‘Infinity Train’ Is Landmark Entertainment Worth Seeking Out, Despite HBO Max’s Attempts To Snuff It Out

There’s a lot going on in Owen Dennis’ massively ambitious Infinity Train – four complete seasons comprised of ten episodes each, each episode running 11-minutes, taking place for the most part on a train made up of numberless, car-specific environments inhabited by assorted passengers both permanent (Nulls) and temporary. So many things at such a breakneck pace, I felt a little relief when I thought I had the rules figured out by the middle of the first season. Only I hadn’t even scratched the surface. I underestimated the depth of this project, its emotional intelligence and courage to go places most popular entertainments can’t, or won’t, go. It reminds in that way of Pendleton Ward’s work, and indeed Infinity Train shares DNA with Adventure Time, Patrick McHale’s Over the Garden Wall, and, for long stretches in its images, characters, and themes, the masterworks of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. It’s gorgeous, in other words, a sensitive piece of speculative fiction.

I’ve been a fan of Dennis’ since his work on Regular Show, another piece that transcends its first impressions as a silly gag-based shorts series; it ultimately reveals itself to be a smart, occasionally devastating, examination of male friendships and failure to launch. A lot can happen over the course of 11-minutes, apparently. For Infinity Train, Dennis apparently set a goal for himself to be a running diary of trauma and recovery over the course of eight seasons. HBO Max and its purge of diverse and challenging fare has given Dennis four seasons that are now hidden from the streaming service — though it can still be accessed, for now, on pay-per-episode services like Amazon Prime Video or, as Dennis himself has suggested, through piracy should all other avenues fail. I hadn’t heard of this show before it’s recent struggles with corporate malfeasance. I’m sorry this is the way I’m finding out about it.

But not as sorry as I am to see exactly what it is this corporate ghoul has decided to ax to avoid paying its creators the pittance of residuals they were set to make. It’s as ugly and traumatizing an action as any undertaken by the series’ ambiguous “villain,” Amelia (voiced by Lena Headey), an architect of the environments in each of the train’s unique cars created, according to her, as attempts to recreate her life before a great, unnamed tragedy took away the love of her life. Her attempts at recreating a lost past have essentially doomed her to an eternity on the train – a train whose function now seems to be to abduct other victims of trauma from the “real world,” to imprint their palms with a number, Logan’s Run-style, and to present to them a series of puzzles in order to move from car to car and to, eventually, get to a place with their emotional damage where they can return to their lives. For some, it’s a matter of days or weeks. For others, a matter of years or never.

One of the first real shocks of Infinity Train is that people can die in the process of their “healing,” and while that shouldn’t be a shock, I didn’t expect to see it here. The first season, or “Book,” is called “The Perennial Child” and follows the onboarding of teen Tulip Olsen (voiced by Ashley Johnson). She is given a guide, or familiar, One-One (voiced by Jeremy Crutchley and Owen Dennis as opposing emotional responses: one upbeat, the other nihilistic), a small robotic orb that I thought was going to be a kid’s show contrivance of adorable sidekick. He is that. He’s also something entirely different at times: a trickster, a literalist in the most unhelpful way, a devil’s advocate for Tulip as she figures out that the number on her palm gets smaller the more she’s able to be introspective about the things that have happened to her and the direction her life is about to take.

Tulip’s parents are getting a divorce, you see, and in her fear and pain she’s lashed out at both of them, running out of her house and onto the train after finding out that both of them have forgotten her plans to attend a camp over the summer. It’s one of those things that’s huge when you’re a kid and Tulip comes to realize eventually that her parents are human, still love her despite not still loving one another, and could use a little empathy during a pretty tough period in all of their lives. Heady stuff that Dennis and his incredible team of voice actors, animators, directors manage with intelligence and, despite the sci-fi/fantasy fireworks now and then, a studied lack of bombast. For a show in which anything can happen, the biggest things that happen on Infinity Train are between its characters during quiet conversations where they lay their hearts bare for one another. In the seventh episode of “The Perennial Child,” Tulip enters a car in which all the interiors are made of reflective chrome. She’s tricked by her reflection “MT” (also voiced by Johnson), into switching places with her through the proverbial looking glass, and then refuses to switch back, earning MT the attention of the police of that world voiced by Bradley Whitford and a terrifying Ben Mendelsohn. They’ve gotten their positions when their “primes,” the people they reflected, died and rather than choose to be reassigned to another prime, chose instead to police those reflections who might want to be something other than reflected life. It’s as fascinating as it sounds – all the more so when MT escapes to be the hero of the second season, “Cracked Reflection.”

When you say “MT” it sounds of course like “Empty,” a name she bristles at as you might imagine, but without a better option, she allows Jesse (Robbie Daymond) to call her that when he appears in a train car playing with MT’s magical, shapeshifting deer Alan Dracula. This is a lot, I get it. It was a lot for me, too. But Infinity Train moves along on the power of its motivating premise: the train as a metaphor for grief, for unresolved issues, for extraordinary psychic pain. You get on it and you can’t ever get off it without a lot of work – and without accepting help from people who you might not at first believe could help you.

In the third season, “Cult of the Conductor,” one of the frightening enemies of the Cracked Reflection, Grace Monroe (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the leader of a band of “lost boys” invested in staying on the train permanently, becomes the center of the story. She comes to see things differently as she develops empathy for one the train’s created beings – a little girl who appears human named Hazel (Isabella Abiera) and her “Null” Tuba (Diane Delano), a giant blue gorilla with tubas attached to her back. Hazel has numbers on her palm like the human penitents and pilgrims on the train, suggesting that if she’s a creation of the intelligence running the train, that these creations – like MT – may be sentient and capable of wounding as deeply as the humans they’re manufactured to nurture. Infinity Train now is something like Blade Runner in its contemplation of existential questions like what it means to be human – and how much of humanity is dependent on the ability to feel sonder for other living things, whatever their creation. The “bad guy” of this third season is Grace’s second-in-command Simon (Kyle McCarley) who has fallen so deeply into the cult of chaotic evil that he’s unable to change his thinking when evidence changes. The ties to our current/eternal state are as obvious as the irony of this show succumbing to the same kind of corporate-think that equates value with monetary worth. He’s scary. And when something terrible happens to Tuba, I cried like I haven’t in anything in this medium since the last season of “Adventure Time,” and maybe Grave of the Fireflies before that. 

It’s final season (for now), “Duet,” follows a pair of Asian-American buddies Min-Gi (Johnny Young) and Ryan (Sekai Murashige) and their Null, Kez (Minty Lewis), a flying bellhop bell who has trouble apologizing when it’s appropriate for her to do so. Min-Gi and Ryan want to start a band but only Ryan has the balls to just dive into it. He goes on a tour of bingo parlors and old folks’ homes in Canada to resounding disinterest, and so returns to the Fried Chicken joint Min-Gi works in to try one last time to convince him to chase their dreams with him. Their argument leads them to the Infinity Train and their working through of their generational traumas. What murders me about “Duet” is how it’s all really about Kez and, more, how terrible self-worth can lead to any number of unexpected personal calamities. It ends in a sentient house – a better metaphor for Freud’s theory of the unconscious there never was – and how Kez’s inability to reckon with the sins of her own past have brought everyone in her past and present to a place that is arrested and violent.

Infinity Train is a landmark entertainment, another proof that animation is a medium and not a genre: an infinitely agile template upon which to layer every possible thing that still, because Dennis is a wonderful showrunner, follows a set of legible rules. The series has its own mythology and it also tells individual stories with care and a what feels now like an impossible amount of patience. There are no throwaway villains. A mysterious The Cat, Cheshire or otherwise and voiced magnificently by Kate Mulgrew, is set up as an easy foil but reveals herself throughout the course of forty episodes to be complicated, tragic, and working through her own payload of self-loathing unto acceptance. “You abandoned me,” someone accuses her and she says, sadly, “Yes. I am what I am.” The layers you could peel back in that kind of statement, made as it is by a talking cat on a sci-fi metaphor in an animated program axed by a merger, would fill an entire volume of Roland Barthes.

Infinity Train is a gift. I’m hard-pressed to find any silver lining to corporations continuing to audit the art we are allowed to receive – but if there’s a tiny one, it’s that it brought me to this show. I am holding it now against my heart. You can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.