The CW has just unveiled its fall 2021-22 schedule, and while the slate of programming doesn’t include the highly anticipated prequel series to The 100, network head Mark Pedowitz revealed that the project is still in the works, almost a year after its planted pilot aired as part of the seventh and final season of the original series.
During The CW’s scheduling call earlier today, Pedowitz told reporters that discussions on whether or not the prequel will be picked up to series are still ongoing. “I bet you’re gonna be shocked by this: There are still discussions going on,” he said. “It is not done in any way shape or form, but there are discussions still happening.”
Last January, Deadline reported that The CW and series producer Warner Bros. explored the idea of The 100 prequel running jointly on the network and WarnerMedia-owned streaming service HBO Max. Following the end of The CW’s output deal with Netflix and with all newer The CW series now streaming on HBO Max, that plan is considered a viable possibility.
The potential The 100 prequel, which has a working title of The 100: Second Dawn, is set 97 years before the events of the original series. The 100 season 7, episode 8, titled Anaconda ― which served as the backdoor pilot for the prequel ― showed the immediate lead up to the nuclear Armageddon that rendered the Earth seemingly uninhabitable. It also introduced Cadogan’s (John Pyper-Ferguson) daughter Callie (Iola Evans) and son Reese (Adain Bradley), who have very different opinions about their father. Should the project get picked up to series, creator Jason Rothenberg said that it will be some sort of Cain and Abel story between Callie and Reese.
Unfortunately for fans, there’s a very small chance that any of the original characters from The 100 will appear in the prequel, even if time warp and time travel were previously used as narrative tools in the mothership series.
“I don’t think we’ll see the characters from the original show. I mean, again, I would say never just because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you are lucky enough to run for a while,” Rothenberg told Deadline. “Some of the actors have already tried to make the pitch that their great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers look exactly like them. I doubt that’s going to happen. We’ll see.”
Rothenberg also mentioned that some of his plans for the spinoff include “Lost-style flashback episodes” to pre-apocalypse times, as well as a plotline that will get the new characters up to space at some point.
“I do know that one of the things I want to do is get it back up to space because concurrent with the timeline of the prequel, what’s happening in space is all the space stations, that were separate at the time of the nuclear holocaust, are coming together to form the ark,” Rothenberg told Deadline. “So, up there is where we would meet the great, great, great grandmother and grandfather of all of our heroes, Clarke’s (Eliza Taylor) great grandparents, great-great-grandparents, Bellamy’s (Bob Morley), Octavia’s (Marie Avgeropoulos), obviously, and so we could tell a story that way.”