Liane Hentscher/The CWWe don't think you're ready for this jelly. And by jelly, we mean episode of The 100. Obviously.
A whole lot of questions will be answered in tonight's episode of the CW hit series, leaving a whole bunch of new questions in their path as we finally learn how and why the world ended nearly a hundred years ago, which means a whole bunch of loose ends are about to get tied together in a way you're probably not expecting.
It's an important episode in more ways than one, and pretty much changes the game from here on out. If we could tell you all those changes were for the good of all your favorite characters, we would, but this is The 100, and good changes aren't often found anywhere near this show.
At the end of last week's episode, we learned from Jaha (Isaiah Washington) that there was definitely a 13th station in space prior to the first Unity Day. It was called Polaris, and for some reason, Polaris refused to join with the other stations to create one unified station. As a result, it was destroyed, along with everyone on it.
Cut to that cave back at Polis, where Murphy (Richard Harmon) was being tortured by Titus (Neil Sandilands), right next to a piece of the station. It would have read "Polaris," except the A and the R had been burned off, leaving only the word "Polis" behind.
As it turns out, Polaris and the end of the world are very much connected, and tonight's episode will explain why.
Executive producer Jason Rothenberg could really tease nothing ahead of the "intense" episode, but we did get a few tidbits out of him that might help to tide you over until "Thirteen" finally airs.
"When we started the season, I had these two sort of separate big stories," Rothenberg explains to E! News. "One was everything happening in Polis and the grounder politics and the conflict between the clans and how the Skaikru fit into that, and the other was this AI story, and I really wanted there to be a point at which the two collided."
Those two stories do collide in a big way tonight, thanks in part to some very informative flashbacks that basically explain how we got to this point.
"I love origin stories, and on some level, this is the origin story of the series," Rothenberg tells us. "We see how the world ended, which is what led to the formation of the ark in the flashback story of this episode, which is where our heroes came from, obviously."
The "end of the world" is a huge part of the story, but it's not the only part. Becca (Erica Cerra), who we know to be responsible for creating A.L.I.E., clearly also has some connection to Jaha's current obsession: the City of Light.
We don't quite know what the City of Light is or does exactly, but we do know that once a person ingests the chip—or the key, if you ask Jaha—their pain goes away and they can see and interact with A.L.I.E.
"We're slowly but surely beginning to reveal the way that chip, as we call it, works. We now know that it erases your pain, your bad memories," Rothenberg says. "I've been fascinated with memory and the idea that when something tragic, like the loss of a child happens, it's impossible to have any good memories, because any good memory is immediately attached to the tragedy. So Jaha doesn't remember Wells because in order to take away, to groom out his pain, A.L.I.E. has taken away any memory of Wells, because even the good memories were connected to the bad ones."
And if anyone's got pain, it's every single character on The 100. As Rothenberg (and anyone at all connected to the show) has said many times before, "Nobody is safe." That means anyone could die at any time, and a ton of people have already died. The people they left behind haven't had a lot of time to grieve, so a quick fix sounds like a great idea. Whether it actually is a great idea has yet to be seen.
"That's something we continue to explore going forward as we begin to unpack more and more of what A.L.I.E. can do once you've taken the key and what it means to be in the City of Light. We haven't really told much more of that story yet. That story becomes more and more important now going forward."
Tonight's episode also forces Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) to work through the last of their issues and decide where to go from here, since the Skaikru is currently in a kind of shambles thanks to Pike's (Michael Beach) violent tyranny (and the fact that everyone's high on A.L.I.E.).
Trust us when we say you're going to want to watch this episode live, or you should at least stay off of Twitter. Stay tuned immediately after the episode for more scoop from Rothenberg.
The 100 airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on the CW.