Snowpiercer Review: Bound by One Track (Season 3 Episode 4)
Snowpiercer Season 3 Episode 4, “Bound by One Track,” sees the train trying to settle into its new status quo as the inhabitants lick their wounds.
This episode is really unified by one theme, which is everyone being haunted metaphorically or literally by what has happened in the time since Wilford took over the train. This is both a feature and a bug. While this is a fine connective tissue, it is about as subtle as a sledgehammer and possesses all the deftness of one.
That being said, it’s not a bad move for the show to take. This is an excellent point in the season for it to take stock and take a bit of a breather. The problem is that it is a bit too pat of a concept. Virtually every character that we spend a significant amount of time with on this episode is clearly grappling with something.
The most profound of these is Alex, a good example of how this both does and doesn’t work successfully. She is, by design, a really insular character and tends to keep how she feels rather close to the chest. The only way to get at her interiority is by going directly to her own conscious mind talking to her by way of a proxy Melanie.
Now for a slight detour to talk about Melanie. This season is still sticking to the notion that Melanie did not survive and she is somewhere deceased. That isn’t tracking very well here, though. The episode treats her more like she is gone, not dead. While there is melancholy in the way that she thinks of her mother, it doesn’t feel as much like grief.
If that’s the way we’re meant to interpret it, then it might be a failing of the episode.
However, we will continue operating under the notion that Melanie somehow — illogical though it may be — has survived and will be reintroduced at some point. This goes perhaps beyond the scope of the show but this episode went out of its way to point out that we have lost minor characters offscreen, like some of the recurring faces from the tail or Rosch’s wife, and that meta-textually feels pandemic related.
Without getting too far into this, it seems like characters were written out because there were real-world complications with filming. If that is the case, then there’s no sensible reason to bring Jennifer Connelly if the show planned to only use her for one episode instead of something else down the line.
Anyway, the main reason why this episode doesn’t work as well as it should is that outside of Alex, we aren’t afforded much more insight into the characters that we didn’t already have. If the point is to shine a light on what they’ve lost and how things have changed, then it comes up a little lacking.
There’s not much that we find out here that we wouldn’t have been able to infer otherwise.
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.