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sidewaysAfter many nervous rumours to the contrary, it's finally been confirmed Infinity Train is getting another season!! I'm really quite excited.
The teaser is tastily devoid of information: a sentence too garbled for me to parse despite many tries ("I'm really" something? "I really miss the world?" "I really miss your" something? "I'm merely Miss Herobe?" lol), followed by an insistent voice asking, "Who are you?"
What does it mean? We just don't know. But I'm sure someone on the internet will have cracked it before long.
I'm not good enough at voices to make a particularly profound stab at who the mysterious speakers are; the hitching delivery of the first voice sounds a little like Hazel, the second could be Jesse at a stretch, but since I can't see much reason for him to re-enter the picture at this point I don't find it the likeliest option. The distortion is reminiscent of Amelia's conductor voice, and the most obvious hook from the third season is Amelia, who was revealed in the last season to be atoning for her mistakes by journeying through the cars to quarantine those she'd corrupted, only to stumble upon Hazel, the sort-of-daughter spawned from her attempts to resurrect her husband. There's a world of plot to be explored there, and it's currently what I'm hoping for most - Amelia is a fascinating character, and such a story promises to dig deeper into the nature of the Train.
Each season (or "book") has peeled another layer away from its mechanisms: first we find out that it helps people; then that it only helps those recognised as people; and at last that it would be better to say that it "helps" people, with all the dubiousness those quote marks imply. It's one of my favourite things about the series - a clever way of creating a story about morality that allows for ample exploration of nuance. Like The Good Place, Infinity Train acknowledges that ethics aren't simple and people are even less so, and any system that tries to cleanly quantify good and bad behaviour will inevitably open itself to deep flaws and unintended consequences. We'll never know who Simon could have become had he not been yanked from his life as a child and left in a chaotic and frequently dangerously dimension to "grow as a person".
We're still a long way away from getting into the fundamental nuts and bolts of the setting, though, and I'm eager for the start of some answers - how did the Train come into existence? Who made it? It's an impossible place that does impossible things, but it's not devoid of logic and it has too rigid and well-defined a purpose for there to have never been a guiding hand at play. One-One's brief breakdown in the first book remains persistently in the back of my mind as one of the earliest hints that the nature of the train is less than wholesome. If they knew it was broken they would have fixed it. They don't need to worry anymore; I'm here to get things back in order. We haven't seen this monotone melding of personalities again, even after One-One's re-ascension to his rightful role as conductor. Perhaps it's nothing more than an automatic response to glitches in the Train's systems and Amelia's meddling, but it's not hard to see it as a reflection of some unknown creator's vision for the Train.
It wouldn't be like this if I had just been better. How can I not try and fix it? It's my fault. Mmmmmhm. Are we really still talking about a single faulty car, One-One?
In any case, really looking forward to whatever this next book holds! And I may have to procure some Infinity Train icons, hmm. In the meantime, another overly friendly robotic ball with a more sinister purpose.
The teaser is tastily devoid of information: a sentence too garbled for me to parse despite many tries ("I'm really" something? "I really miss the world?" "I really miss your" something? "I'm merely Miss Herobe?" lol), followed by an insistent voice asking, "Who are you?"
What does it mean? We just don't know. But I'm sure someone on the internet will have cracked it before long.
I'm not good enough at voices to make a particularly profound stab at who the mysterious speakers are; the hitching delivery of the first voice sounds a little like Hazel, the second could be Jesse at a stretch, but since I can't see much reason for him to re-enter the picture at this point I don't find it the likeliest option. The distortion is reminiscent of Amelia's conductor voice, and the most obvious hook from the third season is Amelia, who was revealed in the last season to be atoning for her mistakes by journeying through the cars to quarantine those she'd corrupted, only to stumble upon Hazel, the sort-of-daughter spawned from her attempts to resurrect her husband. There's a world of plot to be explored there, and it's currently what I'm hoping for most - Amelia is a fascinating character, and such a story promises to dig deeper into the nature of the Train.
Each season (or "book") has peeled another layer away from its mechanisms: first we find out that it helps people; then that it only helps those recognised as people; and at last that it would be better to say that it "helps" people, with all the dubiousness those quote marks imply. It's one of my favourite things about the series - a clever way of creating a story about morality that allows for ample exploration of nuance. Like The Good Place, Infinity Train acknowledges that ethics aren't simple and people are even less so, and any system that tries to cleanly quantify good and bad behaviour will inevitably open itself to deep flaws and unintended consequences. We'll never know who Simon could have become had he not been yanked from his life as a child and left in a chaotic and frequently dangerously dimension to "grow as a person".
We're still a long way away from getting into the fundamental nuts and bolts of the setting, though, and I'm eager for the start of some answers - how did the Train come into existence? Who made it? It's an impossible place that does impossible things, but it's not devoid of logic and it has too rigid and well-defined a purpose for there to have never been a guiding hand at play. One-One's brief breakdown in the first book remains persistently in the back of my mind as one of the earliest hints that the nature of the train is less than wholesome. If they knew it was broken they would have fixed it. They don't need to worry anymore; I'm here to get things back in order. We haven't seen this monotone melding of personalities again, even after One-One's re-ascension to his rightful role as conductor. Perhaps it's nothing more than an automatic response to glitches in the Train's systems and Amelia's meddling, but it's not hard to see it as a reflection of some unknown creator's vision for the Train.
It wouldn't be like this if I had just been better. How can I not try and fix it? It's my fault. Mmmmmhm. Are we really still talking about a single faulty car, One-One?
In any case, really looking forward to whatever this next book holds! And I may have to procure some Infinity Train icons, hmm. In the meantime, another overly friendly robotic ball with a more sinister purpose.
