After a rocky start, TNT’s Snowpiercer finally got his foot over the progress of his first season. Years of post-apocalyptic simmering class conflict between title tracks cars exploded in its climax, the scene for a second season that seeks to investigate the conflict outside the sources of the source material.
In the course of Snowpiercer’s debut season, things got on their minds after the lower class passenger uprising led by Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs); the result was that everyone learned the truth about Snowpiercer’s mysterious, mysterious conductor, mr. Wilford, depicted by Game of Thrones‘Sean Bean. Wilford’s actions in the first season –not to mention Snowpiercer’s Hospitality Manager Melanie (Jennifer Connelly) –the show’s substantial cast gave a lot to chew on, as their characters were all trying to make sense of what would become of their future, now that Snowpiercer passengers had made every effort to maintain their strange society.
But in the last moments of the first season, where the pick up second season, Snowpiercer indicates that it is about to move even further off the track of the source material, as everyone on Snowpiercer learns that their train is not the only one still through the never-ends ice and snow.
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As Snowpiercersecond season opens, there are still many people which Melanie (Jennifer Connelly)’s head, as well as the heads of the rest of the hospitality staff, on spike for their years of cruel submission and deception. But most focus all in season two early episodes – four of which were provided for review ahead of time – are on Big Alice, another monstrous train from Wilford’s creation that pinned him on Snowpiercer with the threat to grind the locomotive to a halt.
Just as the sudden realization that Wilford might be dead or never boarded the train, Snowpiercer’s passengers jerked and learned that he was alive and well aboard Big Alice fills some of them, like hospitality manager Ruth Wardell (Alisson Wright) and teen sociopath LJ (Annalize Basso), with a careful but still delusional hope their savior has arrived. But others in the train, as Layton, Sam Roche (Mike O’Malley) and Bess Till (Mickey Sumner) know that Big Alice and its inhabitants are a threat, if only because of how hard Melanie wanted to keep them away from Wilford.
Under this tension Snowpiercer‘s second season attempts to weave a dark, narrative rhyme while it introduces us again to Melanie, who finds herself in the first moments of the season outside of the two trains, dressed in a special suit that can do just as much to protect her from the deadly frost. Unlike everyone on Snowpiercer who does not have a good idea of what Wilford’s arrival means, Melanie is the only character do, and there’s a feverish passion for the work she’s gathering snow and tinkering with the trains before being dragged back on board to see what Wilford’s arrival at the scene really means.
At the same time that Melanie is stepping on her first foot on Big Alice, which may be the first time ever, Snowpiercer introduces us to Melanie’s long-lost daughter Alex (A crease in time‘s Rowan Blanchard), who gets on the train as Wilford’s delegate with a list of demands to be met under threat that Big Alice will kill Snowpiercer’s power source. In Alex you can see shades of her mother’s calculating eye, but also get an idea of what kind of negative influence Wilford had during her education aboard Big Alice.
The slim peace and confidence in a burgeoning democracy that Snowpiercer’s passengers established in the first season is something else that is increasingly being tested this season, as the fates of Snowpiercer and Big Alice connect figuratively and literally.. When Bean’s Wilford finally moves on screen, he does so with an air of unmistakable darkness that immediately identifies him as the villain of this season. But what’s somewhat curious about Bean’s presence as Wilford is how the character’s actions sometimes undermine the gravity he had to carry.
When we meet other new characters –such as Big Alice’s Head of Hospitality, Kevin (Tom Lipinski), and a man known only as “Icy Bob” (Andre Tricoteux) –they everyone help this idea of Wilford and Big Alice as innocent forces of evil that all on Snowpiercer will do good to fear. But in scenes like the moment Wilford finally comes face to face with Melanie, there is something that almost feels also silly about these figures, especially in comparison with the image and reputation Snowpiercer tried to project last season. It’s still a show about people surviving a winter-like apocalypse by pulling together on trains and beyond Snowpiercer dedicated his first season to exploring what the end-time revolution might look like, it feels like a slow step to turn back to a typically sinister Big Bad figure, doing Big Bad things, like delivering ominous speeches to popular music.
Or that initial threat it Big Alice’s arrival his come home to stay in later episodes of season two, of course, remains to be seen. And despite some of the disappointment with Wilford himself, there are some interesting ideas at work Snowpiercer‘s second season that has the potential to make this next trip of the trip worthwhile. As a start, though, it’s a season that stays the course and fits, rather than doing something new with its world. But in difficult weather situations such as a frozen apocalypse marred by nightmare trains, accidents happen – so who knows what the future may hold?
Snowpiercer returns to TNT today, January 25th.
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