The arrival of Mr Wilford risks Layton’s newly established order all over again.

The first season of Snowpiercer delivered excellent action and drama, and ended on just about a perfect cliffhanger, as we found out that Melanie’s daughter Alex was very much alive after all before the screen faded to black and the credits rolled. This opener for season 2 picks up literally where we left off, and it doesn’t waste much time at all.

Big Alice, the maintenance engine that Wilford and his cohorts have been running around in for the last few years, has Snowpiercer in a vice-like grip, and having overridden their systems, Wilford has the train at his mercy and makes swift use of the fact. Faced with the choice of either co-operating with his demands or letting the whole train freeze to death, Layton makes the obvious choice – but there’s a wild card in the mix of course, with Melanie still outside.

Mostly this is an establishing episode – it needs to do a lot of work in getting us up to speed with how this rapid change of circumstances affects the balance of power, it needs to introduce Wilford and it needs to give us answers about how Alex is still alive. The clever part is doing all this while still driving forward an engaging narrative rather than feeling like a laundry list is being checked off. So we know that the Tail has now become a border between the two trains, we find out the kind of person Wilford is and the sort of hold he has on Alex, we get a bit more of a glimpse at the sort of strength that lies beneath Melanie’s oh-so-placid exterior and we get a lot of politics.

After all, the upper classes and the hospitality staff on Snowpiercer aren’t exactly happy at the prospect of democracy on the train, any more than the Tailees are at the prospect it may be taken away from them by this unexpected turn of events. And a train that’s nearly one thousand carriages long and full of people justifiably might feel that it doesn’t have to bend the knee to a train with forty. But the raw numbers aren’t the only thing to be concerned with, as they find out to their cost.

Layton has other problems closer to home as well – his personal life is always waiting to bite him in more ways than one, and his uneasy alliance with Ruth feels like it might be even more brittle than he might have hoped for, especially now her beloved Mr Wilford has metaphorically risen from the dead.

All the attention of course will rest on Sean Bean as Mr Wilford, and it’s true that the actor is clearly having a great time playing the calm, vengeful character. But plaudits must extend to Rowan Blanchard as Alex – here is a character with so much complexity, furious at her mother for her ‘betrayal’ and for her perception that she was abandoned by her, but also insatiably curious, quietly impressed by that steel in her mother and undeniably cut from the same cloth. It’s a great, understated performance and the chemistry between Blanchard and Jennifer Connelly promises great things for the episodes to come.

Verdict: Back on board and full speed ahead. Any qualms I might have had about how well the show could manage another season are laid to rest in this excellent opener. 9/10

Greg D. Smith