Sanity Slippage, and their friendship quickly sours.
- Octavia and Diyoza also bond to some degree in Season 6, after admitting to being no different and both had been exiled from Sanctum. Then in season 7 they become Heterosexual Life-Partners and raise Hope together.
Intimate Artistry: In the opening scene of the episode "Bitter Harvest", Clarke sketched a portrait of Lexa as she slept. The sketching shows both Clarke's growing feelings for Lexa and also Clarke's general acceptance of Grounder living, as she hasn't done art since before being sent to the ground. After she awakes, Lexa discovers the drawing.
Internal Deconstruction: Season 5 reverses the dynamic of Grounders vs. Sky People, with the protagonists on the ground and a new group of criminals as the colonists from the sky. Many of the same beats are repeated, but with characters are much more experienced and try to make different choices, and recognize why their choices in Season 1 were moronic or foolhardy.
Involuntary Battle to the Death: The Grounders force this on Jaha and Kane, with the ultimatum that both of them will die if they refuse. They resist for two days instead discussing how to broker peace. Turns out to have been a Secret Test of Character by Lexa, who had posed as a slave girl in the same cell in order to decide whether their desire for peace was genuine.
Ironic Echo:
- In the second episode, Murphy chides Finn for thinking that 'the rules' do not apply to him. Finn responds with Murphy's own philosophy: "I thought you said there are no rules."
- In the third episode, 'slaying demons' is used to refer to facing fears and overcoming obstacles. Charlotte takes the wrong lesson from this and, as she kills Wells, repeats "I have to slay my demons."
- "Murphy's Law": "The less you know, the better."
- "I Am Become Death" has the single word "Bygones." Murphy first says it to a former enemy to convince him that he is no longer holding a grudge, then later repeats it when murdering said former enemy (because he was definitely holding a grudge).
- In "Coup de Grace": "You have to trust that I know what's right for us."
- Just before taking Jasper away to harvest, Doctor Tsing says to the teens "I want you to know, you're very special to us." When she is afterwards dying from radiation poisoning, Jasper and other members of the 100 stand over her and repeat the words.
- In "Blood Must Have Blood, Part 2", Lincoln injects Cage with the same drug used to turn Lincoln into a Reaper. As Cage dies, Lincoln says "the first dose is the worst, " the same thing Cage said when he first dosed Lincoln.
- In "How We Get to Peace," Bellamy repeats his familiar, "My sister, my responsibility" as he drugs Octavia to prevent her from executing Clarke and giving him a chance to negotiate for peace. Instead of protecting Octavia, he is now protecting everyone else from her.
- In "Damocles, Part 2," Monty, having aged many years since the others had been put into cryo, mentions in a video message to Clarke that she was right about Harper's dad's genetic condition when Clarke excluded her from the list of 100 people to survive Praimfaya in the Ark, as it did eventually kill her. But the irony is double-edged, as Harper did live long enough to have a child, something the list was meant to be weighted towards.
- After the characters do something awful, Kane often notes that this is how they'll get back their humanity—or, alternatively, that it's time to do so. In "What You Take With You", he's healed of severe injuries by being given a new body, courtesy of the Primes; he's so disgusted, he has himself floated. Two episodes later, as Sanctum begins to crumble, Russell urges Ryker, a fellow Prime, to make Echo a Nightblood, and thus, a host for his wife. "This is how we get our family back," he says.
Jerkass Has a Point: In "Murphy's Law", Murphy is brutally beaten and nearly hanged for a murder he didn't commit after Clarke accuses him loudly and publicly without considering the consequences. Afterwards, when Murphy wants to execute the actual murderer, even Clarke realizes that she should have handled the entire situation more quietly from the beginning. Murphy's main argument is also that if they were willing to execute him on no evidence whatsoever, it's only fair that the same penalty apply to the actual confessed murderer, even if she's only 12 years old. It's not an entirely unreasonable point.
Just a Kid:
- The adults of Camp Jaha repeatedly dismiss Clarke, Bellamy, Finn, Raven, etc. and insist on enforcing their way of doing things, despite the 100 knowing more about Earth by the time they arrived, because they're "just kids".
- Inverted with the twelve-year old Madi. Many adults see her as a Commander who needs to take responsibility for her people, while she just wants to goof off, and play soccer.
- Because, from Diyoza's perspective, she last saw Hope when Hope was ten, she perceives Hope as a child she needs to protect, not a self-sufficient 25-year old.
Kangaroo Court: Discussed after Finn's massacre at Tondisi. The Grounders want to ritually torture him, but Lexa allows the Sky People to try him. She expects, however, that they'll sentence him to death anyway.
Kiddie Angst: Because, from Diyoza's perspective, she last saw Hope when Hope was ten, she perceives Hope as a child she needs to protect, not a self-sufficient 25-year old. Hope protests that she's just as capable, only relenting when she's beaten in a fight.
Kill and Replace:
- As a child, Echo went by Ashe, and trained to be a spy for the Ice Nation with her friend Echo. The original Echo was tasked by Queen Nia with infiltrating Sangedakru, but didn't have the stomach to kill a captured spy in preparation. She was equally unable to kill Ashe—a last chance granted by Queen Nia—and ended up being fatally stabbed by Ashe. It was decided that Ashe would infiltrate Sangedakru instead, and as they were expecting a girl named Echo, she was made to take Echo's name. She doesn't really stop impersonating Echo, confessing all this to an acquaintance—not even Bellamy, whom she's dating—late in the sixth season, and comparing the acquaintance's situation to hers. As he subjected a man to a Grand Theft Me in which the man's mind was wiped, so, too, was Ashe erased from existence.
- In the sixth season, Clarke is subjected to a Grand Theft Me by Josephine Lightbourne, one of the rulers of an agricultural compound on Sanctum. Reclaiming her body, she deletes Josephine's code, but pretends to be her to help stop the royals. Where Josephine struggled to play Clarke, Clarke has little trouble playing Josephine, not being caught for three episodes, and only because she attempts to suss out whether her mom has survived a Grand Theft Me of her own.
- In the seventh season, Russell, the leader of Sanctum's royalty, is subject to a Grand Theft Me by Sheidheda, The Dreaded Dark Commander—and, unlike Clarke, it's not one he can come back from. Sheidheda pretends to be Russell, manipulating the residents of Sanctum to his advantage.
King in the Mountain: The Disciples, an antagonistic group in the seventh and final season, were founded by Bill Cadogan, whom they know only as the Shepherd. They believe he's disappeared, and will return to lead humanity into the Last War. Bill will indeed, but he's closer than they think, sleeping inside a cryogenic chamber in their facility, and being woken every twenty years for an update from the First Disciple on the code which, when solved, will trigger the war.
Kirk Summation:
- In "Nevermind", Clarke, fighting to regain her mind from Josephine, is told that she covers for her self-doubt with bravado. Later, she receives these from herself, of all people. In the guise of Octavia, as Blodreina, she's told that Bellamy thinks she's a monster who'll abandon anyone—even loved ones like him. In the guise of Maya, she's reminded that others pay the price for her actions, and she, like the Primes, enjoys playing saviour.
- In "The Queen's Gambit", Murphy and Sheidheda play chess together. Sheidheda wonders why Murphy isn't exploiting his supposed status as a Prime to mingle with as many women as he desires. "You don't know Emori," he retorts, deeming Sheidheda misogynistic. It's no wonder, he says, when Sheidheda was given up to the Fleimkepas by his mom, and when Lexa was a better Commander, uniting the Grounder clans where he couldn't.
Klingon Promotion:
- Done in Season 3 when Nia, the Queen of the Ice Nation, has challenged Lexa's authority as the Grounder Commander. When she selects her son Roan to fight Lexa in Trial by Combat, Clarke approaches him and tries to persuade him to kill his mother instead and thus become King. Roan considers it, but declines because he knows that the Ice Nation would never forgive him or accept him as their King in that situation. He does, however, offer to help Clarke kill her instead. Nia survives Clarke's assassination attempt, but during the fight between Lexa and Roan, Lexa spares Roan and kills Nia on the sidelines. She then declares Roan King of the Ice Nation.
- Played straight with Ontari who become the commander when she kills all the nightblood children who were her competition in their sleep but subverted in the fact that she is a Fake King because Titus gave the Flame to Clarke to give to the other candidate Luna because he didn't agree with what Ontari did and without the Flame, Ontari can not be the official leader.
Laser-Guided Amnesia: Due to severe time dilation, anyone who passes through the Anomaly without a protective helmet is likely to lose their memories of what happened on the planet they entered from. Ten years spent on Skyring, raising Hope, become meaningless to Octavia back on Sanctum, while Hope doesn't remember her life on Skyring until returning there with Echo and Gabriel.
Last Episode, New Character:
- Both the Mountain Men (the antagonists of Season 2) and A.L.I.E. (the antagonist of Season 3) were shown in the last minutes of the last episode of the season prior to their official introduction.
- Jordan is introduced in the final act of the Season 5 finale.
- Hope turns up in the last minute of Season 6.
Last Fertile Region: The conflict of Season 5 revolves around who gets to take ownership of Eden, the last green spot on Earth following Praimfaya. The season ends with it being destroyed with the Damocles launch.
Last of His Kind:
- As of Season 3, Emerson, Last of the Mountain Men, is the Sole Survivor of the people of Mount Weather. But subverted when he dies later making his people officially extinct.
- After Ontari's death in the penultimate episode of Season 3, Luna remains the last known living Nightblood, but it is implied that there may be others in other villages and clans. In the wake of Praimfaya, with Luna dead, Clarke is one of two remaining Nightbloods, with Madi being naturally born. The sixth season reveals that there are Nightbloods on Sanctum, with Murphy, Echo, and Emori being added to the ranks after they're given the serum in preparation for a Grand Theft Me.
- The radiation kills everyone from Floukru save Luna, due to her nightblood resistance. Thus she's a double example. Unforunately, this loss drives her over the Despair Event Horizon and she becomes a Straw Nihilist, leading to her death at Octavia's hands.
- The series ends with fourteen humans—Clarke, Raven, Murphy, Emori, Indra, Gaia, Hope, Jordan, Jackson, Miller, Octavia, Levitt, Echo, and Nylah—and one dog, Picasso, remaining on Earth. As they've been stripped of their fertility by the Judge, when they die, both species will go extinct.
Last-Name Basis: (John) Murphy, (Nathan) Miller and (Zoe) Monroe are referred to by pretty much everyone by their last names. To a lesser extent, (Thelonius) Jaha, (Charles) Pike, and (Marcus) Kane are this to the younger characters, but Abby and other adults call them by their first names. (Eric) Jackson and (Jacopo) Sinclair are usually addressed and referred to by surname alone. This becomes slightly confusing in the cases of characters like Bellamy, Harper, Fox, Miles, Jackson, Bryan - names that could realistically be either a first or last name.
Last Request: As she dies accidentally at his hand, Lexa makes Titus swear that he will never again try to harm Clarke. He agrees and swears to it.
Later-Installment Weirdness: The first season sees 100 convicted teens sent to Earth, nearly a century after a devastating nuclear war, from a deteriorating Space Station to determine if it's survivable for the residents. After confirming this, they must alert the station, battle descendants of Earthbound survivors who want trespassers off their territory, and build new lives on the surface, all while dealing with interpersonal issues. Come the seventh and final season—like the sixth, not based on Earth—and those characters who haven't been Killed Off for Real are jumping through wormholes to other planets, locking horns with a former leader of the survivors who's subjected a colonist worshipped as a god to a Grand Theft Me, and either fighting or joining a cult which aims to lead humanity into the Last War. This is an exam on the character of the species, administered by an alien who crystallizes races who fail, and allows those who pass to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
Layman's Terms: Abby pulls one of these with Raven in "Fog of War" while they listen to jammed radio frequencies.
Abby: That sounds clear to you?
Raven: Will be once I crack the encryption.
Abby: English, Raven. What does that mean?
Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- In the Cold Open of "The Old Man and the Anomaly", Octavia is sent into a Mushroom Samba so that Gabriel can learn what she saw inside the Anomaly. When she's next in focus, nineteen minutes in, Gabriel mutters, "About time!"
- In a flashback in "Welcome to Bardo", a Disciple named Levitt scans through Octavia's memories using a Mind Probe, going chronologically, as one would episodes of The 100. He seems to have reached the finale of the third season, screaming in excitement as Pike is killed by Octavia, being hyped for Blodreina by Octavia, and asking if Clarke survives her trip to the City of Light.
Legend Fades to Myth: The First Commander began the process of uniting the Grounder Tribes in the city of Polis, created the original Nightbloods, and upon her death her spirit chose her successor, who in turn chooses the next Commander as the chain continues down. "Thirteen" reveals that the First Commander was Becca, the technology innovator who created A.L.I.E., the AI which ended the world. Becca had been living aboard the space station Polaris trying to create a new AI to repair the damage and save the world, and fled to Earth when others on her station learned her connection to A.L.I.E. She used her blood to store information and passed it on to the Grounders she encountered, and the successful AI she developed is implanted in each successive Commander.
Let Them Die Happy: Kane's mother is the leader of the small religious sect on the Ark which cares for a sole tree through offerings of water, which he finds embarrassing and tries to distance himself from. Despite having earlier claimed to have forgotten their prayers when she asked him to transport their tree to the ground, when she is wounded by the bombing on the Ark Kane recites the prayer over her as she dies, causing her to smile before the end.
Light Is Not Good:
- Our first glimpse of Mount Weather is in an all-white room, with Clarke in an all-white outfit. Everything is cleaner and more orderly than the Grounders, and the people are more polite. They are, however, the driving villain of the second season, whom even the Grounders fear and hate.
- A.L.I.E.'s proposed utopia is named "The City of Light."
Living Is More than Surviving: A repeated theme throughout the show, and discussed by Clarke and Lexa. Lexa takes the position that survival is the most important issue in life, while Clarke takes the position that people as people deserve more. Ultimately, Clarke convinces Lexa that they do deserve more than just survival.

M-S

Machine Worship:
- Jaha and the City of Light followers toward the artificial intelligence ALIE.
- Again with the people of Sanctum towards the Primes (though it's unclear if the average Sanctumite is aware that the Primes' "rebirths" are done via Mind Drives).
Magical Defibrillator: Abby uses a shock stick to restart Lincoln's heart.
Make an Example of Them: "Thirteen" reveals that the original thirteenth space station did not refuse to join the other twelve stations to form the Ark, but rather the American space station decided to destroy it as an example to the others that they would need to accept draconian measures if they were to survive. The fact that the station had appeared to be refusing to join the Ark because of internal events gave a very good excuse.
Matricide: In a sense. At the end of the sixth season, Clarke's mom is subject to a Grand Theft Me by Simone Lightbourne. Simone brandishes a gun at Clarke, forcing Clarke, incredibly upset, to float her.
Mauve Shirt: Initially the series focuses on the main cast trying to lead the 100, so some minor delinquents are given a bit of personality before their inevitable doom. Lampshaded by Myles, who comments that he and the main cast don't really hang out much. He's offed later in the same episode.
Meaningful Echo:
- In "The Calm", Jaha informs Kane that the actions he took to help the survivors of the Exodus ship disaster were against the law. Kane responds that a wise man once told him that you have to know when not to follow the law, a Call-Back to Jaha and Kane's conversation in the Pilot.
- The phrase "May we meet again" is used frequently by the Arkers, in both temporary-but-uncertain goodbyes and as last rites to the dead. Lexa repeats the Ark phrase to Clarke in "Blood Must Have Blood, Part 1" echoing Clarke's use of the Grounder rites over Finn in "Remember Me".
- From the Season 2 finale, "Blood Must Have Blood, Part 2":
  - Clarke had told Bellamy that "[he] did good" with the 100 in "We Are Grounders." Kane tells him this again after the Arkers are freed.
  - The phrase "good guys" — in an earlier episode, Abby chides Clarke by telling to remember that they're the good guys. After Clarke's actions in this episode, she tells her mother that she tried, and Abby tells her, "Maybe there are no good guys." Said again by Clarke to Bellamy in "Demons" when he asks what to do when you realize you might not be the good guy.
  - Bellamy tells Clarke that if she wants forgiveness for irradiating Mount Weather and killing everyone inside, he's willing to forgive her — a direct parallel to their conversation in "Day Trip" where Clarke forgives him for indirectly causing the Culling. When Clarke refuses, she says "I bear it, so they don't have to", the same thing President Wallace said to her earlier in the episode. This phrase pops up again in Season 4, when Clarke injects herself with the Nightblood serum instead of a restrained Emori.
- The final climactic moments of Seasons 2 and 3 both involve Clarke pulling a handle.
- Kane's ultimatum to Abby in Season 5 to either quit taking the pills or lose him ends with the single word "Choose" - just like Octavia's message to possible enemies of Wonkru.
Meaningful Name:
- Some of the names have some significant meaning.
  - The "Ark". As in Noah's Ark.
  - The leader of the Mountain Men, who live in an Elaborate Underground Base, is named Dante.
  - In Classical Mythology, Cerberus was guard dog to the Underworld. The "Cerberus Project" involves creating Reapers out of strong Grounders so that the Grounders will fear Mount Weather.
- Episode titles also occasionally fall into this.
  - One of the episodes is titled "Murphy's Law". Aside from things going spectacularly wrong at the camp, it also focuses somewhat on Murphy.
  - The episode "Day Trip". Aside from two characters going on a journey, it also features everyone getting high.
  - The episode in which Raven is possessed by A.L.I.E. and dishes out The Reason You Suck Speeches to the cast is titled "Nevermore".
Medical Horror: The terror of the final episodes from Season 2 comes from the Mountain Men harvesting bone marrow from the 100, cutting them apart and draining them dry.
Melting-Pot Nomenclature: The Grounders have names from various sources to emphasize the rugged future, with names like Tristan (Welsh), Indra (Hindu), and Artigas (Spanish).
Mercy Kill:
- Clarke does this for Atom after he is caught in the acid fog, after Bellamy can't bring himself to.
- It is the general policy of the Grounders to kill any Reaper's that they manage to capture, since they know of no way to reverse what was done to them. This extends to when the Reaper was a close friend or loved one, as they consider this a mercy instead of living as Reaper.
- Clarke kills Finn to spare him from a slow death by torture; this angers both the Grounders (who wanted to see him suffer) and Raven (who wanted to save him).
- Octavia to Ilian in the Final Conclave, after he's impaled through the throat by one of Echo's arrows and paralyzed.
Mood Whiplash: When Bellamy, Octavia, and two guards are scoping out the old parking garage, the guard Scott finds a wind-up music box. It plays "Carol Of The Bells", and the two guards smile and enjoy the toy when they are set upon by two Reapers. The music keeps eerily playing as Bellamy and Octavia discover the Reapers finishing the job.
Moral Myopia:
- The whole conflict between the Grounders and the Sky People because both sides saw the others' actions as unjustifiable and thought the other side were the ones who started the conflict and both sides at first failed to understand that they were both just defending themselves. This is also furthered by the Grounders' culture being harsh and violent and it made making peace with them difficult as they refused to let the things the Sky People did to their people go and some of the Sky People also refused to forgive their actions against their people. This results in one or several members from both sides committing actions that either deliberately or accidentally restarts the conflict. Generally the whole conflict got started accidentally because of the 100 not knowing that people lived on Earth and that they were trespassing on their land, and therefore what they see as self-defense is viewed by the grounders as acts of aggression.
- Debated when Finn massacres a Grounder village in his search for Clarke. Many attempts are made to justify his actions as because he "didn't know" and "meant well", but these excuses fell flat each time compared to the number of the dead. Ultimately, he surrenders to Grounder justice because there was no justification for his actions, and no amount of Us vs Them or we were at war thinking could create one. But of course the real problem wasn't just whether or not his crime was justifiable, but the way the Grounders wanted to punish him for his crime by subjecting him to a slow and painful death and even if he did deserve to die, he didn't deserve to die like that. Abby was even trying to find a compromise that would have him punished for the crime under the Exodus Charter, but the Grounders insisted that it had to be their way.
- The Grounder and Sky People's conflict with the Mountain Men who created the Reapers and puts their people through painful experiments because both groups saw them as this great threat that needed to be stopped but they ignored the fact that the Mountain Men were doing the things they were doing to treat their people's fatal weakness to the radiation of the outside and their experiments on the 48 was an attempt to find a cure. Clarke who was leading the charge was the one who knew this because she was recently in Mount Weather before escaping and was already prepared to wipe them out to save her friends until Bellamy who is undercover on the inside tells her about the children and the faction that doesn't agree with the experiments which changes the plan to only killing the guilty party but not once does she try to find a solution that could get their people cured and get her friends out only being focused on saving her own people. Also Lexa and the other Grounders were also only focused on getting their people out which of course leads to the deal with Lexa to release her people on the condition that she retreats with her people and allows the experiments on the Sky People to continue and when she agrees she points out to Clarke that Clarke would have took the same deal if it was her people and of course Lexa's decision leads to Clarke and Bellamy wiping all of them out with the outside radiation.
- The Mountain Men (particularly Cage, Tsing and the Mountain Guards) also are guilty of this because they could have tried to reach out to the Sky People and found a peaceful solution that could have involved doing the experiments without causing casualties but they decided not to on the grounds of not taking any chances on the possibility that they would say no and they were in a hurry because of radiation leaks in the facility potentially killing everybody in a few months and knowing that a conflict with the Sky People and the Grounders was coming.
- Debated again in "Bitter Harvest", after Clarke has pleaded with Lexa to simply forgo war against Arkadia in order to break the cycle of violence between them. When she still asks for vengeance against Emerson of Mount Weather, Lexa explicitly asks her if Clarke's speeches about mercy only apply to her own people and nobody else. Clarke ultimately chooses to forgo vengeance herself in order to help support the overall peace.
Murder by Mistake: In "Thirteen", Titus planned to kill Clarke and frame Murphy for the act, but wound up shooting Lexa instead.
Mushroom Samba:
- In "Day Trip", the 100 are crippled by the Grounders when they're given hallucinogenic nuts. Jasper believes the camp has been overrun with Grounders, while Bellamy sees Jaha, and the Ark residents who died in the culling he caused.
- In "What You Take With You", Octavia is injected with a powerful drug so that Gabriel can learn what happened when she entered the Anomaly. Alas, this doesn't happen, as she meets Pike inside the fighting pit, admits that she's eager to be redeemed, and saves him from being killed by Blodreina.
Mutants: Present thanks to the extreme radiation post-nuclear fallout altering the genetic structure of some organisms. Their existence is established in the pilot, where the characters meet a deer with two heads. Among the Grounders, the mutants are ostracized and looked down upon being seen as bad luck and because of this they are banished to the wastelands or they are killed when they are born and sometimes their family is banished with them if they refuse to kill them.
The Mutiny: Diana Sidney takes over the exodus ship and sabotages the Ark after trying to kill the council.
My God, What Have I Done?:
- Kane's reaction when he realizes that there was no need to have 320 people kill themselves.
- Said verbaitm by A.L.I.E's creator, Becca, when she watches from the space station as A.L.I.E causes nuclear war to cover Earth.
- Raven, when she realizes that A.L.I.E's way of "removing the pain" means she no longer remembers the feelings she had for Finn and how much he meant to her. In Season 7, to stop Sanctum's nuclear reactor from exploding, Raven sends in several convicts to effect repairs, and they all die from radiation exposure. She bitterly regrets not taking the time to come up with a non-lethal solution, especially since she ignored that Even Evil Has Loved Ones.
My Sister Is Off-Limits: In the beginning of Season 1, Bellamy tries to stop his younger sister from flirting with any of the people on the Ground, specifically Finn.
- Bellamy also ties Atom to a tree all night for kissing her and Atom's responsibility was to look after Octavia while Bellamy was gone.
- Bellamy at first doesn't approve of Octavia's relationship with Lincoln mostly because him being a Grounder, but he later starts to trust Lincoln with protecting her and starts to be okay with them being together.
The Needs of the Many: A recurring conflict — is sacrificing a few people for the greater good of everyone else the right way to go about it?
- Kane thinks so, and gives the go-signal for what comes to be known as "The Culling" — 320 people killed to buy more time. He later realizes he was very wrong about this.
- Jaha initially seemed reluctant to believe so, but states as much in "Survival of the Fittest."
- The reason Tsing is so willing to perform unethical experiments is that continued research will help the Mountain Men return to their proper home, when they get cured of their radiation illness.
- Clarke is adamant about protecting everybody and thus doesn't want to hand over Finn to the Grounders and pushes for the rescue of the 47 in Mount Weather despite the costs.
The Neutral Zone: Played with in Season 3 during the conflict between the Grounders and Arkadia. Lexa wishes to prevent an all-out war between the two people, but cannot allow Arkadia's repeated acts of aggression to go completely unanswered, so she enacts a five-mile quarantine surrounding Arkadia. She will not allow the Grounder armies to attack the settlement, but any Arkadian who leaves the boundary will be killed.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
- Experimenting with the wristbands made every one of them short out.
- Bellamy tells Charlotte she needs to slay her demons when she's awake in order to stop her nightmares. Later, she sees Clarke perform a Mercy Kill by stabbing the carotid artery. She murders Wells using the same technique she saw Clarke use, and says it's to slay her demons, given that Wells reminds her of his father, who killed both of her parents.
- Several of the actions of the teenagers on the ground exacerbate the conflict between them and the Grounders, often on the basis of incomplete or wrong information. Most egregious is Finn failing to stop and consider any alternatives once he has his mind made up that the Grounders have kidnapped Clarke, even amid mounting evidence that they haven't.
- Bellamy helps Pike carry out an unprovoked massacre of allied Grounders, which promptly destroys a very fragile alliance and has continuous negative effects throughout the rest of the season.
- In the sixth season, Abby placates the Primes by producing doses of the Nightblood serum from Madi's bone marrow. When several Primes are killed in quick succession, more doses are asked for; she makes herself a Nightblood to give Madi a break. As soon as the Primes learn that the serum works, she's taken to become a host for Simone, killed by a disgruntled resident of Sanctum. Worse, since she previously removed A.L.I.E.'s neural mesh, there's no way out, as there was with Clarke.
No One Gets Left Behind: This gets repeated frequently in the series, though it is not always upheld.
- When Jasper is attacked and then captured by the Grounders, Clarke insists on going back for her once they realize he's alive. Finn rightly points out that they're likely to lose more people saving him, but decides to help when she won't be dissuaded.
No Periods, Period: The lack of the 100 dealing with any menstrual cycles while stranded on the ground without any supplies is explained in Season 3: Fertility inhibitors prevent both pregnancy and menstrual cycles, and people discuss removing them at the start of this season.
The Nose Knows: Ontari is able to smell the poison on Clarke's sleeve that she intended to use on Nia from across the room.
The Notable Numeral: The 100. It's supposed to be the number of dropped criminals, but Bellamy makes the drop as well, Raven follows soon after, and there aren't a hundred of them anymore.
Not Named in Opening Credits: Used to hide Lexa and Abby's return in the Grand Finale.
"Not So Different" Remark:
- When the 100 learn that the Grounders are coming at them with an all-out attack, Bellamy motivates them by saying that they are Grounders as well and that they have learned to fight and survive on the ground and have as much right to be on the ground as they do. However in an attempt to prevent a battle and convince everyone to abandon the fort and try to seek shelter with Luna's clan, Clarke steps forward and says that they are not Grounders and she also say this because she does not want them to descend to savagery in the name of self-defense.
- Abby says the line verbatim after she witnesses Lexa execute Gustus for his attempt to sabotage the Grounder/Ark alliance. Whether she meant the government's willingness to use draconian measures to enforce their authority, or the people's willingness to accept those draconian punishments to do the right thing, she did not clarify.
- When Abby and Kane are trapped under rubble for most of "Resurrection" following Mount Weather's missile attack in the previous episode, they gradually realise that the tough choice Clarke had to make was like the life-or-death choices they had to make on the Ark. She knew the attack was coming and could have warned them, but if she had then Mount Weather would have figured out they had someone (Bellamy) inside who was working for them. She sacrificed a small number of lives for the greater victory.
- Clarke notes the similarities of her and Abby in "Remember Me" after realizing that they would both go to extremes to keep everyone safe.
Not So Similar: After Bellamy motivates the 100 in the face of a Grounder attack by explaining that after learning to fight and survive they are Grounders as well, Clarke steps forward and says that they are not Grounders. She does not want them to descend to savagery in the name of self-defense and she was attempting to convince them to try and seek shelter with Luna's clan instead of fighting in a battle that they could possibly lose.
The Nth Doctor: At the end of the fifth season, Kane is attacked by a cannibalistic serial killer. He teeters on the edge of death, being kept alive through cryogenics, until a resident of the Primes' compound on Sanctum has his mind replaced with Kane's through Brain Uploading. Kane can't stand living in someone else's body, eventually asking Indra to float him.
Nuclear Mutant: One of the threats of a post-nuclear-apocalypse Earth. The first animal seen is a beautiful buck grazing in the forest-and then it turns and we see it has part of a second head growing out of its first. Mutant humans are also present, often with physical deformations such as extreme syndactyly or a deformed mouth or hand.
Occupiers Out of Our Country: The very beginning of the conflict between the Grounders and the Ark stems from the Ark "invading" Grounder territory when they sent the 100 onto their land and promised more to follow.
Offscreen Romance: This happens to Bellamy during the first two Time Skips. In the three months between the second and third seasons, he begins dating Gina, a fellow resident of Arkadia. In the six years between the fourth and fifth seasons, he begins dating Echo, with whom he's stuck on the Ark, waiting for radiation levels on Earth to decline.
Oh, Crap!:
- Clarke when she realizes something very important about the planet they just landed on in the pilot.
  Clarke: We're not alone.
- Said word-for-word by Jasper in "Join or Die" after he and Octavia drink from the Grounders' vial...and then she passes out.
Once a Season: The season finale climaxes with Clarke doing something deadly to others:
- In the first season, she activates the rockets on the dropship, frying alive 300 Grounders.
- In the second season, she and Bellamy allow radiation to leak into the bunker in Mount Weather, killing the hundreds inside without protection. This act results in her being nicknamed Wanheda, the Commander of Death, by the Grounders.
- In the third season, she destroys the City of Light, and A.L.I.E. with it.
- The fourth season has an inversion. From Earth, she helps her friends get back into the Ark, allowing them to safely wait out Praimfaya.
- In the fifth season, she kills McCreary by stomping in his face.
- In the sixth season, she floats Simone Prime—in her mom's body after a Grand Theft Me—Jasmine Prime, Miranda Prime, and Caleb Prime.
- In the final season, she kills Bill Cadogan, preventing her from ascending with the rest of humanity.
Once More, with Clarity:
- In the sixth season, Octavia follows Diyoza into a temporal anomaly on Sanctum. Straight away, she's expelled without any memory of what happened on the other side, and with strange tattoos all over back. In the premiere of the seventh season, a woman she calls Hope exits the anomaly, causing her to vanish by stabbing her in the stomach. Enhanced by the context provided by flashbacks, these scenes are replayed in the fifth episode. Octavia spent a decade on another planet, raising Hope with Diyoza, before being kidnapped by the Disciples, one of the season's antagonists. Eventually, she was rescued by an adult Hope, tattooed with a code connecting her to Hope, and sent back to Sanctum without a helmet which would protect her from the effects of time dilation. Days later from her perspective, and minutes later for Hope, she was tagged with a tracker by Hope, returning her to the Disciples.
- In "Anaconda", Becca's return to Earth, from "Thirteen", plays out from the perspective of the residents of the bunker, and we see in a bit more detail her execution, briefly depicted in "The Warriors Will". With added context, we now know that she was brought to the bunker, helped Tristan survive radiation poisoning by making him a Nightblood, cracked the code of the Anomaly Stone, was taken somewhere she learned that humanity would be judged, and was imprisoned for suggesting that the Anomaly stay closed. She escaped with Callie's help, but was caught, and taken to be burned at the stake—something she welcomed, if in terror, because it meant that the Flame would remain out of Bill's mitts.
Only Known by Their Nickname: Technically, in Echo's case. Her given name is Ashe, but she hasn't gone by it since childhood, when she was forced to fight her friend to the death, taking her name on Queen Nia's request. Not even Bellamy knows the truth.
Only One Name: All the grounders; surnames don't seem to exist among them anymore. If a longer, more specific name is needed, they’ll be identified by their clan (“Lexa kom Trikru”). Madi is the one exception to this; after being adopted by Clarke, we see her name given as Madi Griffin.
Only the Knowledgable May Pass: According to supplemental material, the Grounder Conlang started as a series of code-words used after the initial nuclear war to distinguish who was or was not a member of their particular group. Over the following century it developed into a fully developed language which the Grounders use alongside English. It’s first used for this purpose in Season 5, with Bellamy and Echo speaking Trig so that the Eligius crew can’t understand what they’re talking about.
Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
- Both Eliza Taylor and Alycia Debnam-Carey let their regular Australian tones peek through briefly in "Thirteen" (Taylor when Clarke says "Stop" in one scene, Debnam-Carey more noticeably when Lexa is shouting at Titus later on).
- Also happens with Eliza playing Josephine in Season 6. After the scene in her room, however, she seems to have it back under control.
Opening Narration:
- The one below, delivered by Clarke, appears in the majority of the first season:
  I was born in space. I've never felt the sun on my face or breathed real air or floated in the water—none of us have. For three generations, the Ark has kept what's left of the human race alive, but now, our home is dying, and we are the last hope of mankind: one hundred prisoners sent on a desperate mission to the ground. Each of us is here because we broke the law; on the ground, there is no law. All we have to do is survive, but we will be tested by the Earth, by the secrets it hides, and most of all, by each other.
- In the third season, the one below is delivered by Bellamy:
  We were born in space. They told us the ground was uninhabitable, but they were wrong, and we've been fighting for our lives since the moment we landed. Some of us have been broken by it, but most of us are still here, searching for other survivors from the Ark, trying to build something real and lasting out of the wilderness—a home. Our leaders believe that to survive, we need to make peace with the Grounders, but peace is a foreign concept here.
Open Secret: Maya states everyone in Mount Weather knew that the Grounders were being harvested for the sake of their blood. Only the Ark kids didn't.
"Pan from the Sky" Beginning: Uniquely for the show, whose Title Sequence usually has a hard cut into the episode, that of "Welcome to Bardo" ends with an Establishing Shot of the planet around which Sanctum orbits, then pans down to the surface of Sanctum.
Panic Attack: After getting the Flame removed and no longer being the Commander, 12-year-old Madi struggles to adjust, all the while having to keep up the facade of leadership. This culminates in a panic attack after being threatened by the season's Big Bad. In a rare Pet the Dog moment for his character, it is Murphy, of all people, who finds her and talks her down from it.
Parenthetical Swearing:
- "Float" (The term for an execution by spacing, which has become a catch-all term for "kill") is often used in the place the the 'f'-word for swearing.
  Clarke: Go float yourself!
- In "A Little Sacrifice", Miller asks Anders, the First Disciple, to "get the flock out of here." He's referring to the Disciples outside the room with the Anomaly Stone, all of whom worship "the Shepherd", but, well… c'mon.
Peace Conference: Finn tries to organize one between the Grounders and The 100 to prevent violence from escalating once people from the Ark arrive. Both sides brought weapons as a matter of security, and Jasper believed that the Grounders were planning an attack and shot first, putting the two sides officialy at war.
Peaceful in Death:
- It is general Grounder tradition to bid farewell at death with "Your fight is over", recognizing that the deceased are finished with the hardships and struggles of the world. Whether the specific dying person peacefully accepts these wishes varies depending on the circumstances.
- As she lies dying, Lexa speaks the phrase "My fight is over" (Emphasis added) to show that she is accepting of what is happening.
- Clarke also uses the first-person variant when she has to do a time-consuming Heroic Sacrifice, which would leave her no time to get back to safety. However, she actually survives, though everyone else believes she died.
Platonic Life-Partners: Lead characters Clarke and Bellamy form a balanced partnership in Season 1 that is as often deepened as it is strained by the events of the show. While they both have multiple love interests, their relationship is often front and center, they frequently forgive and support each other, and both consistently admit that the other is hugely important to them, to the point that they are occasionally implied to be each other's Living Emotional Crutch. Despite all this they don't get romantic, although there are quite a few Ship Tease moments.
Plot Armor:
- In the S1 finale when it's decided the entire Ark would be sent down to the ground, but it was likely only one section of the station would survive. Naturally, it's the only section with named characters. (Though in Season 3 we find that one more did survive, though was too deep in Ice Nation territory to be found at first.)
- The Mount Weather missile attack doesn't manage to kill any of the named characters.
- Jaha's band of followers dwindles over the course of Season 2, leaving just him and the other major character in it, Murphy, alive.
Population Control: By the Ark's laws, people are only allowed to have one child, the medical resources allowed for saving a single life are strictly limited (even for the Chancellor), and even minor criminals over eighteen are executed instead of imprisoned to conserve resources. Being an illegal child is just as illegal as having one. If the population is still too high to be sustained, then even innocent people can be executed. Add in the occasional engineered “accidents” to cull the population, and you have a pretty awful place to live.
The Promised Land: The City of Light, a supposed utopia for all outcasts. No one is really sure if it even exists, and the road towards it is dangerous.
Protagonist Journey to Villain: Played with to hell and back, combined with Redemption Quest and Heel–Face Turn. Basically each major character who starts as an antagonist will become heroic, while the heroic characters become more villainous. Then they switch places and start the cycle over again. In short:
- Clarke starts off as a classical hero, and slowly starts making more questionable decisions until the climax of Season 2 when she and Bellamy intentionally commit genocide. She spends most of Season 3 trying to atone for it, only to become a crazed Mama Bear in Season 5.
- Finn starts off as the Only Sane Man, becoming unhinged in Season 2. Among other things, he shoots dead eighteen Grounders in a grief-fuelled rampage.
- Octavia starts off as innocent and trusting, but by Season 5 she has become a Knight Templar after playing a Zero-Approval Gambit for her people's survival.
- Miller starts off quite rational and kind hearted. He becomes a full on Blood Knight with a fanatical devotion to Octavia by Season 5, though he regrets it by the next season.
- Bellamy starts out villainous, gets better by Season 2, regresses to murderous levels in the first half of Season 3, then spends the latter half of Season 3 atoning.
- Jaha starts off as a Reasonable Authority Figure in Season 1, to a Dark Messiah in Season 2 and 3, with a dose of Brainwashed and Crazy, and spends Season 4 atoning.
- It gets to the point in Season 5 that most of the characters can't tell where they fall anymore, and Bellamy of all people has become The Hero. And to really drive home this trope, Bellamy ends up dying as a villain in Season 7.
Psycho Serum: The Mountain Men turn strong Grounders into the psychotic, murderous Reapers by injecting them with such a drug. They become so addicted to it that they're willing to kill others in order for another dosage.
Punny Name: Some of the episode titles. 'Inclement Weather' and 'Day Trip' stand out.
Put on a Bus:
- In the penultimate episode of the fifth season, Kane is severely injured by Vinson, being placed into cryosleep to save his life. He's woken up in the premiere of the sixth season, but can't stay awake for long, once again being put under. In the ninth episode, he's Back for the Dead, appearing in a new body courtesy of Brain Uploading, and as himself, comforting Abby as he prepares to be floated. This was a result of his actor being cast in The Passage.
- The fifth season ends with the characters placing themselves in cryogenic pods. Indra is the only major character who remains on ice, being freed in the ninth episode of the sixth season.
Quiet Cry for Help:
- In "Human Trials", Mount Weather Research Facility, which many of the 100 have been kidnapped to, suddenly suffers a containment breach. Maya, a worker whom Jasper takes a liking to, is severely poisoned, only saved when he agrees to give her some of his radiation-resistant blood. The following episode, as he attempts to recruit his friends for further transfusions, Maya comes by to say hello. She's got a notebook with two messages: they're being listened to, so they need to act normal, and the containment breach was deliberate.
- In "Heavy Lies the Crown", Bellamy, Monty, Miller, Bryan, and Harper encounter residents of Farm Station who have been enslaved by the Ice Nation. They're slipped a scroll which explains that the slaves are being moved tomorrow, and which asks for help.
- In the sixth season, Clarke is subject to a Grand Theft Me by Josephine Lightbourne, one of the Primes who rule an agricultural compound on Sanctum. She regains enough control to tap out a message to Bellamy in Morse code, which they learned on the Ark, using her finger and arm: "Alive". Having been told that she died when Josephine took over, he's immediately relieved.
Race Against the Clock:
- In the first season, the Ark runs low on oxygen, with the ETA until it's exhausted gradually being lowered, and many problems getting in the way. Eventually, the station itself is brought to the surface, many people dying as it breaks up.
- Raven and Sinclair have to race to get the code to defuse the bomb placed in Mount Weather. They fail.
- In the finale of the third season, Clarke enters the City of Light to stop A.L.I.E., only having so long until she dies. It's dicey, but she succeeds in time.
- The fourth season is a protracted one, as the protagonists have six months, later reduced to three, to prepare for Praimfaya. Their safety isn't assured until the last minute.
- The fifth season ends with a missile filled with hythylodium, a fuel much more powerful than that used in the 100's bomb, being launched at the last habitable land on Earth. The characters have thirteen minutes to escape, and they make use of every second.
- The sixth season sees Josephine Lightbourne uploaded to Clarke's brain, and Clarke surviving the concurrent mind wipe because she was never purged of A.L.I.E.'s code. The women fight for control, and if they do so for too long, Clarke will die of a stroke. Josephine's dad estimates that they have 36 hours—less if Clarke resists strongly enough. Clarke wins by the skin of her teeth, shattering a mental projection of Josephine after flatlining, but before her mind shuts down.
- In the seventh season, the reactor core which powers the compound on Sanctum threatens to overheat; the characters must calm it down before the temperature reaches 1,500 degrees, and everyone dies of radiation poisoning. During this process, Emori has sixty seconds to lower the reactor's rods. Of course, both tasks are completed Just in Time.
Race Lift: Implied as much; in the books, Wells is half-brother to the Blake siblings, but this is unlikely in the show given the actors' ethnicities ^note.
The Radio Dies First: Happens when the dropship crashlands on Earth. As a result, the 100 cannot communicate with the adults on the Ark, with their wristbands the only sign they're alive. Too bad Bellamy starts convincing them to cut them off...
Raised as a Host: The people of Sanctum are raised to worship the Primes, and anyone with black blood is taught that it's an honor to give up their body so that a Prime can live again.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech:
- President Wallace, the former leader of the Mountain Men, gives one of these to his son (Who has taken over Mount Weather and kept his dad confined). While it doesn't happen quite that way, the ex-President turns out to be right.
  Dante: You've killed us. One week in office, and you've managed to turn neighbor against neighbor, you've made the outsiders hate us more than they already did, you lost our outer defenses, and now a door that hasn't been breached in 97 years is going to fall, and an army of savages is going to flood these halls, killing every last one of us.
- Raven deals out Breaking Speeches in this form in "Nevermore" while Brainwashed and Crazy, calling out Clarke and Bellamy for all the deaths they've caused and Jasper for being incapable of moving on.
- Clarke receives a lot of these in early Season 6, regarding her betrayals in the last season.
  Raven: Every time you do something horrible, you say you're sorry. And then you do it again. Clarke Griffin, and her Impossible Choices. At least have the balls to stand by them!
Reasonable Authority Figure: Jaha and Kane for the Ark Survivors, and the president for the Mountain Men. Although Jaha quickly moves away from this.
Recycled with a Gimmick: The show starts as Lord of the Flies AFTER THE END! AND COED! Though it quickly moves away from this premise. In Season 6, it does this with itself, sending the characters to an alien moon whose conflicts mirror those with the Grounders and Mount Weather conflicts.
Red Baron:
- As a consequence of the events of Season 2, the Grounders take to calling Clarke "Wanheda", which means "The Commander of Death". Another epithet that she gains is "Mountain Slayer".
- In Season 4, the Grounders begin calling Octavia "Skairipa", meaning "Death from above", because of her growing infamy as a killer. By the next season, she's moved on to "Blodreina", meaning "red queen", as leader of the bloodthirsty Wonkru.
Redemption Quest: Octavia is hit by the weight of her actions as Blodreina, arguably heinous, when she's rejected by Bellamy during the fight with Diyoza's army. Lost, she starts fumbling for a new way in life, finding it—redemption—thanks to a Mushroom Samba. She starts down this path in her decade on Skyring, raising Hope with Diyoza, and has gone a long way in reaching it by the end of the series.
Redemption Rejection: When Murphy returned from his exile, he seemed to be on the path of redeeming his character, with some even accepting him back, but then he decides to go on a revenge killing spree instead. He gets better, thankfully.
Relationship Upgrade: Though their feelings for each other are apparent, Clarke and Lexa's actions throughout the second season and the beginning of the third are driven by the needs of their people, and they are thrown together and driven apart by circumstance and their own conflicting goals. In "Thirteen", they finally both admit their feelings for each other irrespective of the needs of their people. Lexa is killed following their love scene.
Remember the New Guy?: Season 3 introduces a few new characters in the time skip, whom the core cast are already familiar with as friends or family from back on the Ark.
The Remnant: The Mountain Men have been revealed as one for the U.S. Government/Military, based out of Mount Weather.
Reunion Vow: "May we meet again" is an excerpt from the traditional funeral rites of the Ark. Characters occasionally use it as a farewell when they are unsure that they will reunite.
Revenge Before Reason:
- After Murphy regains the trust of the 100, he ruins it all by going on a revenge spree against the people who wronged him. He convinced himself that he would become the leader after killing Bellamy; his plan goes less than spectacularly.
- When the Ark and the Grounders are preparing for their final attack on Mount Weather, Clarke is worried that in their rage the Grounders might decide to slaughter the entire population when given the opportunity, including even the children and the people who have actively aided them. The Grounders actually strike a deal with Mount Weather and abandon the Ark to face them alone.
- A desire for revenge for Azgeda's attack on the settlement at Mount Weather leads to Bellamy joining Pike in his campaign against any and all Grounders, which ultimately results in Lincoln's execution by Pike.
- Lincoln's execution by Pike (and indirectly caused by Bellamy) causes Octavia to beat the crap out of Bellamy, blatantly murder Pike, and then become a remorseless killing machine for a while, which earns her the nickname "death from above" from the Grounders.
Rousseau Was Right: One of the themes of the show is that many of the "villains" are basically good people stuck in wretched situations and forced to make tough decisions. Listing them:
- Bellamy shot Jaha so he could come to Earth and look after his sister Octavia, and while he does put innocent lives at risk in an effort to save himself he also looks out for The 100 and tries to keep them alive.
- Jaha has had a lot of people executed and he risked The 100's lives sending them to Earth, but it was all in the name of ensuring humanity's survival. Also, he's a Reasonable Authority Figure who tries to avoid unnecessary killing.
- Kane plays a big role in the execution of 320 innocent Ark residents, but he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist trying to keep the human race alive. The realization that the aforementioned execution was unnecessary is a huge My God, What Have I Done? moment for him.
- The Grounders attacked and killed members of The 100, but it was because they believed that The 100 were invaders, a belief that was "confirmed" in their minds when the flares that The 100 used to signal The Ark came back to the surface and burned down a Grounder village.
Royal Blood: Some Grounders have black blood, for which they are termed "Nightbloods". Grounder tradition has the Nightbloods identified as potential successors to the Commander, and one of them will arise to the position with the death of the current Commander. It's later revealed to be the result of a serum to boost radiation resistance, which was originally designed for miners on extra-solar missions. Becca came to the ground intending to inject as many people as possible with the serum.
- Also found on Sanctum, where black blood marks someone as a "host" that a Prime can be reborn in.
Sanity Slippage: Ooh boy, the setting is not good for mental health. Clarke, Jaha, and Finn all struggle with it in Season 2. Murphy has a hard time after being alone for 80 days in the third season. Season 5 shows Octavia, and to a lesser extent all of Wonkru, becoming pretty crazed.
Scenery Porn:
- Earth looks pretty damn good for a planet that was devastated by nuclear war, and the series isn't shy about showing off the awesome scenery.
- The Primes' compound on Sanctum consists of a massive castle surrounded by colourful shipping containers, and fronted by a sizeable pond. Around the compound itself is an equally colourful field in a floral pattern.
Scenery Gorn: Polis, what remains of Annapolis. A tower constructed by Bill Cadogan survived the war, with the Grounders treating it as a massive torch. Meanwhile, a flourishing city has sprung up around the tower, filled with tented shops selling any number of things.
Schmuck Bait: The temporal anomaly affecting the moon known as Sanctum. Not only does it not look fun to be inside, being a hurricane of green fire which can make people nearby see horrible things, and expel flares which lead to Rapid Aging, Diyoza is bluntly warned by Gabriel that nobody who's entered has returned. Lured by a vision of her daughter, she goes in anyway; where Octavia follows her, and is spit out, no longer aging, she remains disappeared, transported God knows where.
The Scream: Used in "Demons" with Harper's scream bleeding into the intro credits.
Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Jaha pardons Abby and later tells Kane that knowing when not to follow the law is an important part of being Chancellor. Given he has spaced people for doing things like this in the past it seems that you should know not to follow the law if it's his life that was saved.
Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: To do so risks becoming a Heroic Sacrifice under the Ark's laws, but a near-certain death sentence doesn't stop Abby from using as much blood as necessary to save Chancellor Jaha's life.
Secret Test of Character:
- Gustus, posing as the Grounder Commander, locks Kane and Jaha in a cell with a Grounder slave woman and explains that they must fight to the death, with the survivor allowed to offer him the Ark's offer of surrender. The slave woman is actually Lexa, who wished to see how Kane and Jaha would react and whether or not their professed desire for peace was genuine.
- The Disciples are fond of using these on recruits, including Octavia, Echo, Diyoza, and Hope, through a Lotus-Eater Machine:
- In the cabin on Skyring, Anders, the First Disciple, takes an infant Hope to be raised by the Disciples. Diyoza fails because she can't handle this, contrary to the Disciple's collectivism.
- The quartet all go through one where a loved one (Diyoza for Octavia and Hope, and Hope for Echo and Diyoza) gets revenge on the Disciples by burning their oxygen farm. They pass by killing the loved one in time, something everyone but Hope is able to do.
Self-Harm: After A.L.I.E. possesses Raven, she has her host make deep gashes on their arms.
Sent Into Hiding: Because the Ark enforced a strict one-child policy, with violations resulting in execution, Bellamy and his mother kept his illegal little sister Octavia hidden under the floor the entire time she was growing up. When she was found out, she was thrown into lockup, her brother was demoted to janitor, and their mother was Thrown Out the Airlock.
Sequel Escalation: The stakes get higher with every season. While Season 1 focuses on the delinquents dealing with a few Trikru authorities, Season 3 features an interclan war, Season 4 is about the cast trying to survive yet another apocalypse, and the end of Season 7 is about a Sufficiently Advanced Alien race that wants to perform a Judgment Day to determine if humanity will "transcend".
The Series Has Left Reality: The 100, in whose first season it's a revelation that there are survivors of the nuclear war who never left Earth, ends with the introduction of wormholes which mess with one's memories, and aliens who quiz races to determine their character, crystallizing those who fail, and allowing those who pass to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
Sex for Services: Seems to be a common (though illegal) way to trade for favors with what limited resources they have on the Ark.
- Bellamy's mother did this so she knew when to hide Octavia, as well as to secure Bellamy a spot on the Guard.
- Suggested of Raven when she needs a part to complete an illegal space lifeboat.
  Nygel: I owe a favor to the chief of electrical, and he's got a thing for tough, pretty girls like you.
Sex for Solace:
- After being confronted with Clarke and Finn's relationship, Raven sleeps with Bellamy to take her mind off Finn and Clarke being out together. She admits afterward that it didn't work.
- In the beginning of Season 3, Clarke sleeps with Niylah as part of her ongoing efforts to cope with her guilt and despair over the end of Season 2.
Sex Signals Death: Lexa is killed in the scene immediately following her sex scene with Clarke.
Shoot the Hostage: Near the end of the second season, Lincoln is held hostage by a Mountain Men sniper. It's a sign of how far Clarke's gone from her All-Loving Hero beginnings that she simply shoots at the sniper's center mass through Lincoln's shoulder. Lincoln just congratulates her on her good aim and goes to get patched up.
Shoot the Messenger: When a pair of Grounders are sent to Arkadia to inform them of the blockade that encircles the settlement, they explain that the blockade will be lifted if Arkadia turns Pike over to them for punishment for his actions. After Pike refuses, Bellamy shoots both Grounders when they warned him to do what was right for his people.
Shout-Out:
- In the season finale, one of the delinquents shout "Game over, man!"
- Ricky Whittle's character was only known as Grounder until he revealed his name to be Lincoln, which so happened to be the name of the character he played on an episode of NCIS in 2013.
- The HUD of ALIE's drones is almost identical to the various terminators' HUD in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
- In 7x09, after agreeing to help Indra and Murphy on his own terms, Sheidheda says: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", a quote from Casablanca .
- The entire Body Backup Drive story arc about the Primes from Season 5 onwards seems directly inspired by the Altered Carbon novels, only with less Cyberpunk.
Showing Off the New Body: In the sixth season, Josephine Lightbourne, one of the Primes who rule an agricultural compound on Sanctum, uses Clarke as a Body Backup Drive. The first thing she does upon getting her bearings is to admire herself, wearing a flattering dress, in a nearby mirror. She clearly likes what she sees, later comparing Clarke's body to a Ferrari, and grinningly whispering to Clarke, fighting to regain control, "I kinda like your body!"
Shrouded in Myth: A mere three months after the final battle at Mount Weather is all it takes to turn Clarke into a fearsome boogeyman among the Grounder tribes, known as "the Commander of Death".
Shut Up, Hannibal!: In "A Little Sacrifice", an angry Disciple calls Clarke and her friends primal beasts, in thrall to their feelings, who don't deserve the Shepherd's mercy. Coolly, Miller replies, "Brave words from a guy in a dress standing in front of a pack of armed beasts."
Shut Up, Kirk!: In "The Queen's Gambit", Murphy plays chess with Sheidheda. He believes that Sheidheda is misogynistic, possibly because he was given up to the Fleimkepas by his mom, and because Lexa was a better Commander, uniting the Grounder clans where he couldn't. "I united the clans!" Sheidheda angrily replies.
Signs of Disrepair:
- Polis got its name from the damaged lettering on the side of Becca's escape pod, which originally spelled out 'Polaris'.
- This is presumably how Tondc got its name as well.
Sins of Our Fathers: Wells catches a lot of flak because people hate his father for enforcing the Ark's draconian laws. It gets him killed in the third episode, when Charlotte murders him because of nightmares about his father and Wells reminding her of him.
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
- The series proper is started with the discovery that the Ark's life support is failing, and a large number of its people need to be removed from the population in order to extend their existing air for long enough to repair the system. The Council believes that the population cannot be told of this information since it would lead to panic and unrest, while some of its members believe that the people deserve to know regardless. The Council's original plan was to have an "accident" to buy themselves the necessary time, but when the population does learn of this news, instead of rioting enough people volunteer to be culled in order to ensure the survival of their loved ones.
- Generally speaking, although the show does have its share of idealistic events, it's mostly relentlessly cynical. Mankind as a whole is consistently portrayed as violent, vindictive, cruel and unable (or unwilling) to learn from past mistakes. The heroes grow progressively darker in their morals as the Crapsack World they live in keeps battering down their ideals. People die in droves, often entirely pointlessly, and any small flame of hope that dares to flicker on occasion is quickly extinguished by more violence, death and suffering. By the end of the final season, the human race is down to less than a thousand specimen that avoid total extinction only by the skin of their teeth, while still deep in the process of wiping each other out.
Soapbox Sadie: Whether or not her causes are just, Callie Cadogan shall lecture you about them to no end. In "Anaconda", she calls her dad, to his face, a vulture capitalist, indirectly tells her brother that MIT and her dad's cult are fascistic regimes, criticizes her dad for protecting a sacred few while eleven billion people suffer because of the nuclear war, and reams out her dad for taking the Anomaly Stone, which she considers a cultural artifact, inside the cult's bunker.
So Proud of You: When Indra said that Octavia had become part of the Trikru, Octavia's eyes glowed with the first acceptance she had ever known in her life.
Soundtrack Dissonance:
- The Teaser to "Nakara", which sees Diyoza stab herself in the neck, kill several Disciples, be crucified, and free herself by chowing down on her captor's neck, is set to "Evil", a peppy song by Interpol about a girl named Rosemary.
- A heavy scene in the Grand Finale—Emori realizes that she's been uploaded into Murphy's mind drive, begging Jackson to remove it before he dies—is backed by "We're Going Home", a typically cheery song by Vance Joy.
Speculative Fiction LGBT: It's mentioned that the Grounders don't particularly care about sexuality in a world that has become so focused on survival, allowing this trope. Among others, there's Clarke (bisexual), Lexa (lesbian), and Miller (gay).
Spiteful Spit: When Clarke and Lexa come face-to-face for the first time in the third season, Clarke spits at Lexa and has to be dragged out of the room ranting threats. Lexa is visibly hurt, as she had hoped for a better reunion.
Sting: The tension of most dramatic revelations in the series are underscored by the Inception-style BWAAAAA horn.
Suddenly Bilingual: In "Anaconda", Clarke and Niylah discuss Bill Cadogan in Trig, with Clarke calling Second Dawn a cult. "We weren't a cult," he replies in English, revealing, to their further surprise, that he's fluent in an older, slower form of the language.
Super Breeding Program: The original plan that Mount Weather had for the 49 kids were to insert them into the gene pool.
- Josephine devised a eugenics program to ensure the continued birth of Nightbloods in Sanctum, but treating their people like cattle this way was rejected even by the other Primes.
Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
- Lexa to Anya. She is introduced after Anya's death and takes her place as the Grounder leader that Clarke and the others are trying to reason with. They are also both stoics who are capable of wiping out Skaikru if they are seen as a threat. Justified, as Anya was mentioned to be the one who trained and mentored Lexa.
- Subverted with Luna who is introduced after Lexa's death. Although she and Lexa are both stoic female leaders who care greatly about their people and have a soft spot for children, Luna's pacifism makes her completely different from Lexa who was capable of great violence when it comes down to it. Also seen in their deaths. Lexa died trying to bring about peace between the Grounders and the Arkadians, while Luna died a Straw Nihilist trying to end humanity's last chance of survival.

T-Z

Take a Third Option: Given the deciding vote on whether to "cull" 300 innocent citizens to buy time to save the Ark, Chancellor Jaha chooses to abstain so the resulting tie will force a revote in ten days, giving Abby until then to prove the Earth is habitable or they will have to kill them.
Take Back Your Gift: Raven returns the pendant Finn made for her when she finds out that he is in love with Clarke.
Take Care of the Kids:
- Abby asks her friend Callie to watch over Clarke for her when she thinks she's about to be executed.
- Diyoza's last words before she's crystallized by GEM9 are a frantic request to get her daughter to safety.
Taking the Heat:
- Wells is revealed to have been doing this for Abby, when he takes the blame for being the one who turned in Clarke's father which led to him getting floated to spare Clarke the pain of knowing it was her own mother who did it.
- Finn took the blame for Raven's illegal spacewalk, because he (as a juvenile) would only be imprisoned while Raven (as an adult) would have been floated.
Talking in Your Dreams: Lexa believes that the previous Commanders speak to her in her dreams. It turns out they really were talking to her through the A.L.I.E 2.0 chip/The Flame.
Teens Are Monsters: Too much freedom leads to the kids going a little wild. Then they found themselves against the Grounders.
Teenage Wasteland: And how! The 100 consist of a hundred teenage juvenile offenders sent down to Earth's surface with absolutely no adult supervision. There was supposed to be a guard, but he was replaced by Bellamy, who is only a few years older. It takes them less than ten minutes to start taking off the wristbands that are monitoring their vital signs and less than a day to declare that their new motto is "Whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want." This doesn't last all that long, though — they are forced to get more organized and disciplined as the harsh realities of survival make themselves known.
Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
- In the early episodes, any collaboration with Clarke and Bellamy. They outright disliked each other then, but were willing to put the rest of the 100 above that. Later, it grows into genuine teamwork.
- The alliance between the Grounders and the survivors of the Ark. There's rampant mistrust on both sides, but both want to take down the Mountain Men.
- A constant component of any pairing when someone has to work with Murphy.
- Octavia and Diyoza when they hunt for Gabriel, after spending the last season leading their peoples to war. Though, after the events of Season 5, anyone working with Octavia does so with teeth clenched, and her partnership with Diyoza is actually pretty friendly compared to the others.
That Sounds Familiar: Nearly a century after the nuclear war, language on Earth has become quite different:
- Before the nuclear war, Callie Cadogan was involved with Tree Crew, a group of environmental activists with militant methods. She gave the name to her group of survivors, and over time, it was corrupted into Trikru.
- Lincoln's village was built around the Lincoln memorial, and bears the name Tondisi, after the remains of a location sign for Washington, D.C.
- Lexa was named after Alexandria, VA which is located on the other side of the Potomac River from D.C.
- Costia, Lexa's former lover, is derived from Anacostia, either the neighborhood in Washington D.C. or the river.
- Other Trikru members include Tomac (after the Potomac River), Delano (after the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington), and Penn (after Pennsylvania Avenue).
- Troy, capital of Azgeda, is a diminutive of Detroit.
- Queen Nia of the Ice Nation is named after Niagara Falls which is in the Ice Nation's territory.
- Ontari is short for Ontario.
- Supervising producer and writer Aaron Ginsburg named Emori and Otan after the DC War Memorial and the DC Botanical Gardens respectively.
Theme Naming: Some of the teenagers are named after famous science fiction writers:
- Clarke: Arthur C. Clarke.
- Wells: H. G. Wells.
- Octavia: Octavia Butler.
- Bellamy: Edward Bellamy.
- Miller: Walter M. Miller.
There Are No Therapists: Thus, nobody's around to help the cast with their increasing PTSD.
- Jasper suffers from PTSD caused by a near-death experience and is unable to get help due to the only medical professional having no knowledge of treating mental illnesses. He then spirals into depression following Maya's death at Mount Weather which eventually culminates in him committing suicide rather than try to survive Praimfaya.
- Finn suffers from PTSD as well, and without being able to get help he subsequently gets sentenced to death for his crimes relating to his mental illness.
- Bellamy is implied to have kept the trauma he underwent in Mount Weather mostly to himself in the Time Skip between Seasons 2 and 3. This coupled with several Skaikru deaths in Mount Weather, including that of his girlfriend Gina, and Clarke's perceived betrayal by allying with Lexa, causes him to support Pike, which, in turn leads to a huge My God, What Have I Done? moment. By Season 4, he doesn't think that he deserves to be one of the people who deserves to be in the ship when the radiation comes and has a desperate desire to redeem himself before the end comes.
- Lincoln's death triggers a Roaring Rampage of Revenge from Octavia, who claims that she died when Lincoln did. In her grief, she nearly walks into the black rain, and takes what remains of humanity to some very dark places. Only after entering the Anomaly on Sanctum, and undergoing a Mushroom Samba with Gabriel, is she able to heal.
- Clarke is haunted by the increasingly horrifying things she does to protect her people, and she goes a bit nuts when this tendency comes into conflict with her newfound Mama Bear instincts for Madi. By Season 6, she's nearly convinced that everyone would be better off without her, and is nearly Driven to Suicide on three separate occasions.
- Subverted in Season 7, in which Jackson (normally a medical doctor) starts acting as a therapist for Madi.
These Hands Have Killed: The seventh season sees Raven, normally a more upstanding member of the cast, dirty her hands by allowing four Eligius prisoners to die of radiation poisoning while fixing a reactor which is going critical, then shooting dead eight Disciples who are about to kill Clarke, Miller, Niylah, and Jordan. Travelling to another planet, she and Clarke are trapped inside the belly of a beast. She breaks down and collapses into Clarke's arms, asking how she copes so well with doing awful things.
Third Line, Some Waiting:
- The back half of Season 2 alternates between the Mount Weather crew and the rest of the Sky People trying to find a way to save them, but adds Jaha and Murphy's quest for the City of Light to the mix. It's geographically removed (as it's them trekking across unfamiliar terrain) and has little in common with the other two plots...until the Season 2 stinger.
- Season 3 begins with Clarke trying to negotiate peace in Polis; Bellamy, Kane, Abby at Arkadia dealing with Pike's politicking, and Jaha's own City of Light related plot.
This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: After taking her first steps on Earth's surface, Octavia grins and cries, "We're back, bitches!"
Thousand-Yard Stare: Clarke, a few times in the episode that comes right after killing Finn due to guilt and stress.
Thrown Out the Airlock: "Floating," the preferred form of execution, consists of putting a person into an airlock and ejecting them from the outer door. Abby and Kane are among the characters who die this way.
Time Skip:
- Season 3 starts precisely 84 days after the events of the Season 2 finale.
- Season 4 ends by going forward six years and seven days.
- The end of Season 5 jumps a hundred and twenty-five years, albeit in cryosleep.
- In the seventh season, unique due to the effects of time dilation:
- Octavia and Diyoza spend a decade away from Sanctum, while, on Sanctum, mere seconds have passed. Later, Echo, Gabriel, and Hope are stranded on Skyring for five years, then travel to Bardo, where they while away an additional three months with Octavia and Diyoza.
- Bellamy and a Disciple spend months on Etherea, attempting to reach the Anomaly stone at the summit of a mountain.
Title by Number: Though they are also referred to as "The 100" in-story.
Title Drop: 'The 100' is mentioned on a regular basis. Some of the episode titles too, e.g. 'We Are Grounders' being part of Bellamy's speech in said episode.
Title-Only Opening: In the first season. From the second season on, there's a Title Sequence.
Too Dumb to Live: Let's just say it's easy to see why Jaha considers most of the Hundred expendable. Frequently Clarke or Wells pointing out what they need to do merits nothing but contempt from the rest of the Hundred.
Torture Always Works: Averted twice, the series seems to stick with the real-life conclusion that torture is an ineffective means of information extraction.
- Lincoln did not reveal the poison antidote when the 100 were torturing him, it was only when Octavia poisoned herself that he gave the information to save her life.
- Finn tortures a Grounder for Clarke's whereabouts, and the Grounder gives them a trail leading to a Grounder village. He had had absolutely no knowledge of Clarke at all, and had sent them to the village because he had a personal grudge against its inhabitants and hoped Finn would serve as his revenge.
Total Eclipse of the Plot: When the twin suns of Sanctum eclipse each other, a toxin is released into the air, causing those who inhale it to go mad with hatred, and see dangerous hallucinations. Clarke, Bellamy, Murphy, Miller, Emori, Echo, and Shaw have the wonderful luck of landing just before one eclipse. It lasts for almost all of "Red Sun Rising"—long enough for Clarke to nearly be Driven to Suicide by a hallucination of her mom, and Bellamy to get into a violent fight with Murphy, leaving Murphy in need of resuscitation.
Trash the Set:
- The Season 1 finale sees both regular sets utterly destroyed: The Ark is brought down, and the Hundred's camp is thoroughly incinerated.
- Mount Weather gets blown up early in Season 3.
- By the end of Season 4, both Arkadia and Polis are destroyed by Praimfaya. The rest of the world is presumed to be in a similar state.
Tragic Monster: The cannibalistic and savage Reapers turn out to be a whole tribe of these. Season 2 reveals that they are former Grounder captives, who due to being physically fit were turned into Warrior\Slaves by Mount Weather experiments to be used as both weapons, hunters and gatherers against their will.
Trial by Combat: At the start of Season 3, Lexa's position as Grounder Commander is tenuous due to her perceived weakness. Nia, Queen of the Ice Nation, challenges her authority, naming her son Roan as her champion. Lexa also has the legal right to a champion, but since the underlying point is that her strength is in question she chooses to face the challenge herself. She wins.
Trippy Finale Syndrome: The final season builds towards The Last War, a conflict which, if won by humanity, will result in them Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence. The Grand Finale, of the same name, reveals that this is a quiz given by an alien judge. Inside their courtroom, a Pocket Dimension with a starry sky, and which changes appearance to suit the test-taker, the judge asks questions to determine whether the species is worthy of ascension. Humanity nearly fails even before Bill Cadogan answers his first question, when Clarke, angry that the test was triggered by mind probing Madi until she had a stroke, enters the courtroom, and shoots him dead.
Troubled, but Cute: Just about every teenage male shown-it comes with the territory of being a juvenile offender in a dystopian future.
Turn to Religion: A journey up a mountain undertaken by Bellamy and a Disciple grows dangerous when they're caught in a drawn-out blizzard. They spend months in a cave, eating lichen to survive, and debating the religion of the Disciples. Bellamy is obstinate, calling it a cult, until he has a vision where he's taken by Bill Cadogan to his long-deceased mom, and sees the remnants of the transcended cave residents. When he wakes, he's a changed man, saving the Disciple from a Disney Villain Death by reciting his scripture, and, upon their return to the Disciples' facility, betraying his friends for Cadogan.
Two Lines, No Waiting: The first season alternates between the 100 trying to survive on the ground and the adults on the Ark trying to survive in space.
Tyrant Takes the Helm:
- Marcus Kane starts the series as next in line for the position of Chancellor on the Ark, and when it looks as though he will succeed Jaha Abby fears he would be disastrous for the people. However, despite several near-deaths on Jaha's part, Kane never succeeds him during the first season. By the time Kane does become Chancellor in Season 2 he has undergone enough character development where he is no longer even a potential Tyrant.
- Charles Pike came down to Earth from Farm Station, which landed away from the location of Camp Jaha and never took part in the Ark/Grounder truce of the second season. He has a fanatical hatred of Grounders and believes that coexistence is impossible, and is nominated for Chancellor after trying to carry out a preemptive strike on a Grounder army that Lexa had sent to protect Arkadia. He wins the election and is appointed Chancellor, and immediately orders the launch of a preemptive strike.
Underground City: The Mountain Men live in a military base underneath a mountain converted to something of this sort.
Unkempt Beauty: Pretty much everyone on the show since they're mainly in survival mode.
Unstoppable Rage: Being handed her mom's possessions by Russell, responsible for her death, is more than enough to send Clarke into one. Where she'd previously been cordial with him, she now roars, and begins assaulting him. By the time she's through, he's dead, having been knocked unconscious, then replaced by Sheidheda, and the Primes' castle is on its way to being gutted.
Violently Protective Girlfriend: Lexa towards Clarke when anybody threatens her or tries to take her away from her.
Villain Has a Point: In Season 3, Clarke and Bellamy are arguing about the oncoming war between Arkadia and the Grounders. During the argument, Bellamy points out the moral and practical errors that Clarke had made which lead them to that point. Instead of countering the argument, Clarke can only apologize in tears, because she has also made mistakes.
Weakened by the Light: The outside world in general but especially sunlight is a death sentence for the Mountain Men since they've lost their ability to metabolize radiation after a hundred years of living underground.
We Hardly Knew Ye: While he's a major presence in the books, Wells is fatally stabbed in just the third episode. It's a stark reminder that Anyone Can Die.
We Have Ways of Making You Talk: Said by Bellamy when they needed the antidote from the Grounder. The only one he gives it up to is Octavia, when she takes the poison herself.
Wham Episode:
- "We Are Grounders": The Ark falls to the Earth, uniting the political plotlines of the adults with the survival story of the 100, and the Mountain Men are introduced to the story as a new adversary even more dangerous than the Grounders.
- "Spacewalker": Finn surrenders to Grounder justice, and the rest of the Ark survivors allow his execution in order to solidify peace between themselves and the Grounders. Clarke herself performs a Mercy Kill to spare him a drawn-out death by torture, and allows it in order to unite the two people against the looming threat of Mount Weather.
- "Blood Must Have Blood": The Grounders betray the Sky People in the conflict with Mount Weather, ultimately forcing Clarke and Bellamy to irradiate Mount Weather and kill off its population. Jaha and Murphy discover the City of Light, only to stumble upon the AI that ended the world the first time.
- "Thirteen": Murphy realizes that the city of Polis was founded by members of the thirteenth space station, Polaris, and the audience is shown the events via flashback. Lexa is accidentally fatally shot by Titus as he tried to kill Clarke, and it is revealed that the Spirit of the Commander which the Grounders have spoken of is actually an AI which is transferred from one Commander to the next and was programmed to help rebuild the world after the nuclear war.
- "Perverse Instantiation, Part 2": It is revealed by ALIE that the nuclear plants are going to melt down in 6 months and kill all life on Earth-even the people who are immune to radiation. She saw putting people in the City of Light as a way of trying to save humanity. Also, Octavia kills Pike.
- "Die All, Die Merrily": Octavia manages to win the 13-clan Conclave against incredible odds (including the deaths of Roan and Luna), and gives a stirring speech proclaiming unity in which all clans will be allowed equal shares of people in the bunker underneath the tower in Polis, only for a last-minute reveal to show that Clarke and Jaha decided to pre-emptively seize the bunker for the Arkers/Skaikru only.
- "Praimfaya": Clarke and a Nightblood child named Madi are seemingly the only humans left on Earth. Then a ship from a penal colony in the asteroid belt lands on Earth...
- "How We Get To Peace": Clarke and Bellamy murder Kara Cooper to sabotage Octavia's war plans, but Octavia had kept her real plans a secret and they were unaffected by the act. Octavia arrests Clarke and intends to have her executed, so Bellamy drugs her, possibly fatally, while muffling her cries for help. He repeats his mantra of, "My sister, my responsibility," with the new meaning of protecting everyone else from Octavia, and his actions likely irreversibly sever the Blake sibling's relationship.
- "Damocles, Part 2". McCreary launches the Damocles, destroying Earth. The surviving characters are launched into space and put into cryosleep. Clarke and Bellamy are awakened 125 years later, with Monty's video logs explaining that he and Harper didn't go into cryo, and instead lived the rest of their lives on the ship. And the kicker? Monty reveals Eligius's other objective: finding a new habitable planet. They succeeded, and the ship's already at said planet.
- "The Face Behind the Glass". Clarke is given a Death of Personality, her mind erased so that one of the Primes can take over her body.
What Happened to the Mouse?: The first season featured quite a number of mutants, both human and animal alike. A two headed deer featured prominently in promotional material. By Season 3, they virtually never appear in any capacity, aside from Emori.
What the Hell, Hero?:
- Bellamy calls Clarke out for not keeping her mouth shut about the knowledge of Wells' killer, as this ultimately led to Charlotte's suicide.
- When Clarke meets with the leader of the Grounders to try and arrange a peace treaty, the Grounder rightly points out that some of the 100's actions could be construed as acts of war (such as capturing and torturing Lincoln). We also learn that the flares used to signal the Ark burned down a Grounder encampment.
- Clarke and Bellamy deliver a joint one to Abigail for abandoning Finn and Murphy after they went out to rescue Clarke and killing off Anya, the only Grounder willing to work for peace between the two sides.
- Clarke to Finn after he, usually the pacifist of the group, snaps and slaughters a large number of innocent villagers. Everyone else is clearly thinking it as well, but don't come out and say anything.
- Raven to Clarke after Finn is mercy-killed. This is mostly due to Raven's grief, as she later realises there was no other way.
When Trees Attack: The trees of Sanctum, the setting of the sixth season, are sentient, in possession of prehensile vines, and hate it when people spend time nearby, using their vines as Tentacle Rope to crush the trespassers to death. This is weaponized by Josephine in a process called oblation; regular, red-blooded children are left with the trees, ensuring that only Nightbloods will survive.
Wish Upon a Shooting Star: Mentioned in "Twilight's Last Gleaming" when the youths on Earth send out signal flares to let the Ark know they're alive.
Clarke: Can you wish on this kind of shooting star?
Bellamy: I wouldn't even know what to wish for.
World of Snark: With a good chunk of the characters being teenagers, this is pretty much a given.
Worst Aid: The show flip-flops on this. There are episodes where attention is drawn to the correct treatment of various injuries (e.g. leaving a knife in the wound until proper care is available) since Abigail is The Medic and Clarke studied under her. In other episodes, they happily transfuse blood of unknown donors and recipients, push arrows through wounds and so on.
Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
- Emori and her brother run this on Jaha's group as they trek through the Dead Zone to the City of Light. Pretending to have been robbed, and exploiting her similarities with Murphy, she leads them into an ambush, with them knocked out and robbed of their supplies.
- In "Ashes to Ashes", Madi, influenced by Sheidheda, is restrained so that her bone marrow can be harvested. She gets Jackson to remove her restraints by claiming that she can't feel her hand. Once she's free, she stabs him in the shoulder, and would've gone further if he didn't think to sedate her.
Year Inside, Hour Outside: Save for Skyring, every planet colonized by the Eligius Corporation is close to black holes, meaning that time passes differently. Three months on Skyring, or even ten years, are mere seconds on Sanctum, while days, at most, on Sanctum translate to centuries on Skyring. This leads to some interesting effects, like Hope, from Octavia and Diyoza's perspective, aging a decade in the blink of an eye.

The 100

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Make It A Kill Shot

Series / The 100 7 Following

WHERE TO WATCH

Tropes present in this series:

Video Example(s):

Make It A Kill Shot

Previous

Index

Next

Make It A Kill Shot

The 100

7 Following