For those who want clean resolutions and clear heroes, look elsewhere. For those who want a show that will make you yell at the screen, question your own morality, and fall in love with deeply flawed characters, The 100 is essential viewing. As the show’s mantra goes: In peace, may you leave the shore. In love, may you find the next.
8/10 (Seasons 1-4: 9/10; Seasons 5-7: 7/10) Serie The 100
By the end of Season 2, The 100 established its core thesis: survival is a zero-sum game. In one of the most shocking sequences in modern TV history, Clarke is forced to pull a lever that irradiates Level 5 of Mount Weather, killing every man, woman, and child inside—including innocent allies—to save her people. There is no triumphant music. There is only Clarke, covered in blood, screaming "I bear it so they don't have to." The show’s greatest strength is its refusal to provide clean heroes. Every character, from the noble Kane (Henry Ian Cusick) to the fierce Octavia Blake (Marie Avgeropoulos), commits atrocities in the name of "my people." The show coins its own philosophy: "There are no good guys." For those who want clean resolutions and clear
However, Seasons 5-7 take a sharp turn. After Earth finally becomes truly uninhabitable, the show goes interstellar. We are introduced to the Eligius Corporation, cryo-sleep, a desert planet, and eventually, a mysterious anomaly that leads to a "transcendence" test. Season 7 is divisive. Some fans praise its ambition and its massive lore expansion (including a prequel backdoor pilot). Others felt it lost the intimate, survivalist horror of the early seasons, trading spear-and-sword combat for mind drives, memory wiping, and a human extinction plot. In love, may you find the next
The series finale, "The Last War," remains controversial. In it, a race of higher beings judges humanity. The final solution? The human race chooses to "transcend" into a collective consciousness, losing their physical bodies and individual identity. Only a handful of characters (Clarke and her closest friends) are denied transcendence and are left alone on a sanitized, empty Earth to live out their mortal lives. Despite its divisive ending, The 100 carved out a unique legacy. In a genre filled with heroes who always find a third option, The 100 ’s protagonists rarely do. They are constantly forced into trolley problems where pulling the lever kills one group to save another. It is a show about the unbearable weight of leadership, the cyclical nature of violence, and whether "doing what you have to do to survive" eventually turns you into the very evil you were fighting.