"What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing and resistance is being overcome."
-Nietzsche
Why is there a Snowpiercer TV series? Science Fiction, as the genre of ideas, tends toward "high concept" plots, which is to say gimmicks. Snowpiercer was the end of the world - on a train! Done. Unless you set each new episode in a new train car, weekly re-gimmicking that gimmick won't give anyone much of a kick.
Don't get me wrong, the movie did a beautiful job overall. Sure, some of the actors could've used another week or seven of rehearsals and the ending sort of fizzles, but Tilda Swinton really stole the show and the inherently industrial metallic chugging of train mechanisms lends itself readily to Dickensian class struggles. This is a flick so slick it could blaze simple torches into a show-stopping visual, but episodic stagnation will literally stop the show. Where will it go without the rush, the momentum, of advancing car by car to smite one's enemies and see them engine-driven before you? How many times can you reiterate "poverty sucks on a train and the world is still ending" before the audience yawns its way to another channel?
Repetition is but one problem. The headlong rush through social strata also prevented viewers from looking too closely at various scenes' claim to novelty or drama - like "why are we siding with the fat chick when everyone else is starving?" or the nominal villains being in the right about pretty much everything. At which point does even a TV-grade audience's IQ clue in to the wrongness of murdering the world's extant population out of spite? Justified post-facto by an animalistic drive to place one's own offspring above all others? Episode, after episode, after episode...
But mostly, it's a problem of momentum. Once a SciFi plot has made its point, pulled off its "one effect" as Poe might've said, it's done. You don't need a postapocalyptic choo-choo to reiterate truisms about mammals being protective of their young. A moving train is a dramatic plot device. Sitting in a train car week after week... not so much.
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