Snowpiercer Recap: Who Killed the World?

What an episode of Snowpiercer! A monster (maybe two?) was defeated, another took its place, and we have Jennifer Connelly back! A lot happened this week, and there is a lot to unravel, starting with Layton and Wilford’s attempted escape from the silo’s basement and the army of soldiers coming to kill them both. Though Alex snuck down and gave them a wristband with access to every door, Wilford correctly assumed they deactivated it the moment they realized Alex had stolen it. Without much time before the first of the Admiral’s forces arrive, they split up. Layton starts fighting but is quickly overwhelmed until the leader of the Morlocks he befriended last week helps him barricade the elevator. Meanwhile, Wilford sends Alex away through the air vents, telling her to get on the train and find Melanie; he is leaving his legacy to her. Then Wilford, ever the cool yet despicable bastard, rigs a sonic weapon and uses the power of music to make the soldiers fall to their knees while Layton blows up the door to the staircase, allowing the two enemies-turned-allies to escape and begin the walk up to the surface.

Meanwhile, Melanie finally arrives from her research and gets to work, concerned that the Gemini compound is not ready, but instead is damaging humanity and the atmosphere. She is also the only person we see who talks back at the Admiral and is not intimidated by him. In turn, he does not threaten her or even undermine her authority; instead, he just keeps the events of the last few episodes hidden. Melanie has reason to worry because she discovers that radiation levels have gone up a lot and toxicity is high in the atmosphere. She also immediately realizes that Alex is in the silo after seeing one of her drawings on a notebook and confronts Nima, who confesses to everything — well, almost. It turns out Melanie was sent away as a distraction, so she wouldn’t be around while the Admiral lured Big Alice to the silo using Liana. Of course, this was all Wilford’s plan.

While looking for Alex, Melanie runs into Layton and Wilford, and the three decide it’s time to take down the Admiral, who is abandoning the silo and making off with the trains as his new kingdom. Melanie finds Alex, and they sneak up on board the Snowpiercer; Alex tells her mom about what happened to Ben and about her experiments in New Eden. Layton also gets inside the train, but not before he finds Josie and Liana — who they convince Doctor Headwood to give away.

Wilford heads out to confront the Admiral, telling the others to hold his trains for him. Unsurprisingly, this is easier said than done, with the Admiral catching Wilford and taking him down to the basement again, this time at gunpoint, to watch him freeze to death once and for all. Except, in Wilford’s greatest moment, all of his years doing bizarre experiments on people, injecting who knows what into his bloodstream pays off. In one of the weirdest turns ever in Snowpiercer, Wilford’s frostbite disappears and he starts breathing and acting perfectly fine in the freezing cold.

It turns out that he is now like Josie, a mutant capable of surviving the cold without a problem. This is by far the most sci-fi thing the show has done, and although it would have been nice to see just a little more of how this works exactly, it’s a testament to the writers that they go so hard on the weirdness of it. Wilford overpowers the Admiral, disconnects his suit’s ventilation system, and watches him slowly freeze to death. Admiral Anton Milius’s reach has exceeded its grasp, and after seven episodes of torturing the passengers of Snowpiercer and serving as a thorn in everyone’s side, he dies.

With the Admiral gone, Wilford quickly takes control of the Silo, but it’s too late to stop Snowpiercer, as Nima convinces the remaining soldiers to prioritize the mission over their loyalty to Milius. He was never a poor little weakling under the boot of the Admiral; he was always the one facilitating every one of the Admiral’s moves, all for the sake of his (not their) mission. He doesn’t care about saving humanity as much as he cares about being the one to do it. Melanie confronts the scientist, saying that the radiation caused by Gemini is exponentially worse than when the ozone layer was destroyed; they must delay the launch of the compound. But Nima doesn’t want to hear it; he thinks they will survive the radiation and the nosebleeds, even if Melanie paints a rather bleak future — if Gemini launches, it won’t just counteract the cooling CW-7 agent that froze the world, it will erode the atmosphere and deplete all breathable oxygen before humanity perishes. Granted, her theory is in large part based on the experiments Alex did by sending birds to the edge of New Eren to test the limits of the climate pockets, but as unreliable as they might be, Alex is the only one who got data on the environment from live subjects at high altitudes. But Nima won’t listen to Melanie’s pleas to triple-check the data. He has worked on this project for 15 years and will not have anyone tell him he’s wrong. But wait, you might ask, the freeze only happened nine years ago. How has Nima been working on a warming agent for that long?

It turns out that the only person who realizes the length of Nima’s treachery is Wilford himself, the only other person with an ego and pride to match Nima. Wilford also sneaks onboard Snowpiercer from the outside. He is quite literally immune to all cold but without Icy Bob’s mutant look. But Layton is back there, waiting for him. This is it. After so much pain and suffering and deliciously evil charm, this is the end of Joseph Wilford. Though he tries to plea with Layton not to be a cold-blooded (ironic, I know) killer, Layton doesn’t listen. Rather than shoot him, however, he allows Wilford one last cigarette, which he confesses is laced with poison. He starts rambling about Buddhism and vices, and right before he dies, Wilford leaves us with one last big reveal — Nima was always the threat. Not the Admiral. Not himself. Nima was too proud to see the error of his ways, yet again. It was he who launched CW-7 and froze the world, and now, to correct his mistake, he will make it all burn.

Tailie Thoughts

• The episode begins with narration from the Admiral, and his backstory. Turns out he went mad with power and started doing human trials without authorization. He found out his own wife reported him to his boss, who fired him. In revenge, he literally poisoned the lowest levels of the silo with the Gemini compound, using everyone down there as lab rats, and killing his wife.

• “I’ve never begged for anything in my life. People beg me!” It is very ironic that Wilford said this in the same episode he dies, isn’t it?

• “Do all scientists take an oath of pessimism?”

• It’s unfortunate that Wilford’s death clearly overshadows everything else in the episode, because not only was the death of the Admiral one of the best in the show, but Clark Gregg was a fantastic villain.

• See, what did I say? Just bring back Jennifer Connelly and the show is immediately improved.

• Layton, Josiel, and Liana are left behind in the last car, which is decoupled from Snowpiercer. With only three episodes to go, who could possibly rescue them in time?

• This week’s problem in New Eden: Power is running out while Big Alice is stationed just outside of town unable to come closer without detonating the bombs. Though Javi finds the detonator and freezes it to safely move it, we cut away and see the results of a big explosion near the tracks. Is this also the end of Javi? Could Snowpiercer get any crueler?