Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The new TNT series Snowpiercer isn’t necessarily a remake of Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 movie of the same name, but it’s more of a reimagining, with new characters and a new timeline. Bong is an executive producer, but doesn’t seem to have much to do with the series; Josh Friedman was the showrunner on the pilot, replaced by Orphan Black‘s Graeme Manson after that. But it’s about the same idea; a train perpetually traveling around the world with the last remaining humans that were saved from a global freeze. Is it as good as the film?
SNOWPIERCER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: In animation, we see a railroad track, and a single flower. “First, the weather changed. The deniers knew why but they still doomed us with their lies,” says a voice as the flower burns up.
The Gist: The animation continues to explain that scientists tried to artificially cool down the planet as global warming continued unchecked, only to trigger a massive global ice age. The Wilfred Corporation built a massive 1,001-car train called the Snowpiercer, designed to perpetually circle the globe carrying humanity’s wealthy and connected. But right before the train’s departure, a massive uprising occurred, and a number of stowaways end up staying on the train. They’re relegated to the tail section, where they’re packed in like sardines and treated like prisoners.
We flash to over six years after departure. The train’s head of hospitality, Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), is also The Voice Of The Train, making announcements and making sure all the first-class passengers are doing well. She and her assistant, Ruth Wardell (Alison Wright) have heard of a disturbance somewhere in third class and need to find out more details.
Meanwhile, in the Tail of the train, the Tailies are planning out yet another push towards the front of the train. Pike (Steven Ogg) and Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) are the de facto leaders of the rebel faction, and they’re in disagreement as to whether another revolt will get them any intel. Layton wants to be cautious, and Pike does not. Layton is also trying to protect Josie (Katie McGuinness), whom he’s fallen for while in captivity, and Miles (Jaylin Fletcher), the intelligent teen who has the capacity to be promoted to engineer status.
After the disruption, Ruth goes to the Tail to retrieve Layton. He’s the only former homicide detective on board, and he needs to help Mr. Wilfred solve a murder. He’s given his favorite meal, grilled cheese and tomato soup, by the “head jackboot,” Roche (Mike O’Malley), and he’s assured by Cavill that if he solves the murder, he’ll be treated well. Layton won’t do it until everyone in the Tail gets sentences commuted, reproductive rights restored, and they all get to immigrate to third class.
Back in the Tail, Pike and company are starting to see Layton as a traitor, and they plan to make another push when one of the most respected Tailies, Old Ivan (Mark Margolis), hangs himself in despair. There’s a bloody confrontation, where one of the jackboots, Bess Till (Mickey Sumner), is taken hostage. Layton negotiates a deal, where Pike and two others will avoid death if they accept going into “the drawers”, i.e. a morgue-like prison where people lie in stasis for their sentences (The woman who was accused of the previous murder on board is there, but she will be let out due to the second murder with the same M.O.) Layton’s thinking is that they’ll be further in the train and will be able to wake up and take over when the revolution occurs.
Our Take: We’re unsure of how the series is going to go after watching the first episode, and that’s mainly to do with a muddled story that’s enhanced by two great lead characters.
Much of the story in the first episode, at least after the idea of the Snowpiercer and the fact that dozens of everyday people fought a bloody battle to survive as stowaways, is muddled. On a train that has multiple classes, and what Cavill hopes to be a utopia, the actual mystery that brings Layton out of the Tail doesn’t seem to be all that significant; it’s just an excuse for him to migrate out and for the people he’s left behind to think he’s turning on them.
Because of that, the rest of the episode is more about class warfare and how societies are built out of nothing under extreme circumstances (something that hits home in quite a depressing way during this pandemic). There’s a jumble of characters that are hard for us to keep track of and who aren’t particularly well fleshed-out, and a palpable sense that the Tailies are just going to keep losing people and not getting anywhere.
There’s very little sense after the first episode just how stark the differences between classes are. We have the rich people up front, the prisoners in the Tail, and not much about the society that has developed in between. Subsequent episodes will likely flesh this out (the series has already been renewed for a second season), but the first episode has trouble trying to establish just who is who and what is what.
That’s why the presence of Diggs and Connelly is so important. As the main characters, they’re pretty well-rounded at the outset. We know that Layton is fiercely loyal to his fellow Tailies and won’t sell them out to upgrade his situation. He’s pissed when he finds out that an ex of his, Zarah Ferami (Sheila Vand), who migrated from The Tail to a sexually-active-and-fluid car, told the jackboots he was a cop. Diggs plays out this fierceness, confidence, and intelligence with the proper amount of balance. We are immediately rooting for him as soon as we see him trying to be the coolest head in the room while the latest revolt is being planned.
Connelly, on the other hand, is cool and collected as Cavill. We know there’s more to her than meets the eye; for someone who claims to be the “head of hospitality,” she knows an awful lot about the ecosystem of the Snowpiercer, and she has no problem telling Layton just how fragile it is when he’s led into a thriving greenhouse car. She plays off Diggs well, and when we find out just who she really is, we became immediately intrigued, just because of how different she is in the locomotive than she is behind it.
Sex and Skin: Whatever there is is mostly implied.
Parting Shot: Now wearing an MIT sweatshirt, Cavill takes over the train from an engineer named Ben (Iddo Goldberg). He says, “You have the train, Mr. Wilfred.” She replies, “I have the train.”
Sleeper Star: Alison Wright is basically the Sleeper Star of any show she’s in. We don’t know a ton about Ruth from the outset, but it seems like her role is fairly significant as a close confidant of Cavill. But does even she know the truth about who Cavill really is?
Most Pilot-y Line: So far, Pike is just that guy in every post-apocalyptic series who wants to go full-steam-ahead and defeat the people keeping his people down, and there isn’t much to his character beyond that. Considering he’ll be in “the drawers” for awhile, we don’t know when we’ll see him again.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Snowpiercer‘s middling pilot is saved by its leads. We’re intrigued to see what Manson can do with the characters and story he inherited from episode 2 on.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.
