![]() ![]() It’s funny but sophisticated stuff, and Dennis has said that one barrier to getting the show renewed was HBO Max’s concern that it was all too weighty for younger viewers. You get kicked you’ll get kicked again you come back anyway, hoping against hope to someday break out of the pattern. “It’s the only truth I know.”Ĭamus couldn’t have put it better. “If all my time in this car has taught me one thing, the toad always gets kicked,” he says. ![]() ![]() One train car is empty except for a single toad (Dennis), who miserably explains that the only way to unlock the exit is to kick him. The show also has a wry outlook on the human, or animal, condition. One of its most frequently recurring characters is the Cat (Kate Mulgrew), a wily feline who’s introduced as a con artist but proves far more complicated - she’s less a schemer than a survivor who has amassed some regrets in her nine lives. Indeed, while “Infinity Train” has a slew of creepshow monsters, there are few absolute good and bad guys. Essential to “Infinity Train” is the idea that people can grow, change and overcome the hurts that shaped them - though sometimes they try and still fail. Mirror Tulip tries to take Tulip’s place on the train in Season 1 in Season 2, Grace and the Apex harass Mirror Tulip on her journey. Joined by a sentient corgi and a spherical robot named One-One - one hemisphere upbeat, the other depressed, like an android yin-yang - she takes an Oz-like journey through the workings of her train and her own roiled emotions.īoth of these protagonists, notably, were introduced as antagonists. In the first season, Tulip (Ashley Johnson), a middle schooler knotted up by her parents’ divorce, runs away and hops what she thinks is an ordinary passenger train. ![]() This silly/wise sensibility puts the show smack in between childhood and adulthood, which is exactly where its protagonists are. Up and down, up and down, an endless line seeking balance. “Lost” fixated on black-and-white dualist symbols a recurring motif in “Infinity Train,” reflected in the series logo, is the sine wave. Like “Lost,” it’s an adventure story with overtones of a religious parable, with spiritual trials and imagery. (In one, a pine-cone scout leader tells a wide-eyed group of conelets a spooky campfire story about a squirrel: “The squirrel scratched again - ‘ Where are my little seeds?’”)īut it also resembles grown-up series like “The Good Place,” with its thematic emphasis on redemption and amends. Each car’s interior - which might be an Old West desert inhabited by bugs, a giant ball pit or a vast landscape of wedding cakes - poses a challenge that must be solved before the door to the next car opens.Īrtistically and in tone, “Infinity Train,” created by Owen Dennis, has a lot in common with animated series like “Adventure Time,” combining psychedelic panoramas with absurdist throwaway jokes. On one level, the mystical train is like a puzzle, or a complex game. Forget coal or electricity this train runs on personal growth. And there they stay, until they figure out their business. It traps them within its endless chain of cars, each of which contains a vast world. In this fantastical animated anthology, which began on Cartoon Network and whose fourth and final season arrives Thursday on HBO Max, a mysterious locomotive picks up passengers with problems to work through. “Infinity Train,” however, requires a little more work on the part of the passenger. People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’. Whatever the state of public transportation in the real world, pop culture does not lack for metaphorical trains that promise to solve our problems. ![]()
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