I think when people look back now, it is easy to let the disappointment of Season 7 overshadow what came before. But Season 6 was actually one of the show’s strongest and most cohesive arcs, and to me it really shows how badly the final season mishandled its own story.
Season 6 works because it gives the characters, and us as viewers, a genuine second chance. After five seasons of war, betrayal, and survival on a dying Earth, Sanctum feels like a fresh start. The world is visually different, its culture mysterious, and its moral conflicts eerily reflective of the choices the characters had made before. The Primes and their whole system of body-snatching are not just there as flashy sci-fi villains, they tie directly into one of the show’s biggest themes: the cost of survival and what makes a life worth saving. Clarke’s storyline in particular is a standout here. Being overtaken by Josephine is not just suspense for the sake of it, it forces Clarke to wrestle with her identity, her history of sacrifice, and the lives she has taken. Eliza Taylor’s dual performance gave Clarke so much depth and really tied back to her growth, reminding us that she was not the same girl who landed on Earth in Season 1. She was someone trying to carry her past while still fighting to be better. By the end of the season we see her growth by no longer protecting ‘her person’ or ‘her persons’ and instead takes risks and potential sacrifices to save everyone, including the people of sanctum. Something Clarke would not have done before.
What also made Season 6 stand out was how it handled character growth across the board. For once, the group was not locked into the same endless cycle of war. Instead, they were given space to reflect, rebuild, and actually move forward. Raven, Murphy, especially Clarke and Octavia, were forced to face their worst selves and start working toward redemption. The whole tone of the season captured the idea that this new world could be a genuine reset, a chance not to repeat the same mistakes. It did not magically erase their flaws, but it showed them actively struggling to grow, and that made the story feel hopeful even in the middle of all the darkness. Does S6 have its pacing issues, characters underused and other issues? Sure, but it’s definitely not as bad as people make out.
Season 7, on the other hand, collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. Instead of carrying on with the grounded conflicts that made Season 6 so strong, it dumped a flood of new sci-fi concepts on us all at once. The Anomaly, the Stones, Bardo, time travel, transcendence, all crammed into a single season. Any one of those ideas could have worked if they had been given time to breathe, but lumped together they just fractured the story and did not give the audience a chance to care about any of them. Worse, the season split the characters up into so many different factions and plotlines that barely connected, and that completely drained away the intimacy that had always been at the heart of the show, and what S6 had brought us back to.
The biggest sin of Season 7 was how it erased years of character growth for shock factor. Clarke, who had spent Seasons 5 and 6 learning restraint, compassion, and accountability, suddenly kills Bellamy in one of the most baffling and out of character decisions the show ever made. After everything she had gone through to protect him, after proving that she could lead with empathy rather than pure desperation, and the idea that she would shoot her closest friend over a notebook just did not track. The end of S6 already had Madi in a desperate situation - possessed and about to be used for bone marrow abstraction until she died, yet, Clarke still risks Madi’s life to save everyone. To think that she would suddenly kill Bellamy, the one person she loves the most second to Madi, without exhausting all other options just doesn’t add up. That single moment undermined not only her arc, but the emotional backbone of the entire series. And it was not just Clarke, other characters had their hard-won growth tossed aside in favor of rushed plot devices. Whilst I understand, covid and behind the scenes issues are a factor, including Bob Morley’s absence, Bellamys death was definitely a choice, and not one that needed to happen.
The transcendence ending really went against the heart of what The 100 had been building toward. From the very first season, the whole story was about whether humanity could break the cycle of violence, power struggles, and bad choices. Every generation seemed doomed to repeat the same mistakes, and the characters were constantly asking if they could be better than the ones who came before. That theme runs straight through to Season 6, which still gave the sense that even though the characters were flawed, they were slowly learning, changing, and fighting for a chance to do better. Season 7, instead of showing them finally breaking the cycle through their own choices, basically said the only solution was transcendence and to leave humanity behind altogether. It felt like the writers were saying the characters could never grow enough on their own, that after everything, their only option was to stop being human. That completely undercut the point of the show. It was supposed to be about survival, about finding a way to live and rebuild, and proving that people can change. Ending it with transcendence was like admitting the cycle was unbreakable, which made the whole journey feel hollow compared to what the show originally promised, and kinda bleak.
