Snowpiercer Review: The Tortoise and the Hare (Season 3 Episode 1)
Snowpiercer Season 3 Episode 1, “The Tortoise and the Hare,” picks up six months from when Layton, Alex, and Till broke the engine off from the rest of the train to go off in search for Melanie and her research.
This season opener doesn’t do anything that might be considered new or particularly substantive but it really serves to reestablish the status quo from where the previous season left off and the way that minor things or characters have been rejiggered in the time between.
The main reason for this is that nothing truly exciting or daring can happen on Snowpiercer until Layton reconnects with the train, which we’re probably still a fair bit away from. As a result, the show needs to stay steady in its plotting and character development, which isn’t to say that we received on either of those fronts isn’t interesting.
For the moment, a lot of what is happening on the series is being told in grand, broad strokes. There’s a resistance spearheaded secretly by Ruth against Wilford but there’s something rather insular about that. There’s not really a sense of how the train as a whole is adapting to this new regime.
We receive snippets here and there about the state of Snowpiercer to gleam an overall picture that the train is in dire straits. There isn’t really a class divide anymore — at least not in the way there was before with first, second, third, and the tail — but instead everyone is in the muck together.
Now it is everyone freezing and working to survive and then anyone who is in Wilford’s inner circle. Surprisingly, Snowpiercer has managed to create a dystopia within a dystopia with this new regime change and with that comes a cynical reminder: things can always be worse.
Things in the engine have an entirely different tone. There is still an active search, based on Melanie’s findings, to find a warm spot that could foster a colony outside of the train. This is a storyline that’s more hopeful but comes with a measure of despair. There’s a lot of potential for failure that could leave them all in a worse position than before.
Brief side note: until we are given definitive proof otherwise, we will be operating under the assumption that Melanie is still alive somewhere. It flies in the face of conventional logic but this is television and if you don’t see a body, they’re not dead. It’s not impossible that she’s dead but you just don’t kill Jennifer Connelly off-screen. There are laws against this.
Back to the drama, what’s interesting here is the desperation for some kind of a silver lining, which feels all too relatable at this point. Everyone on the show, and this has been true from the start, is clinging desperately to something to believe in. Whether that’s finding a warm spot, establishing order, or catching up with the engine, there’s a need to find a foothold on anything.
It’ll be intriguing going forward to see if the series can manage a kind of equilibrium again or if it will find a way to make things even worse, despite feeling like we’re already scratching rock bottom.
What did you think of this episode of Snowpiercer? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Snowpiercer airs Mondays at 9/8c on TNT.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.