Warning: SPOILERS for Snowpiercer Season 1, Episode 2 - "Prepare To Brace"
An extinction-level event befalls Snowpiercer in episode 2, "Prepare to Brace," and it threatens the future of every soul aboard the Great Ark Train. Based upon the French graphic novels and the 2013 film directed by Academy Award-winner Bong Joon Ho (Parasite), TNT's Snowpiercer series is set in a different continuity entirely. While key elements of the film, such as the Tail section plotting a revolution to take the train's engine, are in play (but will happen differently), the Snowpiercer TV show is also setting up extensive world-building, which leads to intriguing but harrowing new dilemmas.
According to Snowpiercer's TV mythology, scientists' plans to prevent climate change resulted in the Earth becoming a frozen wasteland almost 7 years before the train departed, harboring the last 3,000 survivors of the human race. Every other living creature on the planet froze to death. "Prepare to Brace" revealed some details about how Snowpiercer's Engine Eternal functions. Snowpiercer is 1,001 cars long, but the Great Ark Train can never stop circumnavigating the globe on 200,000 miles of track. The train's speed and its perpetual revolutions around the planet are how Snowpiercer generates its power and electricity; if the convoy reduces acceleration below certain levels, sections of the train lose power and are forced into rolling blackouts. However, Snowpiercer's necessary speed becomes a problem in parts of the planet's frozen environment, as "Prepare to Brace" proved when the train barreled past a dangerous stretch of mountains where the 1,001 cars are known to trigger avalanches.
In "Prepare to Brace," Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs), a Tailie who was unwillingly recruited to become the Train Detective and solve a gruesome murder, followed the clues to the section of Snowpiercer where livestock are kept and bred. Layton and his reluctant partner, Brakeman Bess Till (Mickey Sumner), tracked the murder weapons, which pointed to the cleavers the train's butchers use. However, an avalanche struck Snowpiercer and smashed the windows of the livestock cars: all of the cows aboard instantly froze to death in 140 degrees-below-zero temperatures. This was a devastating loss for Snowpiercer. Worse, the Head of Hospitality, Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), who secretly runs the entire train in the name of the mysterious (and possibly non-existent) billionaire Mr. Wilford, admitted that the deaths of Snowpiercer's livestock are an extinction-level event.
Snowpiercer is indeed an ark, and whatever they brought aboard is all humanity has left. The death of the train's cows means that cows are now extinct on Earth. Tragically, the ramifications of the cows' eradication go beyond no more steaks, hamburgers, or beef for ramen noodles enjoyed throughout Snowpiercer's 1,001 cars. As Melanie's closest friends Bennett Knox (Iddo Goldberg) and Jinju Seong (Susan Park) grimly assessed, the cows also provided bovine cultures and methane and even the cows' manure was necessary and recycled. All of that is now gone forever from Snowpiercer and from the Earth itself.
Tragically, the cows' extinction also pushes the human race one step closer towards extinction as well. The ramifications of this loss will last throughout Snowpiercer season 1 and into season 2, which is guaranteed to happen thanks to an early renewal by TNT. Worse, it's possible that Snowpiercer's passengers, especially in the ragged and desperate Tail Section, may resort to a gruesome substitute for beef - cannibalism - something that Layton said had already happened before among the Tailies. Morale on Snowpiercer, from the Tail to Third Class all the way to the luxurious First Class, is already hanging on by a thread, and the extinction-level event may already be an early tipping point towards anarchy aboard the Great Ark Train.
Snowpiercer airs Sundays @ 9pm on TNT.