Summary
Chaos erupts in “Our Answer for Everything”, as everyone is forced to choose a side and further carnage seems right around the corner.
Bess Till narrates the opening of “Our Answer for Everything”, which suggests she’s going to get her long-overdue focus after an episode wisely spent focusing on Melanie. That’s partly the case, as she does get involved in the rather significant matter of finding out who killed the Breachmen, but there’s much more going on here than that. An all-out war is on the near horizon, and sides are being chosen left and right. This week’s hour gives us plenty of development in various subplots and character arcs, positioning the major players on opposing sides, and leaving several in the middle.
But since the episode starts with Till, we will too. After finding a vintage Wilford putting near the corpse of a fallen Breachman, she traces it back to a kindly old woman who swapped a coat with a first-class passenger. From there, she’s led back, predictably, to Pastor Logan, who considers eight murders to be a small price to pay for peace. But peace isn’t on his agenda, since he and Till fight; when he gets a moment, he flees and tries to kill himself by pumping the frigid outside air into a sealed bag around his head, but Till yanks him free with half of his face still thawed. Whether or not he survives isn’t confirmed in Snowpiercer season 2, episode 7, but he certainly doesn’t look well.
There’s nothing to be gained in this subplot, really. Logan being instrumental to Wilford’s plot isn’t all that surprising, and the thread spares little time for Till’s interiority. She still feels somewhat wasted as a device for moving the plot along rather than a well-rounded character in her own right, and “Our Answer for Everything” only exacerbates that feeling by having Till’s arc share space with Ruth’s, which is much more interesting.
Continuing her season-long development, Ruth experiences even more growth than usual here when the Tailies begin to be targeted as revenge for the death of the Breachmen, and she’s forced to shelter with a handful in the medical wing. Among them is a little girl whose mother she sentenced to de-arming back in Season 1 — complications from that punishment led to her death, and the child, Minnie, is terrified of Ruth as a result. Ruth, who always had the advantage of leaving the Tail after causing chaos in it, is appalled by this; her complicity in upholding the rules, doing what she thought was right, is something she now recognizes as being deeply wrong, which she explains to Minnie when she tracks her down after she does a runner. A tearful Alison Wright is excellent here, totally selling Ruth’s horror at seeing, perhaps for the first time, the human cost of slavish devotion to the Wilford ideal. Her means of atoning is accompanying Layton to the Tail, where a shaven-headed, drugged-up and thoroughly unstable Pike has been taken hostage. Layton offers his own arm in exchange, but Ruth intervenes on his behalf. This, she claims, is not the way to create change — at least not anymore. She has turned a corner here.
Speaking of which, Audrey seems to transition in the opposite direction. Still aboard Big Alice, Wilford finds the screwdriver she was hiding for her secret mission and doesn’t believe her excuses for having it. To prove herself, he leads her to Kevin, who apparently survived his suicide attempt but at the cost of his sanity. He needs her to fix him, which she does by convincing Kevin that what happened was just Wilford’s confusing way of showing affection. She turns the lights off to help him “reconnect with what he has lost”, which entails reiterating that he owes Wilford everything. In so doing, she basically turns him into an obedient little slave, summoning him with a click of her fingers and giving him a girl boss walking tour through Big Alice right back to Wilford’s private quarters. There, she makes him kneel before his master and lick his slippers, which he seems to rather enjoy. She sits astride Wilford and kisses him, seeming reinvigorated. Has she switched allegiances for good?
“Our Answer for Everything” ends with Snowpiercer winding around a mountainous roundabout, the red lights in its windows clearly visible to Big Alice — a clear call for Wilford, whose return seems imminent. Even smugger than ever, he orders Icy Bob to be prepped. It’s time. But for what?
