First episode only 30 minutes?

JRoth will never bring Lexa back despite the hate. If anything maybe just a tribute to her.. She's dead so she can't come back and if she does it's purely for fans. Then the show lose its credibility as well as Jroth as a showrunner.

In short the show will be worse if they ever got her back. But of course one particular breed of fans will love it because they are dim.

Don't believe all the info you read o IMDB.

S4 will be only focused on surviving the radiation thread. Last season was about all the consequences of Lexa's betrayal plus Alie. Too much stuff, too many characters and even with 16 episodes there wasn't time enough to flesh out every storyline properly.

Lexa is dead, her corpse was burnt. This is not a show like Vampire Diaries where people die to resurrect on the next day.

I don't see the runtime being 30 minutes. That doesn't make sense, that would mean it's either 9:00-9:30 with no commercials or that they have 30 minutes of commercials within the hour. IMDb isn't usually accurate before episodes air.

The CW lowered the episode count for several shows this year because they renewed them all, they needed more time slots available. It has nothing to do with them rushing this season to get Lexa back next year.

Also I'm pretty sure Mark Pedowitz (the president of the CW) said yesterday that he supports the decision of Lexa dying. That people live and die on the show and the network supports JRoth in his decision. i think it's so weird that so many people actually think she's coming back, mostly because of Jason saying she's not coming back in S4. That's quite a reach.

They would need a s5 to meet the number of episodes necessary for syndication, but with all the shows that got renewed recently plus Riverdale premiering soon the 100 is at risk of getting axed. Crazy Ex Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin have lower ratings but got renewed because they consistently get nominated for awards and are praised by critics, neither of which the 100 can claim ever since last season. Renewal chances for a s5 depend how well the first few episodes of s4 do, which is honestly up in the air, but if lower performing shows like The Originals,Frequency and/or No Tomorrow start doing better I honestly see no argument for keeping the 100 around instead of giving that time slot to one of the new pilots they're developing. Idk what the exact Netflix numbers are but the show hasn't trended for a while now on Netflix and the last statistics released were from May 2015 to May 2016, so there's no way to know how the numbers have been since then.

If it does get renewed, it will probably be to reach enough episodes for syndication and they'll likely make s5 the final season. JRoth was developing a prequel book on the grounders, but if interest for the 100 isn't that high in general I see the CW ditching any prequel ideas.

I don't see Lexa coming back in any form, but even if they did tease a return as a flashback or something in the final season I highly doubt her fans will go flocking back to the show. At most they'll watch the scenes on YouTube.