The 100 Season 2 Review: How The CW Drama Outgrew Its Label

The 100 season 2 review: what changed

The 100 season 2 opened on a show that had already won a following but had not yet earned much respect. Season 1 sent a hundred teenage prisoners from the Ark, a space station that sheltered humanity after a nuclear apocalypse, down to a radiated Earth, and cut back to the station as its air ran low. The review called it a guilty pleasure, and said so with affection.

The second season dropped that label. The writers kept the moral pressure that made season 1 work and removed the clutter that held it back. The original review's headline claim was that this was a leap, one of the strongest science fiction series on television at the time, with a pace that treated every episode as an escalation.

Jason Rothenberg developed the series for The CW from Kass Morgan's young adult novels. Season 2 ran 16 episodes, from October 22, 2014, to March 11, 2015, and picks up the fallout of the season 1 finale: the survivors are scattered, the Ark's citizens are on the ground at last, and a new community is waiting under a mountain.

What season 1 got right and wrong

Season 1's best idea was a repeated question: what does a society owe the people it sacrifices to survive? Clarke and Bellamy on the ground, and Jaha on the Ark, made decisions that cost lives for the good of the group. What do you do with someone who breaks the rules of a brand new society? Do the 100 make peace with the Grounders, the people who survived on Earth, or go to war? The Ark was running out of oxygen, so who gets to live?

The show asked those questions well. Its mistake was the love triangle between Clarke, Finn and Raven, which the review found upsetting because it reduced two commanding characters to a teenage quarrel. Season 2 mostly leaves that behind, and the review credited the writers with learning the lesson. It also pointed out that Clarke and Raven, two of the strongest characters on the show, deserved better than a rivalry over a boy, and that the second season treats them as the leads they are.

Clarke at Mount Weather

The season opens with the main cast split. Clarke and others are taken by the Mountain Men to Mount Weather, Octavia is carried away by Lincoln, and the fates of Bellamy and Finn after Jasper's blast remain uncertain. The Ark's citizens, minus Jaha, have landed.

Inside the mountain, the survivors find a bright, comfortable community that the review compared to Woodbury in The Walking Dead, and Clarke finds it too good to be true. The review praised Eliza Taylor for playing her as a hard, protective leader and compared her to Rick Grimes. As the season goes on, the show reveals what Mount Weather's comfort costs: its residents need outside people's blood to survive, and the leadership is willing to harvest it. Cage Wallace, the son of the mountain's president, pushes bone marrow experiments on the captives and later takes control of the mountain.

The setting was a visual treat as well. The review likened the facility to the vaults in Bethesda's Fallout games and enjoyed the leftover monuments that survived the fallout, with their strange new purposes.

A cast that carries the story

The review argued that the show's strength was its women. Clarke, Raven, Octavia, Abigail and the Grounder women drive the plot and are never damsels in distress. Season 2 also introduces Lexa, who is revealed as the Grounders' Commander and forms a tense alliance with Clarke that develops into something more.

The men were less central. Henry Ian Cusick as Kane and Isaiah Washington as Jaha brought strong performances, but the review felt the other male characters moved more slowly. Devon Bostick's Jasper, with his new crush, got a favorable mention for charm.

Pace, mystery and the first three hours

The review was based on the first three episodes, which The CW sent to critics ahead of broadcast: "The 48," "Inclement Weather" and "Reapercussions," which aired on consecutive Wednesdays from October 22 to November 5, 2014. Three episodes are a small sample, and the review treated them that way, judging the direction of the season and the confidence of the writing, not the full arc.

What stood out was the pace. A show with this many scattered characters can easily feel like a collection of side stories, and season 1 sometimes did. Here, every storyline carried real stakes at once: Clarke's discovery of what the mountain hides, Octavia's recovery with Lincoln, the open question of Bellamy and Finn, and the Ark's survivors finding their feet on the ground.

The Ark storyline gets its share of attention too. Abby, played by Paige Turco, and Kane, played by Henry Ian Cusick, now face the political questions of season 1 on the ground instead of on a station. Jaha, played by Isaiah Washington, is separated from the group at the start of the season, which leaves Kane more room to lead.

Stray observations

The original piece closed with a handful of smaller points. The surviving monuments of the old world, and the purposes they serve now, were a treat that the review hoped to see more of. Jasper's new crush, written for Devon Bostick, was singled out as the most adorable thing in the early episodes.

At the time of the review, the show aired Wednesday nights at 9 PM on The CW, and season 1 was available to stream on Netflix.

The 100 season 2: first three episodes

Source: Wikipedia's article on the second season. The review itself covered these three episodes, which The CW sent for review.

The 100 season 2 verdict and what came next

The review's grade was A-, and the reasoning held up. Strong writing, committed performances and a deeper mystery moved the show from a pleasure to hide to a series to recommend. The writers, in the review's words, managed a near perfect juggling act, driving each storyline forward at breakneck pace.

The ratings did not follow the acclaim. Season 2 averaged 2.46 million U.S. viewers, slightly under season 1's 2.59 million, and viewership declined further in later seasons, reaching 1.30 million in season 6. But the series lasted: it ran for seven seasons and 100 episodes in total, with the finale, "The Last War," airing on September 30, 2020. A prequel was in development from October 2019, and The CW decided not to move forward with it in November 2021.

The season picks up directly from the season 1 finale, so it works best as a continuous watch: the premiere opens in the aftermath of Jasper's blast, with the survivors scattered and the Ark's citizens just arrived. Streaming availability for The 100 differs by country and changes often, so a check on a service tracker is the safest way to find a current home for it.

For anyone deciding where to start, season 2 is the point where the show found its identity. Anyone who bounced off season 1 because of the teenage melodrama can reasonably begin here. The character deaths and betrayals that people remember most from the series, including those around Lexa, Lincoln and Octavia, are traced in the linked pieces below.

Sources

• The 100 season 2, Wikipedia — episode list, air dates, viewer figures and season summary
• The 100 (TV series), Wikipedia — run dates, finale and prequel history