The end of this season of The 100 is bittersweet in a whole new way.
On Sunday, it was announced that season seven of the CW sci-fi show will be its last, and so tonight's episode will be the last regular season finale, and the last time we'll get to the end with a hundred questions instead of answers. And trust us: after tonight's episode (of which you can see a sneak peek above), you will indeed have a hundred questions.
Not only have we seen it, but showrunner and executive producer Jason Rothenberg promised just as much.
"I would say that you can't be prepared fully," he told us, reminding us that we last left Clarke "performing at essentially the deepest, most insane undercover mission of all time," trying to prevent Russell from finding out that his daughter is actually dead.
"She's having to be Josephine as her [dead] mother is literally put in front of her—Simone is wearing her mother's body. So emotionally it's a high-wire act for sure, and it call came down to this, as it always does. There's chaos in Sanctum, our heroes aren't safe there, and they're trying to do better."
And if you're wondering if you should expect a big turn in the vein of last year's 125 year time jump, the answer is yes.
"Oh my god, yes. As always the season ends on a major sort of reversal or set up for what the next big story is, and I think this one is as big or bigger than anything we've done before in terms of turning it on its head," he says.
The next big story will take us to the end of the entire series, one which Rothenberg says he's been trying to write for a while now.
"I've been trying to get them to let me end the show so I could write the proper story in the proper time for a while," he says. "But when they finally said OK, we're going to put creative above business considerations—which I think should really be applauded because it's a rare decision in this day and age--and I finally got it, and I was like, oh s--t, do I really want it? But I do."
Rothenberg's hesitation was because of the people he knows he's going to miss.
"This is my family and these characters are my family too, and these actors are my family and these writers are my family. The writers I'll hopefully get to keep working with on something new, but the actors, we're going to have our last ride together, so we have to make it a good one."
He confirms they have already started writing towards the end of the show.
"We're breaking [episode] seven as we speak, and we know exactly where we're going," Rothenberg says. "We have from the beginning of the season and somewhere in the middle of last season is sort of when [EP] Kim Shumway and I decided we need to wrap this up, we need to sort of roll the dice that they're going to let us wrap it up, and started telling stories in that direction."
Tonight's finale features a showdown of the various religious beliefs in Sanctum, a theme which has carried through the entire series and now comes to a head.
Hit play above on our exclusive sneak peek, in which Bellamy, Echo, and Octavia are holding down the fort against an angry mob of Sanctum residents...until suddenly the fight appears to come to an end.
The 100 airs tonight at 9 p.m. on The CW.