Hello all! Welcome back to my weekly reviews of Infinity Train. Last week we finished up Book 1 with ‘The Past Car’ and ‘The Engine’. This week we get started on the second season – officially known as Book 2: Cracked Reflection.

‘The Black Market Car’, Season 2, Episode 1 (Premiere Date: January 6, 2020)

Synopsis – As the episode opens, we see Mirror Tulip (from ‘The Chrome Car’) drastically changing up her style – shearing off her hair, swapping out Tulip’s clothes for a sleeveless black shirt and jeans, etc. This is followed by a montage of her wandering from car to car, soaking in all the sights. She ultimately ends up in a shady-looking car containing a thriving black market. As she is making her way up the central street, one of the vendors pulls out what appears to be a jeweler’s loupe to get a closer look at her. Mirror Tulip swipes it out of the vendor’s hand in fear and smashes it into tiny pieces, but that isn’t good enough – Agents Mace and Sieve, the Flecs who had tried to kill her in ‘The Chrome Car’, are still able to emerge from the reflective bits of glass.

Mace and Sieve chase Mirror Tulip through the market, nearly catching her on multiple occasions. She is able to escape their clutches and make it to the next car, tearing Sieve’s arm covering in the process. She finds herself in an autumn forest, where a deer is lying down munching away on some leaves. She quickly hides behind the deer just as Mace and Sieve enter the car. She is certain they will catch her, but the deer camouflages itself so that it and Mirror Tulip blend in with the background. Frustrated that their target seemingly got away, the two Flecs consider searching the car but Mace decides that they need to go back to fix Sieve’s suit.

After the Flecs leave, Mirror Tulip thanks the deer and moves on through the car. To her surprise, the deer follows right behind her. She tries to shoo it away at first, but quickly learns to enjoy its company. It becomes more and more clear that this is no ordinary deer, as it appears to be able to change its color at random. Mirror Tulip eventually falls asleep, waking up the next morning to see that the deer has seemingly disappeared. Hearing a voice coming from somewhere between the trees, she gets up and follows it, finding a clearing where the deer is standing with a teenage boy.

Mirror Tulip enters the clearing, demanding to know what the boy is doing with her deer. The guy, who introduces himself as Jesse and is revealed to be a Passenger like Tulip was, claims that since he has been hanging out with the deer (and putting sunglasses on it), it is actually his deer. He decides to give the deer, which turns out to also have shape-shifting and laser vision powers, the name ‘Alan Dracula’. Furious that he thinks he has the right to name the deer, Mirror Tulip berates him. As they are arguing, Alan Dracula suddenly falls straight through the leaf cover and into an apparent abyss. Mirror Tulip and Jesse can only stare on in horror.

My Thoughts – Book 2 has always been one of my favorite seasons of the show (rivaled only by Book 3), and the reasons why are readily apparent in this episode. Because our protagonist this season, Mirror Tulip, and her backstory were already introduced in Book 1, we are able to jump right into the action. It is clear right away what one of the main driving thematic forces for this season is going to be – Mirror Tulip’s fight to be recognized as an individual person. She outright confesses this desire to Alan Dracula, but the matter comes up in subtler ways as well, such as the way that she scolds Jesse for giving Alan a name that isn’t of his own choosing. This theme is very different from that of Book 1, and provides a way to immediately differentiate the two seasons.

Another difference to Book 1? The use of the antagonists. In Book 1, we don’t really become aware of the Conductor/Amelia until the fifth episode. Even after that point she remains a shadowy figure making her moves in the background. Agents Sieve and Mace are different. Unlike Amelia and Tulip, the two agents have a direct connection to Mirror Tulip and are relentlessly hunting her from almost the very first moments of the episode. In addition to producing some very interesting action sequences with the two agents constantly popping out of every reflective surface, it creates an extremely tense and claustrophobic atmosphere. Mirror Tulip is fighting them for her life, literally for her right to exist. They are conformity, and their only goal is to grind her down into nothing.

The episode also takes the time to introduce our other main protagonist (or deuteragonist, if you will) for the season, Jesse. We don’t know much about him yet beyond the fact that he is quirky and a bit all-over-the-place. He does seem like he could become a bit grating (that does not, in my opinion, end up happening), but his bickering dynamic with Mirror Tulip is quite fun. It is interesting that although we have another passenger like Tulip as a main character, he seems to have taken a bit of a back seat so far, indicating a major shift in how this season plans to tell its story.

Episode MVP – Mirror Tulip. Most of the episode is devoted to reintroducing her to us and setting up her journey for the season.

My Totally Arbitrary Car Ranking – Kaiju Car (B+), Black Market Car (B+), Winged Golden Serpent Car (B+), Giant Jellyfish Car (B), Bunny Blacksmith Car (B), Autumn Car (B), Dancing Carrot Car (B-), Doily Car (C+)

My Totally Arbitrary Episode Ranking – A strong B+.

Cast Additions – Only a couple new additions this time around. Jesse is voiced by Robbie Diamond (Persona 5, WarioWare, a whole lot of anime dubs). Mrs. Graham, the Passenger in the Doily Car, is voiced by Grey DeLisle (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and many, many other voice roles). Ashley Johnson, Bradley Whitford, Ben Mendelsohn, Jeremy Crutchley, and Owen Dennis return as Mirror Tulip, Agent Sieve, Agent Mace, Glad One, and Sad One respectively.

Trivia/Stray Observations –

• “Are snacks provided?” “I didn’t ask that.”
• “For those talking to me like I’m there, I’m not!” “I’m a cold, steely pre-recorded video.”
• “Don’t be afraid to reach out!” “Unless the denizen is one of those creatures with more teeth than body…”
• “You can’t spell ‘Escape’ without ‘Companionship’!” You might need to workshop that one, buddy.
• “And I just love cutting corners.”
• “On the upside, the last few months tracking her have been a great, really great bonding experience, you know…” “Enough.” I like how they give Mace and Sieve distinct personalities, with Sieve being the over-eager and more showy one and Mace being the grizzled, take-no-crap one.
• “Yeah, don’t go there. It sucks.”
• “But he’s my deer! We’ve been hanging out for a whole hour. Maybe even a little more.”
• “Now we’re friends too! By association!”
• Mirror Tulip using the Train’s wheels to shear off her hair was…*puts on sunglasses*…metal.
• The opening montage is one of my favorite sequences in the entire series.
• Nice Randall and Atticus cameos.
• One-One including a legal disclaimer at the end of the orientation video was a perfect touch.
• Alan Dracula is quite unsettling. But then, that’s deer for you:

• Jesse is meant to be of Apache descent. Owen Dennis apparently struggled for seven months to convince Cartoon Network to allow this. According to Dennis, Cartoon Network thought having a Native American character would be ‘too hard’ and too much of a ‘third rail’ to touch even when he promised to bring in a consultant. Even after they acquiesced he was only able to slip in one indirect reference in a later episode, which I will point out once we get to that point.
• The music used during the opening montage, Cracked Reflection, is one of the few songs on the show that in my opinion surpasses Running Away. It also serves as the main theme for this season.

‘The Family Tree Car’, Season 2, Episode 2 (Premiere Date: January 6, 2020)

Synopsis – After some good old-fashioned finger-pointing about who is to blame for Alan Dracula’s disappearance, Mirror Tulip and Jesse descend through the hole in the leaf cover and down the trunk of a giant tree. Stepping out onto one of the branches, they come across large talking engravings representing the members of two rival families, the Gillicutty family and the Trundleshank family. The two families have long hated each other, but even more so since one pair of their descendants fell in love and the two trees became intertwined. When asked for her name, Mirror Tulip says that she would prefer to be called M.T.

Jesse and M.T. attempt to continue their way down, but the feuding families keep throwing up roadblocks. M.T. wants them to brute force their way through, but Jesse thinks that the ideal path is to patch things up between the families. This results in further argument between M.T. and Jesse, who briefly separate to test out their own methods. When they both fail, they bicker even more, causing branches to grow up around them and start turning Jesse into wood. Realizing that arguing and being mean to each other is what is causing the tree to turn against them, Jesse and M.T. put aside their differences and are able to make it to the bottom of the tree. Of course, as soon as they arrive they spot Alan Dracula on his way upward using newly formed suction cups on his feet. As they hitch a ride on his horns, M.T. and Jesse agree to a truce. M.T. promises to help Jesse get his number to zero as long as she gets to keep Alan afterwards. Jesse reveals that his number is currently 32, which M.T. claims will be easy to resolve – until he mentions that it was 31 when he first got on the Train.

My Thoughts – Besides that silent, serene shot of the base of the tree, little of this episode has stuck with me between rewatches for some reason. I’m not sure that there is a single, definite cause for this. Part of it is that the pacing feels a bit too slow in the middle (like ‘The Crystal Car’), with the bickering between the Trundleshanks and Gillicutties starting to wear a bit thin after a while. The color palette, which is dark and quite monochromatic, could be a factor as well. I also feel that the episode’s lesson is maybe a bit too on the nose, lacking a bit in subtlety.

Despite the aforementioned issues, there is still quite a few things to like about the episode, even if it isn’t the most memorable of the series. Obviously we see the progression of M.T. and Jesse’s relationship. They start the episode strongly disliking each other (well, it’s actually a bit more one-sided on M.T.’s part) and by the end they have begun the process of accepting each other and looking past their differences. Both dynamics are quite fun to watch, as the two characters have surprisingly good chemistry with each other. It will be interesting to see the dynamic continue to evolve over the next few episodes.

We also begin to get more depth for Jesse – specifically, we can now make a pretty good guess about one of his main issues. It becomes quite clear over the course of the episode that Jesse is chronically indecisive. He tells M.T. all about the ways in which he is a people pleaser and how he gets along with every group at school. That seems nice and all, until we witness him trying to be a negotiator between the two families. Unable to pick a side and desperate to please both parties, he is unable to make any progress toward brokering peace and getting them a way down the tree. The frustration this builds in him is what prompts his number to go up – obviously this is going to be a major component of his journey moving forward.

Episode MVP – Jesse. This episode goes a long way toward filling in the relatively thin sketch of a character we got at the end of the previous episode.

My Totally Arbitrary Car Ranking – Family Tree Car (B-)

My Totally Arbitrary Episode Ranking – A pretty good B-. Jesse gets some needed development, and the Jesse-M.T. dynamic is fun, but otherwise the episode is a tad forgettable.

Cast Additions – There are a few new additions this episode. Prolific voice actor Keith Ferguson (DuckTales reboot, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Kingdom Hearts) voices Wilbur Gillicutty, Seth Trundleshank, and the male quadruplets. Comedian and actress Laraine Newman (SNL, WALL E, Inside Out) voices Marietta Gillicutty and Maise Trundleshank. Kari Wahlgren (Rick and Morty, Young Justice, and many more anime and Western animated series) voices Sinesta Gillicutty, Bree Trundleshank, and the female quadruplets. Rick Zieff (Terminator 3, Tom and Jerry, The Mr. Men Show) voices Ithmush Trundleshank, Nathaniel Trundleshank, and Silas Trundleshank.

Trivia/Stray Observations –

• “Oh, right…he’s still in here as just ‘Dracula’.”
• “No, I just don’t feel pain like you with your squishy flesh.”
• “You can call me G.G.G.G.G.G.S. for short.”
• “This coming from a woman who choked to death eating an orange peel!” “I told you, it’s the most fibrous part of the fruit!”
• “Sorry you both died in such embarrassing ways.”
• “They won’t call you that…okay, they’ll probably call you that.”
• “What happened?” “I kept my eyes open during the scary parts.”
• “And I like your hair…it’s brown…”
• M.T. jumping into the hole straight as a board was a hilarious visual.
• This episode introduces the recurring gag of M.T. flicking Jesse in the forehead. That has to hurt.
• I would say that I don’t think ‘Eraser Kids’ actually exist, but apparently that line was based on writer Lindsay Katai’s actual experience.
• Each crewmember has a different gruesome explanation for how exactly Nathaniel Trundleshank died from sitting on the toilet too hard.
• There is some uncertainty as to who exactly the Trundleshanks and Gillicutties are. Were they actual people who died and were manifested on the Train as the family tree, or were they created solely by the Train? Even the writers are unsure.

That’s it for this week! We’ve got the ball rolling on Book 2, and next week we are off to ‘The Map Car’ and ‘The Toad Car’.

Please share any thoughts about these episodes below. Make sure to spoiler tag any references to future events in the series in case anybody is stumbling across the show for the first time, and follow all of the Avocado’s rules and guidelines.

Thanks for reading!