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"The Tape Car" is the 9th episode of Season 2 of Infinity Train and the 19th episode overall. It aired on January 10, 2020.
Synopsis[]
Mirror Tulip hitches a ride to the car where passengers are assigned their Numbers.
Plot[]
M.T. waits on top of a train car for one of the Passenger Transportation Pods with Alan Dracula, and expresses her plan to use the pod to get to the car where she can get a number. She notes that when she leaves the train she won't be able to take Alan Dracula with her, but soon realizes this is her journey and it would not be fair to force Alan Dracula along. She soon spots one of the pods and hijacks it, damaging it and kicking the confused passenger off in the process, who is terrified into running away by Alan Dracula transforming into a spider-deer. The pod is soon sent back to the Tape Car due to M.T.'s damage, with M.T. forced to listen to One-One's train documentaries.
They eventually arrive at the Tape Car, where M.T. encounters the robotic Porters sorting through the new passengers, although they ignore her due to her status as a denizen. Noticing strings of tape coming from the lower levels, she arrives in the Passenger Farm, where she discovers the tape of the passengers' memories is literally being extracted from their heads, with the Porters collecting it and turning it into the Memory Tapes. She accidentally gets sucked into the ground of the farm when a passenger is being extracted, getting separated from Alan Dracula in the process.
She soon arrives via a tube into the Memory Watching room, where she sees the device that gives the passengers numbers before sending them off in the pods to the rest of the train. She tries to hijack the machine by stealing a passenger's number, but is horrified to discover the machine's laser simply goes through her hand without giving her a number. Angrily declaring she deserves a number, she grabs a pipe off the wall and starts destroying porters before going for the number machine. Before she can cause any more damage, however, she is stopped by the Steward, which corners her before opening its mask to reveal One-One.
| “ |
-Hello! I'd appreciate it if you'd stop breaking everything. |
” |
| —Glad-One and Sad-One | ||
Features[]
Characters[]
- Mirror Tulip
- Alan Dracula
- One-One
- Porters (debut)
- Danny Nougat (debut)
- Danny Nougat's daughter (debut)
- Balding Man (debut)
- Girl (debut)
- Mom (debut)
- Steward (cameo)
- Atticus (mentioned)
- Jesse Cosay (mentioned)
Locations[]
Trivia[]
- End tag: M.T. looking at her reflection in her hand while on board the Infinity Train.
- Owen Dennis modeled the tapes after Cartrivision tapes, an obscure videocassette format first introduced in 1972. He knew of these tapes through his dad's work while he was growing up that specialized in magnetic tapes.
- The theme song cue and title card for The Train Documentaries is seen/heard in the episode when One-One mentions the Tape Car in the pod.
- Sad-One warns Mirror Tulip that if she doesn't stop breaking the car he will have to start writing her obituary. This is a reference to one of his lines from "The Corgi Car" (as well as the pilot episode): "Looks like I'll have to start writing his obituary."
Continuity[]
- One-One speculates on what Atticus is up to, suggesting he's either barking, rolling over, or dead and a pile of dog bones on a long forgotten road, or only playing dead and a pile of not bones on a not-forgotten road.
- According to One-One, the Passenger Preparation Car's interior is projected on the "outside" of it. This implies the train and by extension the surrounding wasteland are projections from a central system.
- When M.T. sees the mass of numbers a passenger receives she exclaims "Uff Da" a Minnesotan slang, suggesting that her prime's Minnesotan origins have affected MT's vocabulary.
Behind the scenes[]
- The opening scene is written to be the official "goodbye" to Alan Dracula, as the rest of the season would run too fast for M.T. to get another chance to do so.[1]
- Justin Michael's cat Fozzie was curled up next to him while writing this scene.[1]
- Michael considers this as the season's "horror" episode as it uses more of a spooky atmosphere. He considers its Book One equivalent to be "The Cat's Car."
- The scene where M.T. pulls a passenger from his pod is left over from the original concept for Book Two where M.T. would have been the villain.[1]
- The passenger does not have a canonical fate: Madeline Queripel's headcanon is that Alan Dracula picked him up after leaving M.T. during the events of the next episode, Owen Dennis thinks he starved to death on top of the train, while Justin Michael thinks he got attacked by a Ghom.[1]
- The "Atticus is dead" joke is something that the team would make frequently, mostly as an easy explanation as to why they have not brought him back. Dennis is notorious for repeating it verbatim on his Twitter.[1]
- Inspirations for the Passenger Preparation Car included The Matrix and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.[1]
- The team minimized dialogue during the scenes where M.T. explores the car, as they wanted to emphasize a creeping horror. Most of M.T.’s brief lines, designed to break through some of the tension, were added by Jacob Winkler while boarding the episode.[1]
- Owen Dennis painted some of the backgrounds of the Passenger Farm himself, to help explain the feel of the room.[1]
- During early production, Owen Dennis and Madeline Queripel put together a packet to explain the show, with a section titled called "WWJCD: What Would John Carpenter Do?" Justin Michael thinks of the second half of this episode as a John Carpenter-esque scene because of the slow-burn reveal of the horror of the car.[1]
- One of the passengers in the farm is "canonically" Bruce Wayne from Batman: The Animated Series.[1]
- The name "Danny Nougat" was a throw-in by Jessie Wong.[1]
- In the DVD Commentary for this episode, the writers note the whole passenger preparation process is meant to demonstrate that there is a non-consensual aspect to the train, something that would have been explored in Book Five.[1]
- The lizard memory is based on a childhood trauma of Justin Michael's: his pet snake was squished to death under a door jam.[1]
- This episode is in some ways a reunion of the core cast for Book One, minus Ernie Hudson (Atticus): all characters are voiced by Ashley Johnson (Tulip), Jeremy Crutchley (Glad One), and Owen Dennis (Sad One).
Errors[]
- The passenger whom M.T. drags out of the car is supposed to have a number, but the design team forgot to add it and didn't notice until the episode had already aired.[1]
Videos[]
Transcript[]
View the episode's transcript here.
Gallery[]
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