Snowpiercer Review: Ouroboros (Season 3 Episode 7)
There’s a bit of a double-edged sword with Snowpiercer Season 3 Episode 7, “Ouroboros.” We love nothing more than a good alternate universe. Take the roster of characters and put them in new roles and dynamics that reflect and contrast how they are normally.
It’s cheap and easy and, more often than not, is immensely satisfying. We have Star Trek‘s Mirror Universe episodes to thank for this.
The downside of this is that it’s not terribly interesting. That isn’t to say that it’s bad; there just isn’t much there. Anything that it has to say is incredibly surface level and almost immediately tells on itself. From the moment that Ben starts talking about the nature of telling lies, everyone knows where this is going and what the point is.
This episode is kind of like eating something tasteless. The problem isn’t that it’s left a bad taste in your mouth. It’s that you’re not entirely sure what you just put in there. What is the point and what is it trying to say? Typically, this is the part of the season when everything is climbing to a head and it maintains that energy for a couple of episodes.
Right now is the point on previous seasons when things would be turned on their head a bit. This certainly is not that. The revelation that Melanie might still be alive is a good and necessary one but if we’re all being honest with ourselves, we already knew that.
We should never forget perhaps the most important rule of television: if you have not seen their cold, dead body, then they are not dead.
Even apart from all of that, Layton’s dream sequences are too broad and vague to truly be effective. It’s all working within a motif and it is not nearly specific enough. It’s attempting a kind of espionage or spy aesthetic but doesn’t want to nail down exactly what that is or what it looks like.
It’s like when a series does a noir episode but can’t settle on what flavor of the genre it is. Neo? LA? East coast? When it’s glaringly obvious that it’s a hodgepodge and not working with anything in particular, then it becomes a problem of laziness. The same is true here.
It feels just enough to exist but not enough that the writers put any effort into what it actually is or what any of the inspirations are for it.
That leads to the episode’s already overall feel: something bland and without much texture to it, something that is ultimately detrimental to the season and series’ pacing and execution.
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.