The Snowpiercer Season 2 Finale Frantically Shifted Gears, Leaving Sense Behind

Snowpiercer’s Season 2 finale was served up as a double booking of episodes, and those who weren’t exhausted by the overwrought carnival / dinner nonsense in the first hour were treated to a high-speed emotional rollercoaster for its second. Did much it make sense? Not really (more on that in a moment), but it was true to the spirit of Snowpiercer as a whole: good ideas executed unevenly.

In its second season, Snowpiercer introduced a new force that necessarily changed the game: the advent not only of Wilford himself, but the supply train he co-opted and re-speced to become the Goliath known as Big Alice. The union of the two trains had fascinating significance. On the one hand, Snowpiercer had just successfully survived a coup, an elimination of class, and a “one train” mentality that was meant to herald a utopia. Instead, it was compromised almost immediately. That’s not surprising, but it is interesting to explore through the lens of the heroes we’ve come to support. Unfortunately, Snowpiercer preferred to focus on the increasingly unhinged figure of Wilford, whose battle against Melanie and Layton was both ideological and mechanical. The two trains needed each other both in terms of power and resources, and because peace was fragile on Snowpiercer while loyalty to Wilford was still strong.

This played out best, initially, in Audrey’s storyline. A survivor and supporter of the revolution, she was willing to go back to an abusive relationship with Wilford in order to infiltrate his growing base of support. The flashbacks to Wilford’s psychological control of Audrey and his sadistic damage was brutal, and spoke more to who he was than the subsequent retelling of the story through Kevin, when Wilford just became Jigsaw from the Saw franchise. But pretty soon after, Audrey was no longer an agent for change, or even a double agent. She just… reverted back to who she was, screwing over her friends and the people of the train to become Wilford’s “floozy,” derided especially by Alex. It was just one of a number of promising female-driven storylines that were cut short; let us not forget Tilly’s interest and investigation into faith (and what faith looks like in an apocalyptic world), only for that to be shattered when the priest turned out to be a murderer working for Wilford. Sigh.

Even when Snowpiercer started to lean too heavily into plot, leaving all of its interesting characterizations behind, it still managed to give us stand-out episodes like “Many Miles from Snowpiercer.” That excellent bottle episode explained why and how Melanie stole the train, left Alex behind, and chronicled her present-day horror story making her way to the research station—a creepy mini-survival mission that was one of the only examples of Tailie-esque life we got in Season 2, which preferred instead to luxuriate uptrain, leaving the fate of its most forgotten citizens, well, forgotten.

Still, when things subverted a third time (Wilford took power back, Melanie was reported as dead, Layton and Ruth were sent to Compost, Roche and his family were put in drawers), it suggested a fresh shift in alliances that would reveal new things about these characters and their supporters. I don’t remember Ruth’s neck tattoo being visible before, but I thought we might learn something about her pre-B&B past, like that weird revelation that Oz apparently was not just a footballer but also a professional-level singer and pianist? Sure, give us more context! The show is at its best when we get little moments like Ruth’s delight at seeing a bath, Javier’s hula girl joke, or Melanie fashioning a rat trap.