Did The 100 Season 6, Episode 2 subtly reveal who killed an off-screen character?

Dating back to the second season, there has been an off-screen character death that has hovered over a certain sector of The 100. Now we may know who killed them, but to what end?

This sixth season of The 100 is shaping up to be a wild one. In Episode 2, “Red Sun Rising,” after Clarke, Bellamy, Murphy, Emori, Jackson, Miller, and Echo arrive down to the new planet that they refer to as Alpha, they quickly learn that something is very wrong with the planet (which is actually a moon). Via a children’s storybook turned warning guide, they discover that toxins on the ground can have an adverse reaction to people’s minds.

The underlying idea is that it plays on some of your greatest fears or impulses. Some go on a murderous rampage, such as Emori stabbing Murphy or Bellamy also going after Murphy (that man deserves a cookie or something after this). Others, like Clarke, hear voices in their heads that play on their self-hatred and fears. This is the camp that Echo resides in and that’s where things get interesting.

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Similarly to Clarke, we hear the voices that play in Echo’s mind, one of which sounds suspiciously like Nia, the former queen of Azgeda whom Lexa killed back in Season 3. A lot is said to Echo, in what many are assuming are recalled voices from her past that now are haunting her, but the thing that sticks out is one line: “Cut her throat and bring me her head.”

Now, there’s one of two ways to take this. Given that this scene is taking place where she is locked in a room with Emori, the voice could commanding Echo to behead Emori. That’s entirely possible, however, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that this truly is a memory.

The only reason you include that line in there, from a writing perspective, is if that supposed beheading means something to the other characters and the audience, and isn’t simply a random grounder that lost their head. That leaves us with only one candidate, the only person that we really know of from the show that was infamously beheaded at the behest of Queen Nia: Costia.

For those of you that may not remember, Costia was Lexa’s lover that was killed by Nia because of her relationship to the Commander. This is the death that cemented Lexa’s ideology of love being a weakness, at least until Clarke came along.

Let’s say that Echo really did kill Costia then. What is the use of revealing that now? There are so few characters left on the show that would particularly care about this reveal, apart from Clarke who may just be upset that this broke Lexa. What then is the point?

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There is one character left though that could have a truly fascinating reaction to this and that comes in the form of the new Heda herself, Madi.

During the fifth season, the little nightblood that could was implanted with The Flame, the AI chip that contains the memories and personalities of all of the former Commanders. Ergo, a part of Lexa lives on in Madi and this can serve to explore the sci-fi elements of The Flame more and particularly how it affects Madi personally.

A version of Lexa exists within The Flame but her experiences and emotions can only guide Madi so much.

To use a recent example, there was an episode from the latest episode of The Good Place where, after a character learns that they had a romance with another character in one of their alternate timelines. It explains that those events aren’t relevant to them because it happened to a fundamentally different person than the one they are currently.

In the same way, this awful, horrible thing happened to Lexa that shaped who she would become going forward, but that person isn’t Madi. She can feel those emotions and understand that rage, but ultimately they would belong to another person.

To go back to Echo, the whole reason that she is having that specific hallucination is the intense fear she feels that someone will eventually find out that she’s the one that killed Costia, this thing that she clearly didn’t want to do in the first place and feels shame for now.

If the one person that would be the most affected by that news ends up turning around and offering Echo some measure of forgiveness in return, that would go a long way in both actualizing the kind of person that Madi wants to be going forward separate of The Flame and allowing some healing to Echo’s soul in regards to the things that she had to do as an Azgeda spy.

What do you think? Do you think Echo truly killed Costia and will this open strong avenues going forward? Let us know in the comments below.

The 100 airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on The CW.