Lindsey Morgan of ‘The 100’ on Her ‘Crazy’ Journey to Directing in Season 7

Lindsey Morgan’s path to directing in The 100’s seventh and final season sounds like an episode of a television show itself.

It has everything: a heroine you can root for, plenty of suspense and plot twists, several location changes and even a last-minute flight! Needless to say, it wasn’t exactly straightforward — but it might surprise some fans to learn that journey started way back in 2017.

“I’d been interested in directing since Season 4,” said Morgan, who plays brilliant, brave mechanic Raven, “but I felt completely not ready and like, ‘I don’t even know where to begin!’”

To remedy that, she started shadowing directors on the set of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama; she’d assist them and go to their meetings. She said she learned a ton of valuable information that way, and she was grateful the network allowed her to do it. But alas, another complication arose: when The CW offered its directing-for-TV program, she was thousands of miles away, filming a movie in Lithuania. “I didn’t think I’d get the chance to direct in Season 7,” Morgan said. “Even though I applied, I didn’t think they’d let me direct because I hadn’t done it before.”

Fortunately, she thought wrong. One of the show’s directors had to drop out three weeks before the episode started filming, and Morgan saw her window of opportunity open again. “I was like, can I do it?” she recalled. Turns out, she could! But what ensued was, as she put it, a crazy story.

“I was in Texas at my grandmother’s funeral, then I flew back [to Vancouver, where The 100 films] and jumped right into shadowing another one of our directors,” she said. “They wanted me to learn as much as I could, so I’d be shadowing from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., then I’d get home and be doing all my homework to get ready.”

Of course, Morgan was also still filming for the show at the time, so she was putting in long hours on the set and assisting directors to learn about the process, too. She remembered a time when she was helping out directors all day, then she filmed until 2 a.m. As if that wasn’t enough, she then had to head to Seattle to catch a flight to Los Angeles — she had to be at the Director’s Guild of America by 9 a.m. to take a certification course, or she wouldn’t be allowed behind the camera.

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Oh, and that was the last course offered that year, so if she missed it or her flight, the episode, “The Queen’s Gambit” would need a new director. No pressure!

Thankfully, this story has a happy ending. “It was a 36-hour whirlwind,” Morgan said, “but we got it done. It was worth it, but it was crazy!”

You can watch the product of that 36-hour whirlwind on Wednesday, when the seventh episode of The 100’s last season airs on The CW.