The 100: Why Raven’s Ending Is Fitting (& Why It Makes No Sense)

Raven is unique amongst the characters from the Ark in The 100. She doesn’t appear in the novels that inspire the show and she doesn’t appear in the first episode of the series as one of the teens sent to Earth. Still, Raven becomes a hugely important character as the show progresses. Without her expertise in spacecraft, the main characters never would have survived.

It’s likely a relief for many fans that, after everything that happened to her over the course of the show, she survives every apocalyptic event thrown her way. Her ending, however, might not have satisfied every fan as there are a few things that don’t seem to make sense about the conclusion of her story.

10 Fitting: Raven Chooses Not To Transcend

Raven already has her own experience with something like transcendence. She knows what it’s like for her mind to be connected to someone else’s and for there to be no pain. It’s not an experience she would want to repeat.

After all, as she points out to Jasper, “There’s nothing like a little pain to remind you you’re alive.” Raven wouldn’t choose to be part of a pain-free collective, and opting to live out her days on Earth allows her to live her life on her own terms.

9 Nonsense: She Accepts Transcendence For Everyone Else

What’s interesting, and a little nonsensical is that Raven is perfectly fine with everyone else transcending. It doesn’t occur to her how similar the situation is to becoming part of the City Of Light, which she and her friends fought so hard against.

After her own experiences, she doesn’t question all of humanity getting to transcend as some sort of reward for their final act of peace.

8 Fitting: She Argues With The New Beings For Humanity

Raven is a big proponent of humanity being better, of finding ways that don’t involve hurting people to survive. She grows from her experience of having to kill Grounders in the first season and despises it when her friends make decisions that involve killing people.

That’s why it makes perfect sense for her to be the one to argue that humanity deserves another chance at life. Raven, after all, got a second chance. So did Octavia – and almost all of their friends. Despite all of the bad things they’ve done, they all found another way to survive, and they wanted to be good. She would believe that the rest of humanity wanted that too.

7 Nonsense: Raven Doesn’t Really Interact With The Whole Group

Though there is a large group of characters that decide not to transcend. They are, as they reiterate throughout the season, a family. It’s interesting that the statement is made, however, since Raven spends so much of the final season not even interacting with them.

Most of Raven’s time in the final season is spent with three characters: Murphy, Emori, and Clarke. It’s clear that these are the people she’s closest to. Outside of the opening picnic scene and the final moment on the beach on Earth, however, Raven doesn’t get to spend much time with any other characters.

6 Fitting: She Fixes Clarke’s Mistake

Raven spends a lot of her time in the series cleaning up after her friends or finding solutions to their impossible problems. Clarke and Bellamy need a way to slow the Grounders down in the first season? Raven blows up a bridge. A few of her friends need a way off the planet to survive Praimfaya? Raven repairs a rocket.

It’s only right that Clarke fails humanity’s final test and Raven refuses to accept that. She takes it upon herself to fix the mistakes Clarke made as best she can, allowing the new alien species they meet to see the good in humanity too.

5 Nonsense: Raven Is A Tech Geek In A World With No Technology

When Raven and her friends return to Earth, it’s without any of the technology they had access to before. The structures they built before are relics of the past, their ships are on another planet, and there is no way to return to Bardo or Sanctum with suits and stones destroyed.

Raven has always loved science and technology. She looks at the broken pieces around her and finds ways to improve them. She is the real spacewalker of the series. It’s hard to imagine her living out the rest of her life in a place where none of the technology she loves exists anymore.

4 Fitting: She Travels To Multiple Planets

Raven has always loved space. That’s very clear from the moment the audience meets her. She’s as much an adventurer as she is a scientist. In the final season, she certainly gets her fill with adventure.

It’s Raven who figures out how to use the helmets from Bardo so that the group can travel from planet to planet. Her experiences on all of those planets might not be the best, but Raven gets the chance to explore with an unconventional travel system.

3 Nonsense: She Ends Up With No Romantic Partner

Other than Clarke, Raven might be the most unlucky in love person on the show. She comes to Earth partly because Finn, who is on Earth because of her, is there. After his death, it takes her a long time to move on. When she does, it’s with someone who drives her crazy and it doesn’t last.

Her final relationship in the series is with Shaw, who dies trying to get Raven and her friends to Sanctum. His death devastates Raven, and it drives a wedge between her and Clarke for a while. In the finale, the only romantic pairing that remains intact and together is Murphy and Emori, which seems unfair to so many characters who fell in love over the course of the series, not just Raven.

2 Fitting: Raven Does Spend The Rest Of Her Life With Family

As Raven points out early in the series, she doesn’t have much family. In fact, she thinks of Finn as her family since her mother was more interested in alcohol than her daughter. Raven eventually comes to think of the new friends she spends so much time with on Earth – and in the sky – as her family.

Raven doesn’t simply choose not to transcend because of her own experiences. She makes the choice because she wants to remain on Earth with Clarke and her friends. She and Clarke reference thinking of one another as sisters in the final season, just as Echo, Murphy, Emori, and Raven call one another family because of their experiences in space. She gets to stay with the family she’s made.

1 Nonsense: Raven Ends Up On Earth

Raven coming to Earth helps change the course of the show. While she is excited to see Earth when she first arrives – the air, the green, and the fresh water – it’s not exactly home to her. Raven is most at home amongst the stars. Earth as her final resting place doesn’t seem to fit her character.

Raven would have been more at home exploring in one of the ships left behind at Sanctum or something like that. Being landlocked, literally, seems unfortunate for her.

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