‘The 100’ Season 7 Episode 1 Review: The Final Season’s Holding Nothing Back

The season premiere of The 100 kicked off with a strong start, promising great things to come for the final season of wildly popular post-apocalyptic TV series.

This is a review of the first episode of Season 7 and will contain major spoilers. 

Bellamy’s Missing

The CW

The episode kicks off with Bellamy calling desperately for Octavia, who had been stabbed by Hope just before disappearing in a cloud of green at the end of the Season 6 finale. He’s defeated and crying, devastated about her disappearance. Little does he know that he’s about to be in a very similar predicament himself.

(Everyone on Twitter who was so upset about Bellamy not being featured in the promo photos was probably super happy to see that he was in the very first scene of the premiere!)

But something invisible grabs him and pulls him away, straight out of a horror movie. Bellamy’s knocked out in the process and there could even be some debate about whether he’s alive or dead. (We later get confirmation that he’s alive.) Echo is the first one to see him being pulled away by the invisible force. She tries to save him, but she’s attacked by something invisible too.

Meanwhile, Gabriel is noticing that the tattoos on Hope’s face match up with the anomaly stone signs. Hope is suffering memory loss from the anomaly cloud, so it’s going to take her a while to clue them in about what’s happening and know who she can trust. Much like her mom (and Octavia), her first instinct is to fight. She later finds a paper embedded in her arm that says: “Trust Bellamy.” Did she leave that message for herself? And why?

So it looks like we learn right away why Bellamy was “missing” from all those promo pictures. He’s gone missing in the show too! An invisible army of some sort kidnapped him and it looks like finding him again is going to be a big plotline. How viewers will handle this, I’m not sure. Some will likely be angry that Bellamy isn’t figuring prominently in the premiere aside from the intro. But others, like me, will be intrigued by what the show might do with his disappearance and how it’s handled in future episodes.

The anomaly travel suits were a great twist that I hadn’t expected. I wasn’t sure what to make of the anomaly stone and the green cloud that somehow aged Diyoza’s daughter Hope in such a short period of time (while Octavia appeared not to age at all.) I like where the show is going with it though. Knowing that it’s possible to navigate the green cloud if you have the right suit, so that you don’t literally lose your mind, is a great touch. The idea that our crew might be able to harness the power of the anomaly storm for their own purposes is quite intriguing. But even more intriguing is knowing there is a group of people out there who have already done just that.

Madi Can Finally Be a Child Again

For the first time in a long time, Madi is able to be a child again. It’s nice to see her having a normal life, with a safe home and a sweet dog. In case you don’t remember, the Flame was removed forcibly from Madi last season after the Dark Commander (Sheidheda) had taken her over. The Flame is supposedly dead, at least according to Gaia’s reactions. I think I’m one of the few viewers who really liked The Flame storyline and the tech involved in making it happen. I’m going to be sorry to see that go. Still, I have to wonder if there’s any way at all to “reincarnate” the Commanders whose souls are still in the Flame. But maybe they’re gone too.

It looks like Madi finding herself again as a person, and not part of the Flame, will be one of the storylines to follow this season.

I also like how Indra is featured prominently from the beginning this season. Looks like I won’t have to write any articles wondering Indra is this time around. 🙂

The CW

Clarke, meanwhile, is still dealing with the death of her mom. As she sometimes does, she tries to push back the pain and move forward. But that pain will catch up with her.

Dark Commander

The CW

The politics of the Primes still figures strong, even with all but one Prime dead. The Children of Gabriel want Russell gone. (And I, for one, can’t really understand why he’s still alive anyway after he killed Abby.) The true believers, meanwhile, will likely turn him into a martyr if he’s killed. (But would that really be so bad compared to the power he could wield while alive?)

And Jordan seems to be trying to play the middle as a peacekeeper somehow, but he’s siding more with the true believers. I wonder how this connects with the blood vision he had last season and how changed he seemed afterward. It’s something pretty mysterious. Russell asks Jordan what he saw in his vision, since Jordan isn’t a “true believer” now.

“You got a glimpse,” Russell says. “Of the truth greater than us all.”

“Yes,” Jordan says. “No… I don’t know.”

“Let me guess. You saw this,” he looks down at a whirling symbol on the floor that looks a lot like the anomaly storm. Russell says he saw the symbol in his vision too. “I created all of Sanctum in its image.” But Russell reveals that he never figured out what the image meant.

In the next scene, we’re shown that the symbol looks a lot like the whirling shape that the anomaly cloud makes.

The Dark Commander storyline had a twist I wasn’t expected — Sheidheda inhabited Russell’s mind drive and took it over. Last season, we saw that while Madi fought with Sheidheda, Raven worked through the code until she was able to transfer Sheidheda out of the Flame drive and onto the ship’s computer. The Dark Commander managed to upload his code somewhere, rather than staying in the little firewall compartment that Raven had him in on the ship. We weren’t told where, but now it appears that he might have jumped from the ship into Russel’s mind drive while Russell was on the ship, and he waited until Russell was knocked out to assert himself and take over.

I’d say that 90% of this episode was phenomenal, with just a bit of “cheese” at the end when Clarke goes full mental on Russell. Don’t get me wrong — it needed to happen and I loved that she did it. But the extra dramatic music during that scene may have been a touch overdone. Still, it was hypnotizing to see Clarke so calm the whole time before she finally gave in to the grief and anger she felt, taking it all out on Russell. She’s capable of great things and she’s capable of terrifying things. Which part will be unleashed next week?

Daily COVID-19 Updates