Summary
Mr. Wilford takes center stage in a solid episode juggling multiple subplots.
I wouldn’t say that “Bell the Cat” is entirely Mr. Wilford-centric, but it’s close enough. Episode 6 splits its focus more than any prior installment of Snowpiercer Season 4, bouncing around between the Silo, Big Alice, and New Eden, but it burns Wilford’s charisma for fuel. It isn’t quite the redemption arc for the long-time series Big Bad, but it does suggest he might be a necessary evil in the face of an even darker threat.
Wilford’s a great character. That isn’t exactly a new revelation but it’s really apparent here because the introduction of the IPF and the demotion of Wilford from any kind of authority like he had aboard Big Alice and Snowpiercer puts him in an interesting position. You see his actual expertise and utility here in a way we haven’t very often before, and you get a real glimpse of how he might have ascended to power in the first place.
But we’ll get to Wilford properly in a minute.
Big Alice
At the end of Episode 5, Snowpiercer separated from Big Alice thanks to Ben’s heroic self-sacrifice, and there is a bit of a funereal quality to “Bell the Cat” on the back of that. It also means that we have multiple characters in different locations, but the least attention is paid to those aboard Big Alice, so we’ll cover that first.
The lack of time spent here is understandable since all the locomotive is doing is chugging along back to New Eden. But it finds Ruth in a new state of defeat. Till assumes that New Eden’s elected representative will have something meaningful to say to the passengers, some of whom were liberated from Snowpiercer after being in service to Milius’s men, but she has nothing. Zilch.
And it’s easy to see why. Ben is dead. Alex is in the Silo. She’s returning to New Eden without any key personnel who could keep the community running on a technical level. What she imagined as a proud return after a successful mission is proving to be anything but.
New Eden
Speaking of New Eden, things aren’t looking especially positive there anyway. Roche is still missing after he disappeared at the end of Episode 4, and Oz is still determined to find him. Instead, he finds Whiggins.
Whiggins claims to have been held captive, but he’s obviously holding something back. It’s decided among New Eden’s remaining leadership to interrogate him for the truth about what happened to Roche and what the IPF have planned for the community, and Oz volunteers himself as an inside man. Whiggins was not a Tailie, but a Night Car regular with particular… interests. Oz can relate.
In what should be a thoroughly ridiculous scene that is nonetheless played with complete seriousness, a foot rub turns dangerously ticklish, and Whiggins gives up what he knows — which is very little. But he does know what caused the avalanche. It was the IPF digging graves along the mountain. The idea that Zarah’s death was an unfortunate accident doesn’t really hold much water anymore.
Human Resources
Snowpiercer | Image via AMC/Netflix
Back at the Silo, Alex remains the smartest character in the room, even when she’s sharing one with Nima, who is the only other contender. She deduces based on Big Alice’s escape that the de-coupling must have been handled by an engineer, and Nima is forced to confirm his fate. But this isn’t the only thing Nima has to reveal.
The IPF has been experimenting on human test subjects in their Gemini research. After an “outbreak”, several floors of the Silo were sealed off, trapping the subjects down there to fend for themselves. As we see later, they boast toxic gas scars. The darkness of the IPF runs much deeper than we first imagined, and their ostensibly altruistic goal has had a real human cost.
Layton and Wilford Reluctantly Team Up
It’s on these sealed floors that Layton wakes up, and it’s also here that Wilford is sent on what Milius calls a “sample run” but what is really an assassination attempt. Milius is hoping that Layton or one of the surviving former subjects kills Wilford while he’s down there and takes the man off his hands, but no such luck.
Throughout Snowpiercer Season 4, Episode 6, we see how Wilford has exerted his skills in secret, making himself useful to the IPF with his engineering talents while quietly charming and gaining the loyalty of several of Milius’s men, including Wolf. He won’t be so easy to kill.
And he has leverage over Layton — he knows where Liana is, or at least claims to. Milius has made a serious tactical error by trying to condemn his two most dangerous enemies to the same fate. The last thing he expected was that they would start working together.
You can feel the walls closing in around Milius by the end of “Bell the Cat”, and you can also see him struggling to deal with it. The episode ends with him claiming that Melanie is due back, which should shake up the status quo a little. But given we haven’t seen Melanie for almost the entire season, it’s impossible to know which side of the conflict she’s even on these days.
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