Snowpiercer showrunner breaks down season 4 premiere, teases final episodes

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Snowpiercer season 4, episode 1, "Snakes in the Garden."

Snowpiercer is back on the rails.

After three seasons on TNT and a two-year hiatus, the dystopian thriller series has debuted the first episode of its final season on AMC. The episode takes place a year after season 3, reintroducing a group of survivors led by Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) and Ruth Wardell (Alison Wright) as they settle into their new, unsettlingly stationary home: New Eden, a snowy community built from the remains of the derailed Big Alice.

Life in New Eden is refreshingly calmer and slower-paced than on the titular train, though trouble is brewing: over the course of the premiere, someone pulls the plug on the town’s power supply, and Mrs. Headwood (Sakina Jaffrey) teams up with a mysterious outsider to kidnap Layton’s baby daughter Liana.

Snowpiercer is in a decidedly worse state than New Eden, as the premiere ends with an intimidating militia force led by Milius (Clark Gregg), the Animal Squad, taking the train by storm.

In a wide-ranging conversation, showrunner Paul Zbyszewski (Lost, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) discusses the new cast, creative challenges, and highlights of Snowpiercer’s final season.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How does New Eden shake up the Snowpiercer status quo?

PAUL ZBYSZEWSKI: We started season 3 trying to imagine what this place would be like, right? So we thought, ‘Okay, if New Eden sucked and everyone just wanted to get back on the trains and roll away, that wouldn't be great for the story.’ So we dove headlong into making this a terrific place to live. We wanted the characters to feel like all that time and energy and struggle that they went through in the first three seasons was worth it, that it paid off. 

And so life in New Eden is pretty good until Admiral Milius comes rolling in and stirs things up. In the year that passed from the train splitting to when we find them in the first episode, life in New Eden is good. Now, aboard Snowpiercer, different story. A few months into their journey, the train got hijacked, so what's going on in the train in the ensuing months is the mystery that we play out throughout the season. That's the story that we're hoping the audience invests in as they ask, ‘What the hell happened? Who are these guys? What do they want, and what do they want with Liana?’

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You worked with Clark Gregg on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. What does he bring to the role of Milius?

He's a real force of authority. He's a military man of rules and principles, and we wanted to bring somebody in who we felt could go toe-to-toe with anyone in our cast — someone who could not just portray toughness and rigor and authority, but also vulnerability. Someone who's flawed, but to what degree he knows he’s flawed remains to be seen. And I knew from personal experience that Clark could deliver on everything we asked him to do. He's an immensely talented actor. He's a great fit for the role. He can be incredibly serious and yet turn around and throw off a joke or a smirk or a quip, and immediately change the tone of the scene. He has that ability, and we wanted to utilize all of those skills and talents for this character so that it changed the dynamic.

What can you tell us about Michael Aronov’s new character?

He's a little bit of a mysterious figure at first, but he is through and through a scientist at heart who believes 1,000 percent in what he's doing, and has the best of intentions to begin with. He brings a different flavor to the show — I don't want to say he's a nerd or a geek, because there are definitely plenty of those on the show with scientific knowledge — but we wanted to bring somebody in who could, on an intellectual and scientific level, go toe-to-toe with Jennifer Connelly’s Melanie Cavill. Someone who can have conversations about the fate of the world, and you would believe that person and feel like, "This person knows what they're talking about and we might want to listen to him."

Michael Aronov brought all of that and then some. He’s an incredibly talented performer — I mean, he's got a Tony Award! credit to Wittney Horton, our casting director, for bringing him to us. He disappears into the role and becomes that person in a way that was, for me, reminiscent of the way Gary Oldman disappears into his roles. Michael, he's a five-tool player.

The Animal Squad brings an extra layer of tension to character dynamics that are already quite tense. What motivated bringing in this new set of characters for the final season?

They came from necessity more than anything else, and it starts from character. A character like Milius comes in — he's an admiral, he's in charge of a military-esque installation, he's going to have people with him. He's going to have capable, effective, scary people with him who are in charge of protecting what's left of humanity. What would they look like? What would they feel like part of that, their look, their feel was necessitated by the realities of what this dystopian world is like. It's friggin’ cold out there, so they have to have these suits that allow them to operate in the cold, but they also have to be ready to fight if they have to, because at the end of the world, who knows how badly it's going to devolve. So that animal squad came from necessity more than anything else.

What surprised you as you constructed the narrative of this final season?

The weight of having to satisfy the arcs of all of these characters. It’s an incredibly large, talented cast, and we had such a desire to feed them all good stuff and to give them moments and scenes and arcs to play and to bring something new to those characters so that they weren't just repeating things they'd done in the past. Having to satisfy that times 15 or 20 was a massive challenge. You wanted to do your best to fulfill the stories of these characters and to satisfy the audience, and that's hard to do with a cast this large over the course of 10 episodes. It is an incredibly daunting task, and all I can say is we did our best and the audience will be the judge if we came through.

Do any character arcs stand out as personal highlights or favorites for this season?

I can't pick just one. It's like choosing one kid over another. You grow to love all these characters and you put as much time and effort into all of them. I will say that just the arc of the show and where it lands in the finale was satisfying. It was a sense of, ‘Okay, we started with something. We had an idea of where these people would go and where they would wind up, and this painful journey leads someplace that gives you a spark of hope. In the spirit of the graphic novels, which are really dark and cynical, there's still that hope at the end, and that's where we wanted to stick the landing, and I'm thinking that we got it. But again, the audience will tell us whether we came through or not.

How does this last season differ from the previous ones?

People can walk left and right instead of just forward and back! The show really is markedly different because of the existence of New Eden. It is this pioneer western town that has its own life, its own dimension, and that completely changes the texture of the show. The challenges and the struggles that these people faced for three seasons were caused by the fact that they could not go outside — they existed in these box cars and could not function as a society because they were divided into classes. Now that those obstacles have been removed, it completely changes the game for the people in New Eden. And so it was really like piloting and reinventing the show for those New Eden stories, and that really makes it unique and different from the other three seasons.

How did the cast react to the new sets and locations that are so different from the previous seasons’ confines?

The looks on their faces when they first walked through that town and saw the size and scale and scope of it.. they brought it. Their energy levels went up because they felt like they were on a different show. It was like, ‘Wow, this is not what we expected.’ And it really infused those episodes in New Eden with a lot of energy and character that I think comes across on screen.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The season 4 premiere of Snowpiercer is now streaming on AMC+. The show airs weekly on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and AMC+.