Snowpiercer Review: The Original Sinners (Season 3 Episode 10)
Snowpiercer Season 3 Episode 10, “The Original Sinners,” closes out the season on a hopeful note but not before dabbling in frustrating motives and decisions.
It’s hard to come away with anything concrete about this episode because it is so incredibly disjointed and didactic. That is something that is both a bug and a feature. This comes about because there is a very clear split in the episode where it takes on an entirely different tone and vibe.
The first half of this episode is nothing short of infuriating. It’s easy to see what the writers are going for, though. By mounting this escalation between Layton and Melanie — and also Wilford, but there’s less of a focus on that part — the show is trying to draw a parallel between now and the first season. That part of it makes sense.
The problem is the show is doing a lot of gymnastics to get to that point. Snowpiercer wants that conflict and it wants to draw that line to where we’ve been that the tension between them feels fabricated, something this season has also been guilty of when Pike died.
It wants to get to that point and it reverse-engineered this tension between them. If anything, it ends up being a disservice to Melanie. In order to get her to this place and sustain it, the show has to practically chuck stupid pills at her, give her this loose martyr complex, and attach this flimsy excuse for why she wouldn’t want to reach New Eden.
That isn’t even to mention how unbelievable it is that Melanie and Wilford would ever work together in any capacity. These are not cooperative people and that has been proven time and time again and it is galling that the show thinks it would be effective.
If this is all this episode turned out to be, then it would be very bad. Thankfully, the finale takes a nice pivot towards half of the train making way for New Eden. It becomes more a story about free will and agency with dashes of hope thrown in.
In a lot of ways, this is the show closing out one chapter and preparing for the next. It’s closing off arcs and it’s getting away from such train-focused drama. This is most evident through the banishment of Wilford and the death of LJ.
Snowpiercer is clearly done with him, at least for the moment, and that’s for the best. He’s an unsustainable antagonist. The show needs to either kill or redeem him and has struggled against both. It needs him active but doesn’t know what to do with him. As a result, sending him off to pasture is the best compromise.
As for LJ, there’s something tragic in the way that she dies. She’s kind of an antithesis here of John Murphy from The 100, a character who will constantly survive no matter what.
It’s sad because, despite being a raging sociopath, her death is a result of the choices and alliances that she’s made up to this point. Anyone that could have prevented it has either been killed or driven away from her. LJ is a classic case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.
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.