A reunion and the imminent end of the journey at New Eden is a cause for celebration on the train, but hope is an ephemeral thing when squared against pragmatic truth.

Doing a little rewind, the action flits from Snowpiercer to the small autonomous track vehicle in which – we are unsurprised to find – Melanie Cavill is indeed alive if not all that well. Going back three months, the show explains to us exactly how the genius engineer has managed to survive on her own in the wilderness for so long with no food or water, and it isn’t pretty.

Still, good news all round. The very person whose work pointed the train in the eventual direction of Cape Horn, whose determination to bring hope to the people brought her to loggerheads with her former boss who left her to die in the cold, is returned to see the end of the journey. There’s only one small problem – she’s not wholly convinced by the data.

I had the feeling when Melanie re-appeared that it wouldn’t necessarily be the great thing everyone on the train expected. There’s the tearful reunions with Alex and Ben, sure, but there’s a glint in that steely blue gaze from the moment she’s properly awake and upright which says that Melanie didn’t come back to play nice. She’s a rationalist first and foremost, and she isn’t ready to take on faith what everyone else has from Layton.

Still, a party is organised as the train prepares for its last trip past the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and Ruth throws caution to the wind in its preparation, pulling out all the stops. The train is united in hope and happiness, so of course it cannot possibly last.

LJ is once again up to no good, and when Oz tries to confront her about whatever she’s up to, it… doesn’t end well. Suffice it to say that any glimmer of hope Oz or we the audience might have had that love would change LJ has been in apparent vain – she’s still the same vicious sadist she’s always been, and she’s loyal to whatever will give her the power and station she constantly craves.

We also start to see the hints of exactly what might be going on under Layton’s nose, and once again this leaves me uncomfortable about Audrey’s new closeness to Bess. Bess is a trusting, decent soul who wants to see the best in Audrey, and in fairness Audrey genuinely helped both Layton and her. But with so much plotting going on in the shadows, it feels impossible to trust this new/old Audrey too much, and I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When things do start going wrong, it happens very quickly indeed. Stripping hope from people who aren’t traditionally accustomed to having it in the first place seems like a particularly dangerous play, and it feels like if anything, Snowpiercer may be about to devolve into even more warring factions than usual.

Verdict: Tense, with a sense of inevitability as to its direction of travel. Sets things up nicely for the season finale. 8/10

Greg D. Smith