The 100 Season 6: Jason Rothenberg Previews the New Planet's Inspiration, Potential, and Future
Yana Grebenyuk
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With there just being a week left until the brand new season of The 100, the search is on for any new insight on what the audience can look forward to.
Previewing The 100 Season 6 based on screeners painted one picture of what might happen, and looping Jason Rothenberg into the conversation is a whole other picture to look forward to.
The executive producer and showrunner of The 100 has shared a few details about what could happen during an interview at New York Comic Con, but now that the premiere is so close, consider this the new and improved guide to Season 6.
Taking some time out to talk with us, Jason Rothenberg reflected on the various influences that played a part in creating this upcoming season. He also touched on fan theories from the trailer, and even offered some exclusive fun details about the dog that everyone is waiting to meet on the show.
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How have you enjoyed the reactions to the trailers? Have any fans managed to connect any dots about the season successfully?
Well, here's what I will say, I haven't really been following a lot of fandom reaction to things other than seeing that people are liking what they've seen, for the most part. So I haven't done a deep dive into the audience and fandom reaction.
What I will say though is I pretty much guarantee that nobody has come even within the ballpark of close of what the story of the season is, the two trailers don't even get close to it. Like we have not even revealed the tip of the iceberg yet.
And the trailers are both great; it isn't like they are misleading, but they really did a great job, and you will know what I mean once you have seen episodes four, five, six, and the story is really engaged.
Both of the trailers did a good job of telling what I think is an intriguing story about a group of people encountering a new world, and the threats and mysteries of it, while kind of hiding the bigger holy shit story that we're telling.
How much did you get inspired by "The Sparrow" and "Annihilation"? What parts of their stories were you drawn to while creating Season 6?
Annihilation was just a great story about these powerful scientists that went into a mysterious, weird Shimmer zone, the rules of physics went out the window.
In many cases, these stories with these characters that we have been following for five seasons are going into this unknown world and having to figure out that beyond that there is an area called the Anomaly that we begin to talk more and more about.
You can see a little piece of it in the trailer, the green light storm vortex thing that someone is running out of. That becomes a huge aspect of this world that we unpack going forward, it has some echoes of Annihilation there, although very different.
The Sparrow was a great book, I actually did a movie adaptation of it that never went anywhere, but one of the things that I loved about it was about this exploratory mission to another world, the church funded a mission to this planet because of the music.
The signal that they picked up was like religious music, and so they go with the intention of just observing and getting to know "God's other children" as the author of the book put it.
And they wind up having their own moral frame judging the species that they encounter, and through their judgment changing the planet forever.
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In this story, there are certainly echoes of that, the idea that our heroes are trying to do better and they are not there to be judgy. And they encounter a society that is functioning; they will probably have a difficult time keeping judgment out of it.
Can they resist the urge to change it and in doing so will they fuck it all up? That is something that harkens back to that story. Obviously, it could not be more different, but it is also certainly when I say inspired by that is what I mean.
How much fun was it to world build your own planet? How did you approach the process?
Yes, science rules go out the window. It is so much fun.
One of the things that I love the most is world creation and telling the story of these new realms and these new worlds and what are the mysteries and the challenges and what is beautiful about it and what is dangerous about it. By the way, to me we did the same thing with Earth frankly.
At the time that The 100 started, before I came onto the project even, I was developing an idea of essentially a colonial mission to another planet where we were going to sort of do what we're doing now so in some ways I've come back to the idea I was toying with in the beginning.
And then I got involved with The 100 and I realized right away that it was essentially the same story except the planet was Earth a hundred years after the apocalypse.
As you well know, the Earth of The 100 is very different from the Earth that we live on today.
So it is not that different in terms of world creation.
But you get to play with gas giants at night; and the stars in the sky; and plants that give off toxins that drive people crazy; and weird snakes with multiple eyes that may or may not be poisonous, and lots of other things that you will discover as the season unfolds that weren't really touched on in the first two episodes.
What can you share about some of the new faces that we will meet this season?
Obviously, we haven't met Russell (J.R Bourne). His wife Simone is another fascinating character that we're going to get to know really well.
An actor Chuku Modu who plays a character named Xavier, he becomes a huge huge new addition that almost nobody has clocked yet. Actually was in Game of Thrones for a season, he played a Dothraki. He's great, love him.
There's a bunch of new characters that are really amazing, an actress named Sara Thompson who plays Josephine becomes an interesting asset to the season. I think people will come to enjoy her; I certainly do.
There's a whole lot of stuff coming your way that I think is new and hopefully, people will like. As always, the guest cast is pretty spectacular. They all raise their game to try to reach the level of what our main cast is able to do until they get stolen by other shows.
How did you approach creating Jordan (Shannon Kook), who is a memory of Harper and Monty, but also his own person at the same time?
It is like writing any character in the sense that you just try to find the truth of his experience, and for that particular character what was fascinating for me was that he is a blank slate in every way. He had parents who loved him of course, but he has experienced nothing.
Those are the only two human beings that he ever interacted with, and so he has never met anybody, he has never gone anywhere outside the spaceship, he's never tasted anything other than algae.
And so everything that he experiences with this wide-eyed amazement that is intoxicating, he is impossible not to like as a character.
He is also a bit naive because he has no experience so he may get himself into trouble as a result of that. So I think he is a fascinating character, he definitely has both of his parents in him, and you are 100% correct he is his own person.
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Because both Monty and Harper lived, they lived their lives and experienced everything that you can experience and then chose to live the life that they were living on that ship for those years.
Jordan never made that choice, which is why he ultimately did choose, and his parents had no other choice but to let him go into cryo, so he could one-day experience life. As sad as that was for them ...
Tell us everything about the dog (from the trailer)!
The dog is great; the dog is awesome. His name is Picasso, that is news I think. I can't remember if his name in the show is Picasso or if his real name is Picasso.
It can be both.
Yes, we can say it is both. The dog is a great addition for sure. It helped to say that this new world is good because there's a dog.
Or the dog could make us think that everything is good, but it isn't? Luring us into a fall sense of security since we don't know if we can trust the planet yet.
Yeah, give them a dog and people will like them.
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The 100 Season 6 Episode 1 premieres Tuesday, April 30 at 9/8c on The CW.
The conversation with Jason Rothenberg will continue, with another exclusive portion of the interview coming out after The 100 Season 6 Episode 2 airs, right here at TV Fanatic.
Stick around TV Fanatic for more features, slideshows, episode previews, and reviews of the upcoming season, and watch The 100 online if you need to catch up on the adventure.
Yana Grebenyuk was a staff writer for TV Fanatic. She retired in April 2021.
