Snowpiercer Season 2 Is Still a Chilling Mirror, but Now There’s Hope

In our review of Snowpiercer’s first season, Joyce Chen wrote on the timeliness of a show about a forced quarantine: “The most unsettling thing about watching a show about a post-apocalyptic future during a pandemic is that even the most random details hit a little too close to home.” At that time we were merely two months into the pandemic (officially, anyway), and Snowpiercer’s focus on class warfare aboard a claustrophobic, careening train we could not disembark from was, as she notes, a mirror rather than a prophesy.

Less than a year later, we are still under quarantine (although your mileage may vary on how seriously those around you take it—please wear a mask) but there is some hope on the horizon: there’s a vaccine and we have a new administration who is ready to tackle this appropriately. Snowpiercer Season 2, which was filmed at the same time as Season 1, also has these tinges of hope: the ruling class has been overthrown, the Earth may be thawing. But it doesn’t take long for the new boss to feel the same as the old boss.

In its first season, Snowpiercer had the difficult task of weaving in storylines from the well-known film and creating new avenues in which to tell its story on a weekly basis to sustain itself for seasons to come. One of the most important tweaks was the introduction of Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs), a Tailie who is called up to be the train’s detective when a series of murders had everyone terrified. It was a clever way to give us a reason to see how the Snowpiercer train—1,001 cars long—operates, and gave context to the many characters who populate it. But soon, a more interesting mystery arose: was the eponymous Mr. Wilford actually aboard the train he created? Or had it been secretly taken over by the chief of Hospitality and Voice of the Train, Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly)?

TNT’s version of Snowpiercer was more of a slow burn, naturally, than its narrative predecessors, and it actually thrived in a weekly episodic format where we could explore the train and its toxic power dynamics in a sprawling way. It wasn’t revolutionary television and didn’t quite make our year-end list, but by golly it was a solid weekly watch with a lot of potential for story.

The same is very much true in its second season, and you can feel that story really settling in to some interesting character arcs now that the initial rebellion has taken place. It also takes some quiet risks; for instance, we almost immediately see Layton deferring the democracy the lower classes fought for in favor of martial law. He doesn’t really have a choice—in the Season 1 finale, the train was taken over by a smaller but stronger supply train called “Big Alice,” carrying both Mr. Wilford himself (Sean Bean) and Melanie’s daughter Alex (Rowan Blanchard) who she thought had died seven years earlier. Still, as the de facto leader of the revolution, it stings.

The elegantly brutal, scenery-chewing Wilford wants his train back, and one of the major conflicts in the new season are the skirmishes that break out between the Wilford faithful and those who have come to put Snowpiercer before their own needs and desires. Wilford’s manipulations begin immediately, first with Melanie in relation to her daughter, and later in a rekindling of a romance with the Night Car’s lead madam Miss Audrey (Lena Hall). There are other romances afoot, like Layton’s ex-wife Zarah (Sheila Vand) finding shelter with him again, while Melanie and chief engineer Bennett (Iddo Goldberg) are more open about their relationship. Refreshingly, all of these connections and the choices these characters make feel adult rather than existing to cause drama. There are bigger fish to fry, so to speak.