After two episodes of Snowpiercer minus Melanie Cavill, it was inevitable that there would be an episode devoted to her and “Many Miles From Snowpiercer” is her showcase, as well as a chance for Jennifer Connolly to yet again convince me to invest in her character.
Why do I dislike Melanie? Because Snowpiercer works best as an ensemble. When Melanie is front and center, she’s sucks up all the plot from the others. (To say nothing of her not being called on her crimes over the past seven years.)
And, yet, Melanie’s struggles in Snowpiercer Season 2 to connect with her teenage daughter and her adamant opposition to Wilford have been compelling. Let’s see what we learned from her struggles at the weather station:
1. Melanie didn’t abandon her daughter.
Yes, Melanie did order Snowpiercer to depart before Alex and her grandparents were aboard. However, as we see in the flashbacks in “Many Miles From Snowpiercer,” the train was due to depart in only minutes in any case. We also know that Melanie’s parents refused to leave with the team sent to retrieve them and Alex.
It’s clear that given who Wilford is, he would have departed on his original timetable and that would still have meant leaving Alex and her grandparents behind.
In a way, Melanie’s theft of the train saved Alex. Wilford rescued Alex so that he could use her against her mother. Had Melanie never stolen the train, her life would have meant nothing to him, and he wouldn’t have made any effort to include Alex on Big Alice.
2. Melanie does feel guilty about the Tailies.
It’s a question I’ve pondered all season: how does Melanie justify her treatment of the Tailies? Answer: she doesn’t. In one of her hallucinations in this episode, Layton taunts her about what she’d forced the Tailies to do to survive, including resorting to cannibalism.
The question remains as to why Melanie didn’t act to alter the train’s dynamics before Layton’s revolution. As I’ve pondered previously, if she hated what Wilford had done to her vision for the train, why did she run the train almost exactly the way Wilford would have?
The narrative finally acknowledging this issue is a good sign that it won’t be forgotten.
3. The color red returns.
Once again, the settings are mostly two-tone, with one major exception.
The weather station that Melanie enters is eternally gray, with shadows in all its corners, including the shades of those who died there. The world outside is eternally the bleakness of white.
But the weather balloons that are released to gather the data to bring hope to humanity are bright red, a garish splotch of color against the neverending gray and white. Of course, they also have a big “W” for Wilford on them. Perhaps that’s a signal that the future is cloudy, despite the hope that the balloons bring.
The red balloons also harken back to the famous 1956 French film, the Red Balloon, in which a boy chases a supposedly sentient balloon. If you’re a person of a certain age, like me, you likely saw this film in elementary school more than once.
4. If rats can survive, humanity has hope.
In this episode, Melanie tracks the rat who’s been eating her food to a heat vent that’s opened in the caves under the weather station. The rats have thrived there. The implication is that humanity perhaps could survive there as well. Certainly, Melanie can live another month like the rats. It also opens the possibility of other heat vents across the world that humanity might colonize.
However, that Snowpiercer zooms past her at the end of the episode is a sign that Wilford has seized control of the train, at least temporarily.
5. Dangling plot element: whatever happened to the drawers?
As Melanie explores the weather station, she stumbles across the bodies of those who manned it until their power vanished and they froze to death. At least, some of them froze to death. The supposed death of the planet and humanity took its toll on the operators, leading to a wife shooting her husband to spare him further pain and preserve their meager supplies.
Continued belowThat’s exactly the choice Melanie faced: abandon someone she cared about for the greater good.
But Melanie also hedged her bets by using the drawers to put people in, well, storage, until such time as the situation outside changed. Given Melanie tried to include geneticists on the train, she’s well aware that humanity needs as many people’s genes as possible to survive in the long term. The Revolution brought these people back to consciousness but, so far, we’ve seen few reactions to what they think about their time in limbo.
Do the drawers remain? Will they have to be used again? Or is the show simply dropping that element?
We’ve four episodes to go to see what answers are provided.
