#infinity train analysis

In The Twin Tapes, we see Ryan's always had a passion for music along with his friend, Min. At age six, it seems like Ryan was the lead singer while Min provided the music.

Later we see Ryan with his guitar implying that he got it when he was 11 or 12.

Now, (apart from episodes 2-5) Ryan is always since carrying/playing his guitar. He often also sings while playing it and seems to enjoy it. Based on this, it's obvious that the guitar brings Ryan a lot of comfort and enjoyment

At the beginning of The Iceberg Car, when him and Min get on the train one of Ryan’s immediate thoughts is “where’s my guitar?”, like I said earlier he always has his guitar with him so, ofc it stresses him out to not have it/not know where it is.

Later in the beginning of The Party Car, Min and Ryan get their belongings back and Ryan obviously very happy to have his guitar back even calling it his “baby” and kisses it. Ryan plays with it throughout the episode (in the green room with Min, on the stage, then in the bathroom with Min). Ryan appears to be much happier than the previous episodes now that he has his guitar back.

Ryan plays with it at the beginning of The Art Gallery Car singing Lion Tamer and is noticeably very happy while discussing music with Min (hehe that doesn’t last long).

In the next episode, The Mega Maze Car, Min and Ryan are both on edge with the whole Ryan getting his exit and almost leaving Min to die thing. While in the maze, Ryan is now playing his guitar and singing obviously as an attempt to cheer himself up about the current situation which ofc doesn’t work so he puts it away.

Even after putting it away he still holds it closely to him as him and Min have their heart-to-heart conversation, holding the case strap rather tightly. He still finds comfort in his guitar even if he isn’t actually playing with it.

Now on to the last episode, The Train to Nowhere, one interesting detail is how far Ryan puts his guitar away from him like in this shot. Right now, Ryan is at his lowest point and this time, he feels completely useless and doesn’t feel like he deserves to be happy. He doesn’t even try to cheer himself up like in The Mega Maze Car. He isn’t playing with it or even holding on to it, it’s completely far away from him.

After, Min tells him he still wants to play with him the two start playing with their instruments. Later, at the end the two perform at New York and they’re having a great time.

So the first big question surrounds the legitimacy of the Docent- whether it even belongs to the art gallery or if it's a foreign element like when a Ghom sneaks onto a car.

The main thing indicating something's wrong with it is the sheer violence implied by the fact it's made up with hands with numbers- but when you move beyond that grotesquery, it does seem to be native to the gallery car. There's a sign acknowledging its presence, and it follows an ironic logic; if you touch the art, it comes out of the art, touches you back, robs you of what you used to interfere with the art. On paper, it tracks as the sort of concept One would come up with.

But many of the specific details of it's behavior don't quite mesh with the car it's in, or the overall "rules" of the train.

For a car that's themed around taking your time and exploring all the angles, The Docent introduces a weird time pressure. Ryan trying to use the paintings as a portal is intuitive, and very in line with the kind of thinking the car is trying to encourage. Just touching the paintings is something most passengers are gonna do in the course of investigating the room. Once it's bearing down on you, you probably aren't gonna figure out the door puzzle unless you happen to be right next to it, like Min was, and it's a pretty big gallery. Most people who go up against this thing are gonna die; the only reason it took so long to attack Min-gi is that, either by preference or as another rule of engagement, it wanted to wait till he was alone. Most passengers enter alone- Ryan and Min-gi are remarked on as unusual situation, they present more work than usual.

The second incongruous element is the emotion control thing. That's a weird power for this thing to have, given how the train works and how passengers work. I think the Docent is the only thing on the train that we've seen supernaturally inhibit or influence the judgement of a passenger. In every other situation there might be a physical threat, but the minds of the Passengers are left unclouded so that they can apply what they're learning. Min and Ryan weren't going to learn anything from what the Docent was doing to them. The only goal seemed to be to split them off so it could kill them.

Then there's the hand thing. It isn't made of arms - there's a couple shots where you can see a sort of shadowy material inside it that's acting like the glue holding the arms together. The arms are presumably trophies that it took of dead passengers and arraigned on it's own body.  You know, like the abstract art it's spent it's whole existence surrounded with.

Lastly, you get to the meta level- in a season where every single antagonist is a denizen, it's got a noticeably more involved concept and design, and it was introduced in the seventh episode. Everything introduced in the seventh episode becomes important down the line- Lake in Season one, The Apex in Season 2, Amelia as a springboard for Hazel's future in season 3. This thing was slated to be important.

So at this point I'm going to back off and discuss the themes of the show as a whole as I see them.

As a whole, Infinity Train is an examination and deconstruction of stories like The Wizard of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Over the Garden Wall. Each book has dug into a specific failure of the train's premise, and a broader way that stories in this subgenre could potentially go off the rails.

Season One is a fairly straightforward adventure in the subgenre, but it still goes out of its way to demonstrate that the Train's judgement isn't infallible. Tulip’s anger at being manipulated by an unseen judge is validated by the narrative, and, more broadly, the train onboards a passenger who's smart enough and dangerous enough to buck the system and overthrow the conductor. It's about what would happen if Dorothy got sick of taking arbitrary marching orders from the Wizard and usurped him, to become the man behind the curtain.

Season Two follows a supporting party member- a tin man, a scarecrow, a NPC who was created off-the-cuff to give a passenger a one-and-done opportunity to be kind to something. The season is about what would happen if such a character decides to assert their own personhood, when they meet a "protagonist" who bucks genre convention and becomes so invested in their success that it nearly destroys the narrative logic the train is running on.

Season 3 is about how it's not a given that the "protagonists" are going to realize what sort of adventure they're supposed to be on. It's very possible for passengers to misinterpret how the system works, and when you put literal children in a "Phantom Tollbooth" situation, they're going to be incredibly vulnerable to emotional manipulation and predation. (The Oz comparison sort of writes itself here; there's only one witch alive at the end of that movie for a reason. Wicked milked a whole musical out of this concept.)

Season Four has the deconstruction less front and center, but it touched on a general assumption made by stories like The Wizard of Oz- that the supporting cast is going to be fine and dandy when the protagonist completes their journey and heads home. Kez and Morgan aren't fine. They haven't moved on from Jeremy's adventure, and they can't take it as a flat victory that they were able to get him home; by design, they didn't have much in their lives besides him. The "life-affirming-adventure" model has psychologically broken Morgan because this has just happened again and again, even to people who would have stayed with her given the choice.

( I say stories like the Wizard of Oz because Oz proper actually addressed in the sequels that there were a lot of political problems caused by Dorothy's abrupt departure, and it's treated as a triumph when she's able to make her way back and settle in for the long haul to help fix things. This is a digression. I love Oz.)

There were other takes on this narrative kicked around during the AMA. Dennis mentioned they were working on a book about a passenger who refused to leave when the adventure was over, and a book about an elderly passenger who couldn't engage with the train in the intended way due to Alzheimer's inhibiting his memory retention. But the pattern is clear; each season is a deep-dive into a specific assumption or convention present in stories like these.

 Something they never did a deep dive into is the plight of the Talking Trees.

(A picture of Marcel, a minor antagonist from book 2 of Infinity train.)

There are weird ethics underpinning the designated antagonistic setpieces like Marcel, Perry, and Lake - all sentient beings who exist to only to hurt passengers in a way that teaches them something. Are they evil, or just filling the role in the story they were created to fill? Can they be evil towards their own benefit- mapping the room with friends, finding a new body- or are they always doomed to, essentially, be a sentient puzzle?

 We've never seen a denizen deliberately and maliciously try to become a a threat to the entire train because it doesn’t like its lot in life. Lake got close, but that wasn't her actual goal, just collateral damage she inflicted by accident.

So here's the theory: In a future season, The Docent would have been the main antagonist. They would have presented an unexplored angle of the denizen situation; an initially antagonistic setpiece denizen who, like Lake, decided to buck their role in the train and express their agency. Unlike Lake,  they choose to do this not by asserting their own rights and humanity and opting out of the train system, but by killing every single passenger they can get their many, many hands on.

I'm speculating that the The Docent starts its career, essentially, as a funhouse threat; it's a vaguely-ghost shaped shadow-thing that's supposed to spook passengers, send a chill up their spine, introduce a mild pressure to clear the gallery car in good time. In keeping with the theme, it's only allowed to engage passengers once they start handling the art; maybe it gets more and more obvious the more they tamper, so that they have a chance to recognize the pattern, but you'd have to go out of your way to actually get killed by this thing. Okay, cool.

Except maybe, like Lake, the Docent starts to get frustrated with the fact it was created solely to encourage passengers to move on with their lives. It starts to get frustrated that it's surrounded by all these forms of expression, but it's limited to being a vaguely defined blob. And it starts to get pissy about all these passengers Constantly. Touching. The Paintings. It is, after all, designed from the ground up to be a Docent. It cares about such things.

Unlike Lake, this thing was never designed with a drive to escape; the Docent’s base function is retaliatory. So it it starts pushing the envelope to see what it can get away with. It starts hurting passengers who touch the paintings. It starts killing them. It starts killing them the first chance it gets, instead of gradually ramping up. It starts killing 99 percent of the people who enter the car. It starts experimenting, artistically, with the corpses. It becomes less about guarding the art and more about making its own art.

And eventually, it realizes that One doesn't care. After all, it's still technically possible for passengers to escape alive if they don't touch the art. There is a sign about it; that's fair warning, right? And anyway most passengers don't make it to this car in the first place. The ones the Docent murders are a drop in the bucket. When we see it, it only has maybe twenty people’s worth of arms.

What One does care about is that the Docent stays in its assigned car. It's a setpiece, not a potential companion; bodycount aside, it only makes aesthetic sense in the context of its puzzle. And that irks the Docent, well down the path of artistic experimentation, more than anything. It doesn't want to be someone else’s art. It wants to make art.

And then, Amelia hijacks the train.

We see that in her initial bout of incompetence, she accidently self-destructed many of the stewards that One would have used to stop the Docent had it tried to leave. And we see that she cared even less than One did about maintaining order in the cars; all she cared about was Alrick.

That leaves a thirty year window for the Docent to realize that nothing is physically stopping it from leaving the gallery car anymore.

According to the AMA, the theme of Book 6, summed up in one word, would have been "Guilt." I think that Book Six would have involved One-one tasking Amelia with hunting down and destroying the Docent, who, as a result of her take-over, has had thirty years to rampage through the train with impunity, ambushing solo passengers and building an increasingly lovecraftian body for itself out of stolen parts.

It would be a dark mirror of several previous antagonists and anti-heroes.

Like Amelia, it feels like the train dealt it a crappy hand, and it's exploiting the resources the train presents it with to continuously tinker with a masterpiece that's never quite right.

Like Lake, it would be a bitter Denizen fighting tooth and nail to reify itself, willing to break the system for its own self-satisfaction, obsessed with collecting passenger numbers to prove a point to the powers that be.

And like the Apex, it would treat the train as an endless buffet of potential victims that it's entitled to, by dint of its raw power in comparison to everything else.

All of this would be layered under the ethical question of whose fault this perfect storm of evil is. Is One at fault for creating something relatively harmless but then letting it go malignant by neglecting its personal needs? Is Amelia at fault, for not using her thirty year stint as conductor to stop it? Is it the train's fault, for constantly putting new people in its path? Can it all be pinned on The Docent, for continuing to be evil even after better opportunities opened up to it?

Or is it all on the Passengers, because they couldn't keep their hands off the fuckin' paintings?

Finally, I want to elaborate why I think this would be a perfect antagonist for Amelia specifically.

(Image ID: Amelia, from Infinity train, halfway through her breakdown in the final episode.)

I have a very specific read of Amelia's breakdown at the end of Book One. Amelia doesn't care that she hurt One-one, and she's arguably right not to; Season 4 shows that prior to the overthrow, One was a bit of a callous prick. Amelia is upset for practical reasons; she's finally admitted to herself that she picked an untenable goal, and nearly personally killed a child to further a plan that wasn't going to work. 

She does care if people get hurt! She gave all the passengers their stuff back and she stepped in to save Grace on two separate occasions; she does care on some level for the other passengers, as long as they don't get in her way. She isn't upset about her number because she agrees that it's a valid measure of her moral worth; she's upset because she's going to be stuck on the train forever, without Alrick, now that One-One is back in charge.

All of this is to say that Amelia doesn't care at all about the damage she did to the train proper; she cares that she wasted her life and nearly killed a kid, but she doesn't care about the damage she did to Corginia or what she did to the Cat. She's repairing the train because One-One told her to, not because she cares if it functions as a therapy tool. She gives about as much of a shit about the denizens as the Apex did, as One-One does. Even when she takes Hazel, it's as a test subject, not out of concern.

The Docent as extrapolated here, though, presents Amelia with a different story. It presents a real human body-count racked up as a result of her takeover. It represents an affirmation that by becoming Conductor, Amelia took on specific duties to the passengers that One wasn't meeting, but that she also failed to meet by not stopping the Docent and other things like it. 

She's travelling with Hazel. Hazel, who's the other side of the coin in terms of sentient fallout of Amelia's myopia. Hazel, who's in a perfect position and mindset to interrogate Amelia on her shortcomings, to put a human face on the carnage the Docent causes to the Denizens who have interesting parts for it to collect.

And through this whole process, Amelia is, at least at first, chasing the Docent as an extension of her desire to work her way off the train. One-one didn't necessarily send her after it because it's killing people so much as because it's not playing by the rules. For One-One, a “win” would be getting the Docent back to its original car, or creating a whole new Docent and starting the cycle over. At least at first, neither of them would be trying to fix their mistake for the right reasons. And that would feed into an extremely important question that the series could handle fantastically;

Does it matter why you want to solve a problem, or why you want to fix your mistakes, so long as you do?

GRACE MONROE AND JOHN KRESSE - PURPOSE, GUILT AND REDEMPTION

Grace came from a home where she was ignored by her parents and she could only get their attention through standards that they put on her and she got into trouble just to get their attention and the train picks her up and the fact of being in an unknown place without knowing what besides almost dying if it weren't for the fact that the false conductor (Amelia) inadvertently saved her, makes Grace consider that the train belongs to the passengers and that the denizens of the train have no value and are just decorations.

Kreese on the other hand had a hard life: her mother committed suicide and she had to work to survive and her girlfriend Betsy gave her hope for a happy life. Then comes the Vietnam War, Betsy's death and the rejection of both the government and American citizens towards the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and this ends up marking him for life with his ideology: peace is just an illusion, if not you attack first and hard or if you just don't win then they will kill you.

They both had a difficult life and had traumatic events (Grace being saved by the fake driver from almost dying and Kreese because of everything she lived through during the Vietnam War) that shaped their way of thinking (with Grace it is that the passengers are the only ones that have value and the denizens are only accessories and with Kreese it's that if you do not win and attack first they kill you) but you will wonder why they create Apex and Cobra Kai? The answer is simple: they seek to give meaning to their traumatic experiences and, by extension, they seek purpose in the current environment they find themselves in because if their traumas and pain are meaningless then they will have suffered for nothing.

Also during their stays on the train and in Vietnam respectively, they meet Simon Laurent and Terry Silver who will be their closest friends by sharing their trauma and therefore end up sharing their ideology and will spend years spreading their toxic ideologies to their friends (Simon and Terry) and the younger generation. Grace and Kreese think they're helping the younger generation survive when in reality they're harming them with toxic ideologies that will only bring them trouble in society.

Grace and Kreese continue with this way of life until they meet someone who will not have much of an impact at first but as time goes on will start a snowball effect that will make them question their ideologies: Johnny Lawrence and Hazel.

At first Grace and Kreese have a good relationship with Hazel and Johnny and even come to love them like family (Grace loves Hazel like a little sister and Kreese considers Johnny his son) but they constantly let them down to the point of that Hazel and Johnny don't trust them and want nothing to do with them anymore, this makes Grace and Kreese realize that they have ruined their relationship with them to an irreparable level but these aren't the only relationships they ruined to that level because they also failed in their relationships with Simon and Terry by manipulating and lying to them all the time not to mention that they feel displaced by Hazel and Johnny until they (Simon and Terry) get tired of Grace and Kreese, betray them and lock them up in prisons (Grace is locked in a tape with her memories and Kreese is arrested for a crime he didn't commit). All this, plus the guilt they feel for all their mistakes, forces them to recognize that they have failed and that they need to change for the better, Grace recognizing her mistakes and wanting to change not only herself but also the young people she has failed and lied to and Kreese will (possibly) have to do the same thing Grace did if he wants to fix his life and his relationship with Johnny because if he doesn't, Kreese will live miserable and alone for the rest of his life.

SIMON LAURENT AND TERRY SILVER - LOYALTY, DENIAL AND MADNESS

On the other hand, Simon and Terry have followed Grace and Kreese for as long as we've known them, but why are they so loyal to them? That's because Grace and Kreese saved them from dying in the past and Simon and Terry feel indebted to them but Grace and especially Kreese share their views with them and create Apex and Cobra Kai as a result, teaching them a dysfunctional ideology. In addition to taking advantage of Simon and Terry's loyalty by abusing it, manipulating them and (especially Kreese) mistreating them.

Simon and Terry are willing to prove their loyalty to Grace and Kreese to the point that they do horrible things to do it (Simon kills Tuba behind Grace's back and Terry almost kills Johnny) and this makes Grace and Kreese angry and they don't know. This is because Grace and Kreese are inadvertently changing due to their relationship with Hazel and Johnny, and by extension, are doing the opposite of the ideologies that govern their lives and their respective organizations (Kreese has compassion for Johnny and saves him from dying and Grace shows grief and pity for Tuba, a train denizen) so Simon and Terry feel like they were lied to all along and as King said in The Owl House season 2 episode 16 Hollow Mind:

King: No one wants to think they've wasted their life following the wrong person.

And this is what happens with Simon and Terry, they don't want to change because that would imply recognizing that they have been following a flawed ideology, a lie and they don't want to feel that their loyalty was for a lie, was for nothing and they choose to blame Grace and Kreese for betraying what they want to believe is the truth.

Also Simon and Terry realize that Grace and Kreese's change is motivated by Hazel and Johnny and at the same time they feel displaced by them.

All of the above (the constant exploitation and manipulation, feeling cheated and betrayed, not wanting to recognize that their ideology doesn't work, and feeling that they were displaced by someone else) makes Simon and Terry tire of Grace and Kreese, betraying and locking them up while they usurp their positions as leaders of their organizations (Apex and Cobra Kai) and while this is happening Grace and (possibly) Kreese reflect on their mistakes and are willing to change while Simon and Terry continue to refuse to acknowledge their mistakes to the point that this effort for denying the truth and refusing to recognize his mistakes turns into madness, making Simon turn the Apex into a cult himself and wants to kill Grace when he returns and possibly Terry ends up turning Cobra Kai into a cult himself too and wants to kill to Kreese when he gets out of jail. All this leads to Simon's death and if Terry continues with that same way of thinking he could end up like Simon.

Kreese and Terry are the toxic versions of Grace and Simon because Kreese is what Grace would have been if she hadn't realized her mistakes and that her way of thinking was wrong and Terry is what Simon would have been if the latter had remained alive and would have returned from the infinity train to the real world.