Cartoon Network’s Infinity Train is a strangely beautiful show. Created by Owen Dennis, a storyboard artist on the long-running Cartoon Network series Regular Show, the anthology series could easily be summed up as a young girl going on an emotional adventure on a seemingly endless train heading to nowhere, but that summary belies the emotionally charged ride that is Infinity Train.
**Spoilers for Book One and Book Two of Infinity Train.**
Okay, so the train is a metaphor for therapy.
Book One opens with a teenage girl named Tulip (Ashley Johnson, Recess), who is struggling to deal with the emotional aftermath of her parents’ divorce, running away from home and ending up on the train with a mysterious number on her hand. She ends up going on a journey, with a weird talking robot ball named One-One and a Corgie King named Atticus, to find out the secret of the train. As we follow her, we see the number on her hand going up and down depending on the actions she takes and how she allows herself to come to terms with the emotional issues she’s been keeping down.
It turns out the train was created as a way for people to come and work out their feelings through a number of quests that would eventually lead to them being released. However, your number can go up or down towards (you guessed it) infinity.
Tulip’s adventure is pretty straightforward as a hero’s quest to return home. The train allows her to deal with how her parents were not right together and their divorce was actually a good thing. Tulip herself isn’t some perfect pollyanna on the outs. She is stubborn, a little selfish, and often so single-minded that she misses out on the things around her. That’s why, when we see her become this more emotionally mature person over the course of 10 eleven-minute episodes, it’s totally satisfying.
However, Book Two builds upon the foundation of the series and plays with the morality of what the train can do to people. Book Two follows MT (Mirror Tulip), the renegade Mirror Self of Tulip, who is continuing her attempts to evade the pair of reflection officers, who were introduced in episode seven, “The Chrome Car.” MT escapes her car and is on the run from the Reflection Police, who want to either kill her or return her to their mirror world. She ends up meeting with Jesse, and a supernatural deer who they nickname Alan Dracula.
This season is all about personhood and individuality. MT wants to live beyond just what it meant to be tied to Tulip and spends the entire season fighting to prove that she is a person and should be allowed to live. As a reflection, her purpose was to just be there for Tulip until she died, and then either become a member of the Reflection Police or lose her entire identity.
Jesse is a people pleaser who has often allowed peer pressure to turn him into an abusive jerk, especially when it came to his brother Nate and the “man test” episode, which is painful to watch because it speaks so truly to the way young men feel pressured to conform to masculinity. It’s almost as if Peggy Orenstein wrote it herself.
We also see that there are a ton of people on the train who don’t want to leave. Getting pulled into a strange supernatural environment with no proper instruction and being expected to just grow and mature is unrealistic. We meet The Apex, a group of Lord of the Flies-like teenagers who have chosen to thrive on the train and attempt to get the highest numbers possible—no dealing with their issues and no rules in place to actually force them to do so.
The ending of Book Two is beautiful and thoughtful, leaving me shocked at how so many shows can’t make 12 hour-long episodes that work as well as a show like Infinity Train. It’s a tiny masterpiece, and I highly recommend it for anyone who hasn’t checked it out already. It hits you right in the feels.
(image: Cartoon Network)
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