ABOUT T IME

‘The 100’ takes a huge leap forward in busy fifth season

IT’S always risky using a time jump as a plot device — but the new season of The CW’s “The 100” pulls it off.

“We take a lot of chances, and sometimes we hit and sometimes we miss,” says showrunner Jason Rothenberg. “But the fact that it was a risk — a bold choice — was one of the reasons we wanted to do it.” The show’s Season 5 premiere (Tuesday at 9 p.m.) moves the dystopian drama’s plot forward, aging each character by a whopping six years.

“When you do a time jump, it does allow you the freedom to change [characters] in significant ways,” says Rothenberg. “But you also have to be careful to make sure that they still feel like the same people.”

“The 100” is set on a future earth ravaged by nuclear bombs. The first four seasons followed what’s left of humanity as the survivors clashed (often violently) over opposing ideas of how their new society should be constructed. Key characters include Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor), Bellamy Blake (Bob Morley) — who’s the Mulder to her Scully — and Bellamy’s sister Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos).

Thanks to an apocalyptic disaster at the end of Season 4, Season 5 begins with Clarke, Bellamy and Octavia having been separated for six years, with Clarke presumed dead. Rothenberg says Season 5 is filled with emotional reunions.

“Bellamy seeing his sister again was one we knew was going to be highly dramatic, because you open Pandora’s box and [how she spent six years] is a surprise, to say the least,” he says.

“But the biggest [deal] to me was the realization that Clarke was still alive,” he says. “They weren’t just reunions, they were weirdly mind- blowing reversals, too. You don’t think you’re ever going to see this person again, and there she is. Obviously that affects Bellamy probably more strongly than any of them.”

The key to putting characters though six years of offscreen evolution without making them unrecognizable? Distilling their essential qualities, Rothenberg says.

“For Bellamy, he was always a protector; it’s just he’s now a protector who is able to integrate his head and his heart and think before he acts,” he says. “Clarke has always been fiercely protective of her people; now her people is a person [a girl she meets in the interval]. Octavia is still really emotional and protective of her clan.”

Another key to a successful time jump, he says, is periodic flashbacks and “making sure that you’re including enough dialogue that helps people bridge the gap in their minds of what they missed.”

The leap forward means that the formerly teen characters are all now adults. But Rothenberg says that doesn’t impact whether the show can still be considered a teen drama.

“Despite marketing standpoints, it was [never] the way we approached it,” he says. “I have two children, one is about to be 19, one is 9. And I’m going to use a term they would make fun of me for, but theirs is a ‘woke’ generation. They take themselves seriously much more so than previous generations, or at least mine ... it’s certainly something we try to do with these characters, too. We were never writing kids.

“I just looked at them as people.”