Now this is classic Snowpiercer drama! Though the switching between timelines still doesn’t fully work, this episode is firing on all cylinders, a sort of The Taking of Snowpiercer 123 about how the military squad from the last episode takes control of the train is riveting, well-shot, and a reminder of why this story is popular enough to get so many adaptations and retellings.
“The Sting of Survival†starts with narration by Miss Audrey, who laments that her attempt at warning New Eden about the incoming military attack failed, and the townsfolk were as blindsided as the train people were. Then we go back to nine months prior, the day Till and Ben go out to investigate the rocket and encounter The International Peacekeeping Forces. Almost immediately after they board the train, one of the soldiers shoots Bess Till in the shoulder as she tries to warn the rest of the passengers. But as brutal and authoritarian as the soldiers are, there is something interesting about the way Clark Gregg’s Admiral Anton talks about them being on a mission, and he phrases it as a mission that also includes the passengers of Snowpiercer — even if he threatens to kill Ben if Melanie doesn’t surrender the train. When she inevitably does, we switch tracks and go into non-Wilford territory.
But this is Melanie fucking Cavill, and she is not going to give control of the train that easily, so the moment she lets the Admiral into the engine room, she immediately starts plotting for revenge. Melanie and Ben build a makeshift pressure shooter using a model of the Snowpiercer as ammo and kill a passing soldier before Melanie takes his gun. Curiously, they don’t notice that the guard’s blood LITERALLY FLOATS! Now, this show has played fast and loose with certain things to sell the fiction of its post-apocalyptic, icy world, but this is new territory for them. Upon discovering the corpse, Anton orders his men to shoot a breach in the market car, putting 100 people at risk of freezing to death if Melanie doesn’t surrender herself.
Though they missed the coolest new reveal since Wilford’s icy mutant in season two, Ben and Melanie sneak into what used to be Ruth’s secret hideout from her rebellion days to get back into the engine room. Faced with the decision of either trying to take her train back or save 100 people, Melanie decides the train is the priority and plans a way to kill two birds with one stone. If she can sneak through the engine’s intake from the outside, go through the air shaft and get back to the engine, she can rig a fail-safe that would open the market doors to flush out the cold. This is pure Snowpiercer drama. After last week’s open landscapes and scenes of characters spread out outdoors, seeing a bunch of people under threat of freezing in a closed and confined single train car is tense and thrilling. The camera claustrophobically pushes its way through the crowd, all while one of our protagonists plans a daring, kind of insane plan to fix things is what this show is all about.
Even after successfully climbing under the train, crawling to get to the intake while on a high-speed train, and making it back to the train, the celebration is short-lived. Though Melanie saves the market people, the train is already docking somewhere — underground. A new face comes in, and Melanie recognizes him as Nima Rousseau (Michael Aronov). It turns out that this guy and his team of 80 scientists were conscripted by the International Peacekeeping Forces after the Cold War to “pioneer the next age for humankind†— meaning correcting the government’s mistakes. Though the team hasn’t seen the sky in years, they successfully developed a compound that triggers the CW-7 cooling agent that doomed the world to denature in the upper atmosphere — meaning the Earth can warm up again. From the single location they are bunkered in, the team successfully created six warm spots, the six spots Melanie discovered in season two, which includes New Eden.
The problem is that because the equator is still frozen, these spots won’t last forever, and they won’t spread to the rest of the planet. They need Snowpiercer as a base to launch other rockets from around the world. This is what Melanie has been fighting and hoping for. But to carry out the mission, they’d need to heavily modify the train, causing irrevocable damage, as well as make the passengers into a workforce. Still, isn’t that the whole point of the train? To carry humanity into salvation? So far, this is the most fascinating addition to the canon of the show. The Snowpiercer movie never gave us anywhere remotely close to hope of the planet warming up again, but here there actually seems to be a chance that things will get better. But for now, that hope for the future means Melanie and Ben have to say good-bye — which they seal with a kiss!
Unsurprisingly, nine months later everything has gone to hell. The Peacekeeping Forces are, of course, just another Wilford-like authoritarian regime that is using the passengers as a labor force through oppressive means. Till and Audrey plan an escape with Ben’s help, using a track scaler to head to New Eden and warn them that they overheard the soldiers talk about the settlement. Unfortunately, a soldier finds them right before they leave and Till is left behind dealing with him as Audrey escapes alone on the scaler. By the time she arrived, it was too late, as there was one person dead and one baby missing. Oh, and her face is covered in frostbite.
But we still don’t know why they wanted the child or how the doctor knew they were coming. How does Wilford fit into all of this? Whatever the answers, Layton doesn’t care. He immediately sets out to find the train, and he is angry.
Tailie Thoughts
• It is kind of heartwarming to see how the dynamics and relationships among the train passengers evolved through the seasons. The way the characters talk about the people in New Eden in this episode as friends and loved ones makes it seem like they are finally united as one train — even if they are apart.