All about Melanie

After a couple of episodes of her absence from Snowpiercer, and the awful revelation last week that her ‘pings’ had stopped, the show takes the opportunity to catch up with exactly what Melanie has been up to, from when she left the train up to the present day. On the way, it also fills us in on some of the details as to how exactly Melanie came to steal Wilford’s train from him and why.

The way in which this is laid out is fairly familiar to anyone who’s watched/ read/ listened to genre fiction of this type before. Stranded alone in an abandoned research station in the midst of a frozen wilderness with only her ingenuity to rely upon, Melanie is faced with challenges which are both physical and mental. And the longer she’s alone, fighting against the odds, the more she finds herself drifting, haunted by avatars of people she knows as she talks away to herself.

It’s through these ‘conversations’ that we perhaps get the best look at exactly what Melanie Cavill the person thinks of herself. It’s clear already that Wilford is a monster by any measure, let alone in comparison to Melanie, but it’s also clear that that isn’t a good enough defence in her mind for some of the things that she’s done over the years. Snowpiercer under Melanie’s control may have been fairer than it might have been under the auspices of Wilford himself, but that’s not necessarily saying much, given that when we came in, after several years of that rule, the Tailees were getting ready to plan their next revolution as they starved in the Tail while First Class lived the high life.

Not only that, it’s also clear that whatever defences she may offer to others, Melanie has never forgiven herself for leaving her daughter behind when Snowpiercer set off. But we get some interesting context there as well, via the series of flashbacks the episode delivers of the world leading up to Snowpiercer’s departure. What’s clear from these (if anything, a little overdone) is that if we thought Wilford was bad in the present, he was always a monstrous individual from the beginning, Snowpiercer merely a vanity project rather than a genuine attempt at saving humanity.

That gives valuable context to the plan Melanie and Ben hatched to steal the train from him, but it also leaves Melanie, if anything, as an even greyer character from a moral perspective. It’s all very well that she had this burst of humanity that drove her to take the train from its despotic owner, but she still worked for a man who was clearly maladjusted for quite some time, even in spite of his multiple outbursts and even threats against her.

It leaves the whole episode tonally slightly odd. Clearly it wants us to sympathise with Melanie’s current plight and battle against the odds to deliver data that may lead to the salvation of all humanity. But it also puts enough in there to temper that sympathy, and make us ask just how good a person she really can be, with so much blood on her hands in one way or another. It’s a conversation, in a way, about whether someone is righteous just by dint of opposing tyranny, even when their own rule is tyrannical, albeit less so. Perhaps it’s a dialogue with the viewer about the relative nature of morality, the dangers of believing in one’s own righteousness too much. Perhaps, to paraphrase a genre philosophical musing from elsewhere, Melanie has simply lived long enough to see herself become a villain of sorts.

Verdict: A strong instalment capably held for the most part by Jennifer Connolly on her own acting her socks off. 9/10

Greg D. Smith