Everything We Know About The 100’s Anomaly

Throughout season six of The 100, the infamous anomaly plays a big part of the story – but apart from a few clues, it remains a mind-boggling phenomenon. Gabriel called it the greatest mystery of Sanctum, and it certainly lives up to the title. Just when we expect some clarity, the finale poses even more questions than it answers.

Right at the end, Gabriel discovers a message tattooed on Octavia’s back and uses it to “contact” the anomaly via the mathematical symbols on its stone. With a loud whoosh, it expands over the entire moon, Hope walks out and stabs Octavia into disappearance. I think most viewers, like myself, sat with their mouths open, saying, “What the…?”

Being a complete sci-fi enthusiast, I cannot wait to find out where the writers take this exciting storyline. In the meantime, we can speculate all we want, but The 100 rarely stays inside the coloring lines, nor does it follow recipes. I think it’s safe to say they might exceed our wildest expectations. While we wait for answers, here’s a list of everything we do know.

 

1. It releases temporal flares as messages

In episode 6×05 ‘The Gospel of Josephine’ Octavia and Diyoza find themselves immovable in a crucible when a temporal flare waves over the area, fossilizing everything in its path. Diyoza barely escapes while Octavia hides beneath the quicksand. Somehow her hand gets exposed to the flash, changing it from smooth to wrinkled and knobby in seconds.

But, the old hand also constantly moves in a logarithmic spiral – the shape of the anomaly. Gabriel has the same tattoo on his chest (how did he get it?) and Diyoza kept drawing the pattern in her notebook. It seems that the spiral called out to them by some means  – but why? My guess, someone inside needs them, whether it’s for good or bad, I can’t say.

 

2. Time’s dilated inside

This is probably the most obvious fact about the spectacle – time misbehaves. The flare aged everything it came into contact with. The sap that Gabriel extracts from one of the affected trees, heals Diyoza’s scar in an instant due to its ability to speed up recovery time. Diyoza entered the anomaly while six months pregnant with Hope and the unborn baby returns a few days later in her late teens or early twenties. Meanwhile, Octavia came back clean, healthy, and with longer hair after spending mere seconds inside.

Given those details, I doubt any possibility of time travel exists. Life inside the anomaly simply moves at a time much faster than we’re used to. An alternate dimension if you will. This is a nifty diversification of Einstein’s theory of relativity. While this show falls into a sci-fi genre, it has always operated on a platform of realism. I’m not saying the Elon Musks of the world turn out research anything like what we see on the show, only that creating drives able to upload consciousness is exactly the sort of thing a real-life Becca Franco would do.

 

3, Radio signals get sucked up by the anomaly stone

This little tidbit is certainly the most interesting. Radios do not work on the moon yet Gabriel’s camp – built above the anomaly stone – picks up the signals in endless repeating waves. Is this just a side-effect of the magnetic field that holds up the stone? It could have been structured this way merely to prohibit communication between the inhabitants, but there might be an underlying reason as well.

In the finale, Russel tells the other primes that if the habitable planets do not have signal-sucking anomalies, they can access the other teams’ mind drives wirelessly from the ship.
Sheidheda uploaded himself to some unknown location right before the final whistle blew: is it possible that he transmitted the data to the anomaly? Is Josephine’s empty chip accessible? Was Hope sent to murder Octavia and retrieve it in exchange for her mother’s safety, similar to how The Terminator was sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor and prevent the birth of her son? Even though these are all questions only season seven will be able to answer, it’s worth thinking about.

 

4. It emits a toxin that causes mass hysteria

Gabriel explains in episode eight, ‘The old man and the anomaly’, that it parallels the effects of the red sun toxin – only constantly, and weirder. In the same way water is naturally recycled on earth, this could be a secondhand effect of the eclipse. It’s plausible that the anomaly absorbs the sun’s toxin and manipulates it to send messages or the suns are affected by the anomaly, killing unwanted settlers. Regardless, the anomaly uses the toxin to its advantage.

On their way to the green light, the trio experience visions. “Sometimes it’s your darkest fear, sometimes your deepest desire and sometimes it’s both at once,” Gabriel explains. The anomaly seems to use the candy-to-a-child tactics to lure those it needs inside since Diyoza follows the sweet little face of her child straight into the ‘trap’. Gabriel has always been too cautious to cross the threshold yet nothing is holding the former terrorist back.

 

5. No-one has ever returned from entering it

Octavia was the first person to ever escape the green-lighted prison, and she did so by running away from something that scared her. The last symbol of the sequence on her back is called an Octonian, closely related to her name. When the light reacts to the sequence, she seems to recover some of her anomaly-gained memories, right before Hope stabs her. Was Octavia’s whole purpose to come back and stop the so-called ‘he’ that Diyoza’s daughter referred to?

Now, the biggest question, is she dead or alive and was that really her? She didn’t die, neither did she re-enter the light, she simply evaporated. Either way, she’s special, as Gabriel decides, and appears to have a much, much bigger purpose.

 

6. It’s operated by a thousand-year-old stone

Now this suggests to me that it may be a manmade wormhole built by scientists and mathematicians. Octavia has a tattoo of the stone on her back with some mathematical symbols highlighted in red. Though it’s just a piece of metal, shaped like the anomaly, engraved with ciphers, it seems to be a computer of some sort, signaling the spectacle.

While this age-old device may exude mystical Indiana Jones or Lost’s ‘moving the island’ vibes, I believe there’s a very scientific explanation behind the workings of the stone. Someone built it, it consists of mathematics not even Dr. Santiago understands and it’s crafted from steel. It’s certainly not Harry Potter territory, just something our average minds struggle to comprehend.

This might not seem like much of an explanation but it does shed some light on a very dark matter. There are definitely people living inside the anomaly that are able to send peculiar messages to those they need. Time travel can never be ruled out, but an alternate dimension moving at faster than normal speed seems more likely. Finally, through science, someone is trying to control the moon and its occupants while Octavia poses a threat to ‘him’. The possibility exists that the girl under the floor was specifically created for this purpose – just a crazy conspiracy theory.