(At Least) Two Deaths and a Chilling Reveal About Who Caused the Big Freeze!
Snowpiercer is leaving nothing on the field, as it heads into its final three episodes ever.
This Sunday night’s episode, the seventh of the farewell season’s 10, returned Melanie to the silo, where Milius did his best to keep her in the dark about the ugliness that transpired in her absence. Luckily, Nima has a far worse poker face and is more simpatico with Melanie on a professional level, so he was quick to blab that Alex is also at the silo, on one of the decommissioned floors.
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As Melanie made tracks to find her daughter, Layton and Wilford worked to pick off grunts who tried to take the elevator down to capture/kill them. Wilford worked with Alex to slap together a sonic weapon of sorts that deafened arriving troops with, well, rock music — before which he urged Alex to escape via the air vents. Layton meanwhile used an acquired grenade to blast the lock on the stairwell door, and then started ascending. Along the way, he bumped into Melanie, and shortly thereafter Melanie reunited with Alex.
Wilford made his way to the control room and began barking orders about what to with with Snowpiercer pulling up to the silo, only to have Milius get the drop on him. The admiral — whose deplorable backstory we got in the cold open (tl;dr as a disgruntled captain he trapped Admiral Chang and her team on 3, before flooding it with gas to use them as human test subjects) — led Wilford to a level that had been rendered lethally cold. Milius donned a snowsuit, but Wilford was unprotected and quickly began to freeze to death. Until he didn’t. Wilford “thawed” and ripped away Milius’ breathing tube, and then removed the admiral’s helmet so that he instead would be left exposed. (It was later confirmed that Wilford used a transfusion from Josie, glimpsed last week, to make himself also impervious to cold.)
Layton reunited with Josie and then Liana (thanks to a sympathetic Hedwig), and they boarded Snowpiercer. Alex and Melanie did same, setting the stage the former to delicately apprise her mom of Ben’s heroic death; Melanie, though so strong, couldn’t help but break down sobbing. Layton wound up in a confrontation in the last car with Wilford, who’d weathered the outside to board the train from the back. Layton wrested Milius’ gun from Wilford and was poised to put him down once and for all. Wilford asked one last act of kindess, to light up. He the revealed that his cigar was laced with poison, to afford him a slow, gentle death.
Near the engine, meanwhile, Melanie found Nima and alerted him to the fact that Gemini was not ready to be deployed into the atmosphere — that per Alex’s tests with the bird, it would destroy all oxygen and kill off humankind once and for all. In the tail, a dying Wilford spoke of how there was one X factor that Layton & Co. had not accounted for — pride. Dr. Nima’s pride, specifically. As Wilford spoke, we saw Nima debate Melanie over Gemini’s readiness, growing more and more agitated and defiant, roaring that he has 15 years of research to back up his findings.
Wait, 15 years? But the Freeze only happened nine years ago, Melanie noted.
Wilford, with his dying breaths, told Layton that Nima’s bad science was responsible for freezing this big blue marble in the first place, and now his pride won’t let anything stand in the way of him fixing things. Nima slipped on a mask before cracking open a gas canister to knock Melanie out, reassuring her that she will wake up to a new world….
Meanwhile at New Eden, Big Alice announced her imminent arrival but Javi beckoned them to hit the brakes, seeing as they don’t know what might trigger the bombs planted in the mountainside. Javi led a team to sweep the tracks, and shortly after he iced over one device before extricating it, Ruth from Big Alice’s engine window heard and saw an explosion at the far end of the bridge where Javi had just been standing….
What did you think of Snowpiercer Season 4, Episode 7, and its many major developments?
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