After a difficult start, TNT’s Snowpiercer ultimately found its foundation the progression of its first season. Years of post-apocalyptic class conflict between members of the titular train cars exploded inside its climax, setting the stage for a second season that wants to try to explore these conflicts beyond the limits of its original material.
Along Snowpiercerdebut season, things came to various heads after the lower class passenger lift led by Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs); its result was that everyone learned the truth about Snowpiercer’s mysterious and reserved conductor, Mr. Wilford, Pictured by War of Thrones‘Sean Bean. Wilford’s actions in the first season –not to mention Snowpiercer’s head of hospitality Melanie (Jennifer Connelly) –it gave the show’s sizable cast a lot to think about, as its characters tried to figure out what would happen to their futures, now that Snowpiercer’s passengers had given up on maintaining their strange society.
But in the final moments of the first season, which is exactly where the second season begins, Snowpiercer he signaled that he was about to deviate further from the original material tracks, as everyone at the Snowpiercer learned that his train was not the only one that was still going through the neverending ice and snow.
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Like Snowpiercerthe second season begins, there are still many people who want the head of Melanie (Jennifer Connelly), as well as the heads of the rest of the hospitality team,pikes by his years of brutal subjugation and deception. But the focus of almost everyone in the second season initial episodes – four of which were provided ahead of time for review – is on Big Alice, another monstrous train of Wilford’s creation that attached itself to Snowpiercer with the threat of paralyzing the locomotive.
Just as the sudden realization that Wilford may actually be dead or never board the train shook Snowpiercer’s passengers, knowing that he is alive and well on board Big Alice fills some of them, such as hospitality manager Ruth Wardell ( Alisson Wright) and adolescent sociopath LJ (Annalize Basso), with a cautious but still delusional I hope your savior has arrived. But others on the train, to like Layton, Sam Roche (Mike O’Malley) and Bess Till (Mickey Sumner), see Big Alice and her inhabitants as a threat only because of Melanie’s insistence on keeping them away from Wilford.
Between this tension SnowpiercerThe second season of trying to weave a dark narrative rhyme while reintroducing us to Melanie, found in the opening moments of the season outside of the two trains, dressed in a special suit that can only do a lot to protect her from the deadly frost. Unlike everyone at Snowpiercer who doesn’t have a solid idea of what Wilford’s arrival means, Melanie is the only character who does, and there is a feverish passion for the work she does by gathering snow and moving trains before being pulled back on board to face what Wilford’s arrival on the scene really means.
At the same time Melanie stepped on Big Alice, for what may be the first time, Snowpiercer presents us with the long history of Melanielost daughter Alex (A Wrinkle In TimeRowan Blanchard), who boards the train as Wilford’s envoy with a list of requirements that must be met under the threat of Big Alice killing Snowpiercer’s energy source. In Alex, you can see the shades of your mother’s calculating eye, but also get an idea of what kind of negative influence Wilford was during his education aboard Big Alice.
The tenuous peace and faith in an incipient democracy that Snowpiercer’s passengers established in the first season is another thing that is increasingly being tested this season, as the destinations of Snowpiercer and Big Alice become figuratively and literally interconnected in different ways.. When Bean’s Wilford finally appears on the screen, he does so with an air of unmistakable darkness that immediately marks him as the villain of this season. But what is somewhat curious about Bean’s presence as Wilford is how the character’s actions sometimes lessen the gravity he should carry.
When we meet other new characters –like Big Alice’s chief of hospitality, Kevin (Tom Lipinski), and a man better known only as “Icy Bob” (Andre Tricoteux) –they, everyone help to create this idea of Wilford and Big Alice as indominable forces of evil that everyone at Snowpiercer would do well to fear. But in scenes like the moment when Wilford finally comes face to face with Melanie, there is something that seems almost too silly about those numbers, especially compared to the image and reputation Snowpiercer spent the past season trying to project itself. This is still a program about people surviving a wintry apocalypse grouping on trains, and after the path Snowpiercer committed its first season to examining what the revolution at the end of time might look like, it seems like a kind of slowing backwards to move away from that for a Typically sinister figure of the Great Mau, who does things of the Great Mau like making sinister speeches for popular music.
If that initial threat Arrival of the great alice signals returns home to perch in the later episodes of the second season, of course. And although some of the disappointments with Wilford himself, there are some interesting ideas at work in the Snowpiercerthe second season that has the potential to make this next leg of the journey worth following. For starters, though, it’s a season that keeps going and keeps pace, instead of doing something truly new in your world. But in complicated weather situations, like a frozen apocalypse navigated by nightmare trains, accidents happen all the time – so who knows what the future holds?
Snowpiercer returns to TNT today, January 25th.
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