TL;DR – Conflict switches from the internal to the external as Snowpiercer comes under attack from Big Alice

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix subscription that viewed this series.

Snowpiercer Review –

Last year there was an odd experiment that hopped on our screens. It was to take a cult classic film and re-imagine it into a TV show. Overall, I felt that Season One had some interesting moments but never got the heights it was aiming for. However, there was some promise here, and that promise was enough to make me want to have a look at Season Two.

So to set the scene, at the end of last season after a protracted revolution Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly) and Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) agreed to fix the society that runs on steep class divisions. However, a surprise appears with another train coming into the mix at that moment of triumph, an old supply train that somehow has survived the seven years of cold. On that train is none other than Mr Wilford (Sean Bean) who is here to take back the train stolen from him. Now from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead. 

We get this week is a bit of a framing episode putting in place all the different vectors of conflict that we will see throughout this season. The first and most pressing is, of course, the division between Snowpiercer and Big Alice. In our first glimpses of life aboard Big Alice, we get to see the sheer force of will that it would have taken to get a project like this going and the personality that would have every focus of that world on them. So it should be said that Sean Bean has been perfectly cast in this role and fits into the job of probably a villain but not 100% sure about quite well.

On Snowpiercer the realities of this new world and how it shunted all the hopes of the last has started to make waves across the train. For Layton, that means taking control and stalling the move to democracy and trying to navigate the shifting terrain of the train’s social map. While this is all going on, the one thing I found the most interesting was the character of Ruth Wardell (Alison Wright). In the first season, especially towards the tail end of the run, she was presented in a very one-dimensional way. This week, however, we get to see more dimensions to her, and I hope that means we will get to see more of that going forward.

In the end, do we recommend The Time of Two Engines? Well, yes so far. This is a week where we got to see many of the conflicts lined up, which was interesting. As well as this, there were a couple of little hints here and there of something more, maybe even something outside the train. I am not sure yet if I am in for the long run, but you can call me intrigued at the moment.  

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Snowpiercer
Directed by – Christoph Schrewe
Written by – Graeme Manso
Developed by – Josh Friedman & Graeme Manson
Based on – Snowpiercer by Bong Joon Ho & Kelly Masterson and Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand & Jean-Marc Rochette
Starring – Jennifer Connelly, Daveed Diggs, Mickey Sumner, Alison Wright, Lena Hall, Iddo Goldberg, Steven Ogg, Sheila Vand, Mike O’Malley, Annalise Basso, Sam Otto, Roberto Urbina, Rowan Blanchard & Sean Bean