my thoughts on That abt the Infinity Train book 3 finale
Ok so I’ve seen two kinds of takes about That Scene in the infinity train book 3 finale, those being “Simon’s a horrible person and he deserved it” and “Simon’s an innocent babbu and didn’t deserve it” both of which I disagree with heavily so I’ve decided to make my own post with my own take
Now, let me start this by saying that Simon’s a horrible, awful, disgusting person that has done countless despicable things, and I don’t think his trauma/tragic past changes that.
With that said, I still don’t think he should’ve died the way he did.
In systems like the infinity train, I always find it slightly off-putting that it’s possible for people to die, but I shrug it off because lots of things can kill people and it’s not realistic to expect the train to just have failsafes for every single one of them, I would’ve been fine if they had Simon die because he fell off the train amidst his hubris and wheeled himself by accident, or something of the sort, but this was different.
As some people have pointed out, it seems that the highest someone’s number is, the quicker they die when Gohms attack them, so it’s likely that they’re essentially the train’s tools for “killing off” passengers with very high numbers. And that’s the problem.
If the purpose of the train is to lure people in and work out their issues, make them better people, WHY does it have a tool specifically for killing off people with too many issues? In this sense, it essentially lures troubled people in to kill them.
I really liked Infinity Train because it promoted the message of individual redemption- of becoming a better person for your own sake, and that no one, not even people like Amelia and Grace with incredibly huge numbers, are beyond changing for the better, and that there’s no such thing as someone being irredeemable or “too far gone”, and that truly anyone is capable of change, they just have to allow themselves to. That there’s no one that’s truly evil.
So Simon having a brutal, graphic death by pulverization because he had too many issues feels not only like a kick in the gut, but also it goes against the entire point of the show: “Everyone can become a better person! Except for some people.”
Think of how interesting it could’ve been for Simon, after betraying his best friend even after she saved his life even though he was trying to kill her, being all alone because obviously Grace won’t trust him anymore and the Apex kids are definitively terrified of him, imagine having him run away from them and only be seen again in a later season, going trough the process of becoming a better person despite all of the despicable shit he’s done. It could’ve been such a great exploration of the topic of redemption when pushed to its limit, the worst person you can imagine realizing their wrongs and changing, trying to make themself a better person.
But now that’ll never happen because he got pulverized for being too troubled for the “fixing troubled people” car. Great.
And yeah, sure, they could introduce a new character that also happens to make horrible choices and get a full body number, but then that’d feel so... cheap? Like it’s Simon 2 except now there’s no emotional buildup for his atrocities so redeeming them isn’t uncomfortable, hurray. And if they did introduce a character that was as unlikable as Simon and gave them a season, that’d be even worse because now you’re just rehashing a character when you could’ve just used the original, and for what, shock value of having a character be brutally and graphically pulverized on-screen on a kids show? (I should make it clear I DON’T think they killed Simon for shock value, by the way.)
So yeah, those are my thoughts. Simon’s a horrible monster of a person and that’s exactly why having the train kill him for being a bad person was a bad choice imo. Writing this definitively made me feel better, and I still have high hopes that if we get more Infinity Train it’ll be as good as everything else we’ve gotten.