La Ron S. Readus
patreon
The Amelia Saga is Actually A Trilogy! (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2021-04-19 20:00:03 +0000 UTCAnyone else have a friend like One One? I have about...3. (Pauses and reflects) I don’t know what that says about me...
_________
Readers, I marathoned books 1 through 3 of Infinity Train to catch myself up before the release of Book 4 on HBO Max, and JESUS CHRIST THIS SHOW IS GREAT
By the time I realized the “gimmick” of the show when it came to the passengers and seeing how Tulip progressed after the second episode, I was all like:
(Stares at computer screen and narrows eyes) Is this Silent Hill for Kids?
Because that’s pretty much the concept of the show being an anthology series; individuals who are dealing with problems in the real world -- whether they’re personal, psychological, or moral -- attract the attention of the train.
/They’re given a number upon entry, and once they start solving puzzles in various train cars and interacting with the inhabitants, they have to work through the problems that got them on the train in the first place in order for their number to decrease./
/And only when it reaches 0 when they reach their moment of enlightenment regarding their problem will a portal open that will allow them to leave and return to the real world, hopefully now changed for the better./
It makes the perfect vehicle -- no pun intended -- for an anthology series, because you can tell so many stories with so many different characters with different personalities and perspectives, each with experiences completely unique to whoever was the focus before them thanks to the train...well, being INFINITE.
But there’s something very unique that books 1 through 3 does in HOW it chooses to be an anthology series that I really appreciated. And that’s pretty much how the first two books set up who was going to be the protagonist for the following one within their own story.
One episode of Book 1 introduces who’s going to be the POV for Book 2, and Book 2 sets up who’s going to be the POV for Book 3; all in ways that naturally flows into the story that the seasons are trying to tell.
And as a result, it makes Books 1, 2 and 3 nicely interwoven with each other in a way that follows the anthology formula of the show, but also allows some form of interconnectivity with the elements that were used and introduced in the previous seasons.
But since Book 4 of Infinity Train takes place BEFORE the events of Book 1, it doesn’t really leave that much interconnectivity between it and Book 3.
But Book 3 is special in its OWN right. Because while it doesn’t introduce a character or an element that’ll play a part in Book 4, it actually does something else; something that better reflects the name of the series. It completes the infinite loop of storytelling of connecting with Book 1, and bringing the three interconnected stories full circle in the form of a trilogy. Allow me to explain.
In Book 1, we’re introduced to Tulip, who gets on the train because she doesn’t want to deal with the changes happening in her life now that her parents are divorced. Over the course of her journey she meets and befriends One One, who -- unbeknownst to her at the time of their meeting -- is the real conductor of the train, and Sir Atticus, the goodest King who ever lived.
/And she’s doing all of this while avoiding Amelia, a passenger who disconnected One One from the train and took over as conductor in order to build a train car that would be a perfect replica of her life with her husband before he died. Sometimes using parts and energy sources from other trains in order to do so./
But before Tulip learns about Amelia and that final encounter happens, she meets her reflection in the Chrome Car.
/And after a bit of trickery on the reflections end because of her want to break free from Tulip’s reflection to be her own person and a bit of talking between the two in order to better understand one another, Tulip helps her reflection accomplish her goal of living a life on her side of the screen and avoid the enforcers of her world. So while Tulip, One One and Atticus continue their Wizard of Oz meets Silent Hill adventure, Tulip’s reflection is now free to explore the train/
So, as if to address this change that happened over the course of Tulip’s adventure, Book 2 features her conscious reflection as the protagonist and starts her on an adventure of her own.
/She meets a magical deer named Alan Dracula along with another passenger Jesse who she later befriends, gives herself the moniker of MT until she chooses the name “Lake” for herself at the end of the adventure, and is on a journey of discovering her own identity separate from her prime -- aka Tulip. This sends her to areas of the train where we as the viewers discover more about the passenger process, such as how passenger tapes are made, discovering that the item Amelia used as a helmet was actually a method of transport to the boarding process for new passengers upon their arrival, and how they get their number./
But MT doesn’t get to that portion of her quest until Alan Dracula, Jesse and herself come face-to-face with Grace, the leader of a gang of destructive kids called the Apex.
/They believe Amelia -- who they only know by her mech form -- is the true conductor of the train, that everything on it is entitled to them, and the non-human residents on them -- who they call Nulls -- don’t matter as a result./
Now because this gang and their beliefs are depicted as just another obstacle for MT to develop her sense of self through and to help Jesse learn to get over his crutch of the acceptance of others at the cost of his sense of morality, their involvement -- especially Grace’s -- is very minimal; just enough for MT and Jesse to grow and learn from it respectively.
/Which is why in Book 3, Grace is the protagonist/
Now as much as I LOVE Book 3 for how it covers its topics, I have MANY opinions about how Grace was used in it that warrant its own video, so I’m not going to delve too much into that aspect.
/But I WILL say that it’s because Grace is the protagonist, and -- as a result -- shines a light on Apex and their beliefs regarding who they think the REAL conductor is, that Book 3 turns the first three seasons of Infinity Train into something that’s rarely displayed in the medium of Television: A Proper Trilogy./
Okay. So, for everyone relatively new to the channel, I have a series I call “A Proper Movie Trilogy.”
In it, I talk about different film trilogies, whether or not they already count as proper trilogies and adjust the third installment in a way that makes the whole trilogy a proper one if it's not. I currently release a new installment once a month, and you can check out the playlist in the annotation on the upper right hand of the screen
/But technically, I’m not wrong; the last third of Book 3 actually follows the formula of what makes a proper trilogy and brings everything full circle to something we initially learned about in Book 1. Something very “blink and you’ll miss it.”/
So the formula of a proper trilogy -- film or otherwise -- is that there has to be an element of the first installment’s plot that plays a significant role in the third in a way that makes all three installments work together as one cohesive story.
From there, you can use the third installment to reveal new information about what's being carried over from the first, and expand upon it in various ways; the most common form being a plot twist.
For the sake of simplicity, I usually call the element taken from the first installment that’s expanded upon in the third a “Thread.” Because the end goal is to use that thread to stitch together all three patches that otherwise would’ve been loosely connected tatters.
And in the case of the first three books of Infinity Train, the thread that was present in Book 1 that’s being carried over in Book 3 to better reinforce the already strong interconnectivity of all three books is Amelia.
/More specifically, Amelia’s “contributions” to the train, and why -- after being defeated by Tulip in Book 1 -- we see her doing what she’s doing in Episode 8 of Book 3/ (So I took control...I’m making amends)
Both Amelia’s presence and this explanation in Book 3 provides two separate yet equally important epiphanies for the first three season’s interconnected story.
Not only does this revelation help challenge the way Grace has perceived the purpose of the train...
/But thanks to Amelia’s discovery of Hazel in regards to her being a Null (she’s one of my failed attempts at making Ulrick) we now have an expansion of a thread that was present in Book 1./
While Amelia was the conductor, she created trains to try and recreate her life before Ulrick died. But as she explained in “The Hey Ho Whoa Car,” they were never correct. And we actually SEE the result of those failed attempts at least twice in Book 1.
The first time is in the episode “The Unfinished Car.”
/There, Tulip and the others enter a car ruled and populated by turtle people in an unfinished cityscape that they’ve adapted to. However, One One -- unbeknown to us being the original conductor -- sees the car as unfinished and proceeds to go about multiple means of trying to fix it before Tulip convinces him that/ (It’s not your fault the car is this way. It just is)
/Then after we learn Amelia is the conductor after seeing her origin in “The Past Car” and learning that the town in the Unfinished Car was supposed to be her college campus, we see how her new attempt at recreating it is going when Tulip decides to challenge her in “The Engine”/ (Unbelievable. Again with the turtles)
So while we learn this information and put together that the turtle people in the Unfinished Car aren’t SUPPOSED to be turtle people and instead PEOPLE people thanks to the context provided by “The Engine,”
/We now see that Hazel -- the Null Grace and Simon thought was a human with a non-glowing number -- is the expansion of the thread that is the information we learned about in The Unfinished Car and The Engine in Book 1 that’s not only a development vehicle for Grace, but also explores more about Amelia’s experiments shown in Book 1 and how they affect the overall livelihood of the train once you take into consideration how the events of Book 3 came to be in the first place/ (She’s the anomaly)
Book 3 brilliantly uses a thread from Book 1 that no one really thought about outside of just being the machinations of an antagonistic passenger that couldn’t let go of the past...
And found a way of not only incorporating it into the development arc of a character originally rooted in prejudice and the like, but also make it better tie in to the stories of an anthology series that’s already pretty nicely interwoven since season 2.
And while Book 4 is great in its own right -- both in Ming-Gi and Ryan’s journey and the “blink and you’ll miss it” clues that let you know that it takes place during Amelia’s initial takeover of the train --
The fact that there’s this finely crafted proper trilogy in this anthology series’ first three seasons that’s ALREADY brilliantly interwoven with each other's stories, is one hell of an accomplishment and a reason to watch this show in its own right.
Also if HBO Max sees that the audience is there, then they may move forward with creator Owen Dennis’ plans of a movie for season 5. So there’s that.
But, I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day:
Write in the comment section below if YOU caught the trilogy element of the first three seasons of Infinity Train
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, what you think of the show if you’ve seen it.
Whichever answer you’d like to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
