Spoilers ahead for the Season 3 premiere of Snowpiercer on TNT.
Snowpiercer hopped back and forth between both trains in the Season 3 premiere, and of course, followed up on the big cliffhanger in Season 2 about the Earth warming up. A rescue mission forced a chunk of the episode to take place outside the trains and nearly saw Daveed Diggs’ Andre Layton lose his life. Andre pulled through by the episode’s end but came back with a strange vision that viewers will undoubtedly have a lot of questions about.
I spoke to Snowpiercer executive producer and director Christoph Schrewe about the overall tone of Season 3 and how it compares to previous seasons. Schrewe was happy to lay out the road that the series has traveled thus far and how that all culminates in the action in Season 3:
What we try to do every season is to amp it up. I think the show really found its voice towards the end of Season 1. And then, in Season 2, we tried to put all this knowledge together and push it as far as we could. And I loved it. It was a massive thrill ride. And then, for Season 3, that means you can't do this exactly the same. You want to continue because there's a DNA to the show, the energy, the characters, their stories. But then we were looking for kind of a way to just increase the energy, to add more action, to just put everything more on the edge and just amplify the thrill ride on the one side. And on the other side, digging really deep into what it means if you are out there for survival.
Snowpiercer is about life on the train, but with Season 2’s revelation that life on the outside could be possible, it’s obvious Season 3 will continue to work more towards that storyline. This is especially true with the arrival of a new passenger who lived life outside the train, who should be thanking her stars that she ended up on Snowpiercer and not Wilford’s Big Alice. Daveed Diggs once described Wilford’s train as an “alternate dimension,” and based on what’s shown in the premiere, that’s not an inaccurate description.
Unfortunately, Snowpiercer viewers didn’t get to see Layton and Wilford interact (despite Daveed Diggs’ positive comments about working with Sean Bean). What they did see is Layton nearly died out in the wilderness and experienced a vision of a giant tree and desert area. The moment stuck with him long after his return to Snowpiercer, and Schrewe teased a bit about where that’s headed as Season 3 continues.
I think the big point is that Layton has a vision at the end of the first episode, and his vision is there might be life outside of this train. That brings a lot of questions because how far are you ready to go for your vision? What are you ready to risk? And so the characters are on a completely new journey with some hope outside and a lot of horrors inside.
Andre Layton’s vision didn't involve anything like him rapping or some other Hamilton reference, and while a tree might not be as cool as that, it does set Season 3 on a course with the feasibility of life outside the train. I’m eager to see if that’s really possible, especially with Wilford determined to re-attach Big Alice to Snowpiercer should he get the opportunity.
Snowpiercer Season 3 airs over at TNT on Mondays at 9:00 p.m. ET. It’s just one of many shows for fans of Daveed Diggs to watch, though I’d argue Snowpiercer is one of the must-watch returning tv shows for people to catch in 2022.
