Snowpiercer’s Jennifer Connelly Talks Episode 2 Twists: ‘Suspicious’ Melanie ‘Is Always Playing the Long Game’
The following contains spoilers from the July 28 episode of Snowpiercer, now streaming on AMC+.
This week on Snowpiercer, we got to witness exactly what happened when Admiral Milius (Clark Gregg) of the International Peacekeeping Force and his “Animal Crew” first boarded Melanie’s train nine months ago.
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Milius made a beeline for the engine room, and though Melanie acted quick to seal herself off from the unexpected guests, a threat on Ben’s life nudged her to open the door and hear what this Milius had to say.
Milius and a hacker type commandeered the engine room, to steer the train into a turn onto a brand-new set of tracks the IPF had laid down since Snowpiercer’s previous revolution. Melanie and Ben in turn got shoved into a guarded steward room, but later managed to escape using a makeshift projectile launcher (very Captain Kirk vs. Gorn), and then secreted away to Ruth’s old hiding place. Upon learning that a hunrded passengers had been locked inside a market car that was rapidly filling with frigid outside air, Melanie set out to duck outside and crawl along the train’s underside, then re-enter via one of the intake manifolds. She then triggered a failsafe to force open the market car doors.
Snowpiercer star Jennifer Connelly, surveying Melanie’s bold move, told TVLine, “She’s really evolved in the way that she manages her position at the helm. She’s found an interesting balance, I think, between her compassion and her intellect.” As a result, “She’s at her strongest this season.”
“She was more pragmatic in Season 1,” Connelly added. “Having suffered what she thought was the loss of her daughter, she’d compartmentalized to such an extent that she buried a part of herself. But now we have a truer sense of who she is as a person, her compassion and her love.”
Just as Snowpiercer pulled into the subterranean bunker station that IPF calls home, Melanie sneaked back into the engine room and got the drop on Milius’ goon stationed there — but she was led to stand down when Milius arrived with Dr. Nima Rousseau (played by The Americans‘ Michael Aronov), an old colleague of Melanie’s. Nima revealed that he and about 80 other scientists this whole time had been tasked with correcting the government’s mistakes “pioneering the next age for humankind.”
Nima explained that the IPF had an idea to add to and connect the various “warm” spots around the globe (such as New Eden), weaving a veritable blanket around the chilled planet. But Snowpiercer is needed to fulfill that mission, with passengers staying aboard to provide a blue collar workforce.
Melanie agrees with the data driving this theory, if not Milius (and his tactics) at large.
“She is suspicious,” Connelly confirms. “I think that with Nima she is influenced by her prior relationship with him and what she knows of him from the past — and that to some extent in the short term clouds her judgement. But I think that she’s a savvy person, and she is on alert much of the time.”
While Ben, as engineer, sticks with Snowpiercer and its passenger workforce, Melanie stays behind at the bunker, presumably to lend her bean to Nima’s braintrust. But also to gain intel on what exactly is going on.
“She is always playing the long game, trying to calculate scenarios and think a few moves ahead,” says Connelly. “She’s someone who makes difficult decisions because she’s trying to think, big picture, ‘What are the best decisions I can make?’ Although she’s not always capable of doing that, as we’ll see this season.”
Melanie is also driven by seeing, via satellite, proof that New Eden is in fact populated and thriving. Which means good things for Alex, whom she misses so.
“It’s a huge driving force for her, wanting to be reunited with her daughter,” Connelly notes. “First and foremost she wants her daughter to be happy, and to be safe, but ultimately she would love to bring everyone safely together.”
After Melanie and Ben parted ways, the second episode of this final season leaped forward nine months, where Till planned to escape via track scaler and speed to New Eden to warn Layton & Co. of Snowpiercer’s fate. But when members of Milius’ Animal Squad got wind and intervened, it was Miss Audrey — who had been in the midst of wishing her lover safe travels — who instead boarded the track scaler and just barely managed a getaway….
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