Nightmare Fuel / Infinity Train

Yes, that's a denizen.

Infinite possibilities on the Infinity Train can also mean infinite scares.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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General

• The SDCC 2018 trailer is pretty spooky, in no small part from how Tulip's mom keeps calling for her daughter, not knowing that she's vanished without a trace. The slow turn of Tulip's hand to see the glowing numbers is also agonizing to watch.
• According to Word of God, the show's aesthetic is similar to, of all things, The Mysterious Stranger segment of The Adventures of Mark Twain. Not to mention, listen closely at 4:23 in the Mysterious Stranger clip that Owen linked to. Sound familiar? The Infinity Train jingle is based on it. A jingle that plays when clay people given life by Satan fall to their deaths is the Infinity Train theme. (Granted, a very close listen reveals the tune does play in the background a bit when the gang first enters Satan's world, but it's barely noticeable—the above moment is where it's much more prominent.)
  • To quote a commenter:
    Jayden Yamada: If you are looking for the cue, passengers, it is at 4:23. Now is when you panic.

Book 1

The Grid Car

• The first episode gives us some idea of how far this show is willing to go as Tulip, in her attempt to escape the train, finds herself the target of vicious, relentless, giant lifeforce-draining cockroach monsters. No punches are pulled; Tulip's face is shown visibly aging as her vitality is drained from her.
• Tulip catches a glimpse of someone getting dragged off the train and reduced to particles by some kind of vortex. It scares her so much that she wants to leave immediately.
  • This gets lightened up a bit in the last episodes, as the vortex is the way home.
• One which only becomes obvious in retrospect: look very closely at the trees in the background as Tulip wakes up in the snow car. Notice anyone familiar?◊ Yeah, turns out the Conductor was right there the entire time.
  • Book 2 reveals the existence of Passenger Transportation Pods, so it's more likely that the mysterious object was just Tulip's pod.

The Cat's Car

• The trip through Tulip's memories is a degenerating cavalcade that initially ranges from funny, harmless changes to subtle, eerie differences, and quickly drops from there.
  • One memory involves Tulip going downstairs late at night and kneeling by the couch, staring and smiling at seemingly nothing. As Tulip looks at her past self, she realizes there's some weird, muffled talking coming from seemingly nowhere, before the memory suddenly "glitches." It's revealed later that this was simply an altered memory of Tulip speaking with her dad, but without context it's very unsettling, especially for the brief moment where past Tulip is replaced with something under a blanket lying on the couch.
  • The memory at Tulip's birthday party suddenly cuts to a close up of Tulip's mother with a terrifying Slasher Smile, before turning to her with the Steward's face, her father lunging at her while stretching into terrifying, Cronenbergian proportions, and Tulip is consumed by static at the end.
  • The next particularly distorted memory has Tulip's warped memory of her parents' divorce, as the entire room bursts aflame and Tulip's parents converge on a crying Tulip while changing into horrible, demonic creatures, chanting "DIVORCE! DIVORCE!"
• The ending, where it turns out The Cat is being threatened into trying to capture Tulip by the Steward and a shadowy figure implied to be the mysterious "Conductor". Whoever it is, all we see of the Steward's master is a monitor with an ominous line on it that moves in time with the bizarre mechanical "voice" it uses to give orders to the Steward.
  • When the Cat confesses Tulip already left the car, she begs for her life as the Steward is about to crush her in its tentacles.

The Unfinished Car

• One-One's obsession with "fixing" the glitchy-looking town full of talking turtles takes an unsettling turn near the end, when both of his personalities start to Speak in Unison, something he has never done up until this point.
  • Take a look back at the Mysterious Stranger clip. What else speaks with two voices?
  The Mysterious Stranger: "I can do no wrong... for I do not know what it is."
  One-One: "I'm here to get things back in order."

The Chrome Car

• We learn that reflections are intelligent beings, distinct from the person that they mirror, and if they step out of line they get ground into dust.
  • The reflection authorities seem totally affable at first - and then reveal their intent to kill Tulip's reflection for acting out of line. Suddenly the pair of Good Cop/Bad Cop buddies put some seriously creepy masks on, and pull out an arm-mounted sander that might as well be a chainsaw by reflection standards. The worst part is that they imply this has happened before, likely with previous passengers, and one of the officers is The Unfettered in getting the job done.

The Ball Pit Car

• Watching the episode closely, you can see the Steward is lurking in the background from the moment the gang stepped into the car.
• The entire scene with the Steward hunting for Tulip; since it couldn't find her just by looking around the car due to the tube maze, it starts sending it's tentacles out to feel for her instead. The group tries to get to the door without toughing any of the tentacles, which becomes much harder when we see that the tunnels are completely filled with the things just laying there, like traps set to spring at the slightest disturbance. Tulip's sheer terror during the whole thing just makes it worse, her actually gulping in fear when a claw twitches in front of her.
• You know a situation is pretty terrifying if One-One looks like he's so scared he can barely move without Tulip yelling at him to run away.
• Though it failed to kill her, the Conductor intimidates The Cat into chasing after One-One - before signaling the order for the Steward to fire on the tube The Cat should've been inside. Just before this, the Steward was also violently firing upon Tulip, demonstrating that the Conductor has no qualms about receiving her dead rather than alive.
• We finally get a full glimpse of The Conductor, and she proves just how ruthless she can be by threatening Tulip and her friends (in the process giving Tulip a Breaking Speech about how her friends were imperiled by her stubborn insistence on investigating the train), and turning Atticus into a Ghom. This implies that all the Ghoms in the wilderness we saw in "The Grid Car" were former denizens who got on the Conductor's bad side.
  • The creator revealed that not all Ghoms were created this way. Still, makes you wonder...
  • Atticus’s transformation is nothing to sneeze at either. First he launches himself out of Tulip’s arms with a snarl, sprouts the antennae while his paws grow and turn black. We then get to see a shilouette of Atticus, and he has the carapace of an Ghom growing on his face which quickly engulfs him. No wonder Tulip was broken!

The Past Car

• We find that in the tape, Amelia was running towards her college and was on the highest part building wearing a dark hood. Given that we find out her husband Aldrick had passed away, she was avoiding going to his funeral, too distraught to live in a world without her husband. The train appearing right in front of her at this moment could have been an Interrupted Suicide.

The Engine

• While we know there are obviously more humans on board, the fact that they range from children much younger than Tulip to the elderly is kind of horrifying, especially with some of these passengers having numbers that stretch beyond the tens of thousands.
• Amelia's spent so long trying to recreate her old life instead of overcoming her issues that her number stretches off of her hand, around her arm, and wraps around her neck creating a number with a lot of digits! Considering that the only way to leave the train is to get the number to zero... yeah, even she acknowledges that her ever returning to Earth is an impossibility at this point.
  • To give a comparison, Tulip only started off at 115. Some passengers on the train have numbers past five digits, which the computer doesn't bother counting. It appears that Amelia's repeated failures to recreate her life with Aldrick have caused her mental state to spiral so far that she may never recover.
• How long Tulip has been on the train. Time doesn't run differently there and the Conductor says that she had been on there for months thwarting her plans, with the flash forward at the end revealing that Tulip was there for at least five months. Her parents were most likely devastated and worried sick over her sudden disappearance. Meanwhile, Amelia has been on the train for decades and will likely grow old there and die, and that’s not even getting into the stays of other passengers (past, present, and future)...
• Even though Tulip's returned to the real world, she no longer has a reflection which is likely to remind her of the events she went through when on the train forever.

Book 2

The Black Market Car

• Mirror Tulip, who now goes by MT, is still not safe from Mirror Police, who are chasing after her with the intent to kill her. And they can travel through any reflective surface (except MT herself). It's gotten to the point where she carries a spray paint can around with her to spray anything reflective to try to stop them from reaching her.

The Map Car

• Marcel the wind spirit goes from friendly to threatening really quick when MT discovers his ruse. And the way he goes out is kinda creepy, dissolving into ordinary gusts of wind and effectively ceasing to exist.

The Parasite Car

• According to Jesse's conversation with MT, if a reflection's Prime dies, while they don't reflect the corpse (though Jesse's scenario of Tulip dying is horrifying enough to imagine), they get two options, getting their memories erased and getting a new Prime and form, or becoming a Mirror Police officer. That's it.
• Alan Dracula's powers start freaking out as he struggles against the control of Perry the parasite. When he finally breaks through, it's by growing a second head on his chest that lets out a horrific distressed screech that shows he is NOT enjoying the experience.

The Lucky Cat Car

• While Khaki Bottoms is shown to have survived the events of "The Ball Pit Car", he lost an ear.
• Grace. She spends the episode dressed in a creepy mask and cloak (though her almost tribal attire underneath is almost as concerning), and when she reveals herself, she lets a horde of younger passengers into the car, who then proceed to ransack it, using the justification that they're passengers and need to do what they can to survive (and that Grace wanted a corn-dog) when M.T. points out the way that they're treating the inhabitants of the car. And when Grace has one of the kids take the trio to their base, after doing an odd routine with them (specifically moving her fingers to imitate the facial markings on the boy's face), she takes off her long glove to reveal that, like Amelia's, her number goes off her hand, extending at up her arm at least to her elbow. Even worse, she acts like Jesse's number going down (which is at 4, meaning he's super close to leaving) is a bad thing!
  • Did you notice something off about the kid's right hand? There's no number on it which leaves the question whether the kid is real, Grace did something to take the number off of him or perhaps that the kid's not even a real human at all. Or maybe he's the child of two train passengers.
    • Possibly an animation error. There's at least one scene in season 3 when Simon's number inexplicably disappears as well.
  • Grace is quite young, appearing to be in her mid-to-late teens. Yet her number is at least in the trillions. What atrocities has this girl committed?
• It's heavily implied the workers at The Cat's carnival are all in debt to her somehow, as there's mention of a "debtor's prison" for those who fail to predict who will win passage out of the car.

The Mall Car

• The situation of the group of passengers who call themselves Apex is absolutely dire. They consist mostly of young children, and under their leader, Grace (who says she has the highest number), they have a cult-like adoration of the previous conductor, believing One-One to be the false one. As such, they do everything they can to NOT get their number down to zero under the false belief that it's a bad thing. They even have tattoos of Amelia's wavelength.
  • They also don't view the inhabitants of the cars as equal, with Grace having no qualms in letting MT be taken by the Mirror Police so she can be killed.
  • While the Apex believe the Train is theirs, they're all still human kids. When Grace is showing off the harpoon pack, she mentions "poor Lucy." Thankfully Book 3 shows her alive, but she has to wear an eyepatch.

The Wasteland

• Infinity Train outdoes itself once again as Mace gets bisected when MT drags him to the Wasteland. In what surely must be a reference to Aliens, we see his gooey silver blood hang out for the rest of the episode. His dialogue makes it clear that he's actually dying from this. It only gets worse from here.
• We finally find out what happens to non-humans when they try to go out far into the Wasteland. MT tries to leave, but the train prevents her from moving forward. As if things couldn't get worse, the Ghoms make their return.
• In an act that certainly pushes the boundaries of violence on Cartoon Network, MT shoves Agent Mace right into the train wheels and horrifically grinds him into a pulp on-screen, all the while Mace is screaming in absolute pain and terror with silvery blood leaking from every orifice on his face, and spraying said blood on MT's hardened face. And the only reason they got away with it was because "he isn't a human".

The Tape Car

• Easily the most intense and creepiest episode, where we find out how everybody comes to the train and how their memories are extracted. Which includes unconscious passengers being planted into a mushy white ground while their memories are pulled from their heads by little nanorobots. They are then sucked into the ground into a tube of water, and then float in a river until they come to a pool of water while their tape is reviewed by giant bird-looking robots. Their number is then burned onto their hand and are sent off to a designated car via a pod.
• We also learn in a one-off line from One-One that the Tape Car projections are on the outside of the car, not the inside. This means the outside barren wasteland that the train travels through is just like the inside of the other cars: a projection. What is the train... and where does it actually exist....
• While more lowkey, its probably a scary situation for the guy MT tossed out of his pod before he reached his destination. He was forcibly woken up on a speeding train, in an unfamiliar and unsafe place as he was not in the train proper, and with no instruction video of what he had to do. No telling what may happen to him after.

The Number Car

• Sieve is so distraught by Mace's death that he drops any reasonable qualities that he has and just tries to outright murder MT in Revenge.
• While One-One's Blue-and-Orange Morality is hinted at before, here it comes up full form. One-One has absolutely no interest in the wellbeing of anyone, happily allowing suffering and death as long as people fulfill their role on the train, and seriously considers letting MT die to resolve the Logic Bomb caused by her attempted escape. They only help her due to MT exploiting a loophole in their programming. It's a chilling reminder that for all the cute little gags, One-One is an inhuman machine with goals and values very different from ours.
• Alan Dracula shoots Sieve with his Eye Beams, causing Sieve to explode into metallic goo.
• Sieve throwing Jesse like a ragdoll into the memory-watching machine to get to MT. Fortunely, Jesse doesn't seem to be too hurt outside of a few bruises.

Book 3

General

• Simon's Sanity Slippage. Whereas Grace goes through a Heel–Face Turn as the book progresses, Simon goes off the deep end and doubles down on his existing vices after being reminded of his trauma, starts murdering any Nulls he sees and comes to believe everyone is plotting against him.

Trailer

• Grace "being sympathetic" and having Hazel join the Apex while also making her distrustful of Tuba. There's even the idea of her and Simon trying to kill the kind and gentle gorilla. This won't end well.
  • Grace and Simon paralyzed as Tuba walks towards them and Hazel proclaiming that trespassers are to be sacrificed to her. Of course it's revealed that they are being tickled but still...
• Not only is Hazel's number rather high (377), but it doesn't glow. Just why is Hazel on the train, and what's wrong with her number?
• One scene has Grace and Simon fighting off turtles in a car. The Unfinished Car...
  • In said car, Simon is struck with a lot of heavy debris on his back. Let's hope that it doesn't paralyze him...

Le Chat Chalet Car

• Simon having a Panic Attack upon being stuck in the cabin with the cat, who abandoned him all those years ago leaving him with severe paranoia and difficulty trusting others, especially nulls. Made worse for him as Grace, basically the closest thing to a therapist in his life, is too busy worrying about her number to help him deal with his emotional turmoil. As Simon breathes heavier and heavier as the reality of the situation sets in, the drums of the soundtrack get louder and louder.
• A scene of Simon exploring the storage room, starts out with him getting nostalgic upon finding one of his old toys, but then seeing a stuffed ghom and having a meltdown.
• Simon's clear discomfort at seeing the cat with Hazel and Tuba with Hazel are clear Foreshadowing, especially when the episode is rewatched, for him murdering Tuba in a delusional attempt to "protect" Hazel from future abandonment and vent his anger at being abandoned by a denizen.

The Color Clock Car

• Tuba's death at Simon's hands is an extremely bleak, terrifying scene that begins with a tense Hope Spot and ends with a starkly-depicted cold-blooded murder as Tuba is kicked directly into the path of the train's wheels. The scene uses a discretion shot, but the final haunting shots of Tuba plunging to her doom and Simon's terrifying glare leave nothing to the imagination (particularly with Mace's death in the same fashion having been completely onscreen in the last book).
  • What's more is that he just spent an entire episode learning to trust Tuba, which usually means that his number should go down. Instead, he continues to think nulls are Always Chaotic Evil, doesn't understand why Hazel is angry at him for killing her adoptive mom and is confused Grace isn't excited about his number going up like usual. And his sanity only gets worse from here.
• Hazel transforming into a turtle humanoid at the end of the episode. Just what is she?!

The Campfire Car

• As we pick up right where the previous episode left off, we see that Hazel had no idea she was a denizen. She's just as confused and freaked out by her transformation as Grace. She tries to get her shell off, only to discover that it's attached to her body, and then tries scratching off her scales.
  Hazel: What's going on? What's on me? (Tries to pull off her shell) It's stuck on me! It's my skin! (Scratches at her scales) Why is it my skin?!
• After Hazel discovers that she's a "train person", she comes to the horrifying realization that Simon will probably wheel her like he did Tuba if he ever finds out the truth.

The Canyon of the Golden Winged Snakes Car

• Simon's mental state is slipping like mad when he states how Grace isn't acting like "she should be", showing off how he's so co-dependent on her. He forcefully gets into her space, grabbing her arm so he could see her number. Overall, his behavior is highly reminiscent of a controlling boyfriend.

The Hey Ho Whoa Car

• Simon's Villainous Breakdown when Amelia gives him the Awful Truth about the train's true purpose and taunts him for being a brat who needs to face reality.
• It turns out that everything Amelia made is being "quarantined", as well as any car that Hazel happens to be in at the time it gets scanned. This also means that regardless of Simon murdering Tuba or not, Tuba was going to be quarantined either way. Moreover, there were all those corgis in the Unfinished Car too, so they're also being sent off (although given how One-One personally knows Atticus, perhaps he'll let them go).

The Origami Car

• The Kubrick Stare Simon gives Hazel at the start of the episode at an angle looks like he's glaring at the audience as well.
• Simon continues to fall further and further into paranoia, even attacking Grace with the tape player and trapping her under the delusion that her lying to Hazel meant she was going to abandon him just like the cat did.
• The end of the episode has Simon trap Grace in that memory of her promising Hazel "not to tell Simon"... while in the real world, Grace is stuck in a trance and is left in a coma as the tape keeps repeating that same phrase over and over and over again.
• By the end of the episode, Simon's number is up to his neck.
• The Conductor in Grace's idealized memory is presented as a towering presence, caked in shadows, a mouth that opens to reveal a human hand covered in numbers, with a booming voice and demonic beeps that control the Steward like a mighty God commanding a dragon like a plaything. It's small wonder Grace came to worship the Conductor as an all powerful monster.

The New Apex

• Grace having to see Hazel chew her out for all that she did.
  • When Grace snaps out of it, she finds the memory tape and tries to pull it out. She starts gagging when she pulls out the end to reveal something that looks like part of her brain.
• It isn't stated how long Grace spent trapped in the tape or how long it took her to get back to the Mall Car. But look at Simon's hair when we see him again. It's gone from a short ponytail to below his shoulders. Hair grows at a rate of about 1/2 an inch per month. At minimum, it was several months since the last time they were together. We don't know if the tape 'preserves' those it traps or if they would need care similar to a coma patient, so we can't say Grace spent all that time in the tape rather than traveling back to the Apex (especially since she didn't have a harpoon pack to speed up the trip), but we also can't say she didn't.
  • Speaking of the time between Simon trapping her and them fighting, Simon would've spent at least a few months ruling the Apex. It isn't clear what exactly he did other than tell them Grace was a 'void', but judging by how... despondent they seem carrying his throne, it likely wasn't anything good.
• Think about this whole ordeal from the perspective of Grace & Simon's followers; their leaders are taken from them in what they would likely assume to be an attack by One-One. They don't know if they're alive or ever coming back. Over the next who-knows-how-long (looking at the scene, Grand and Simon went much further than 47 cars away), they manage to survive, constantly afraid the False Conductor will attack them again. Then Simon returns, but without Grace. He doesn't tell them anything about what happened other than that Grace is a 'void', assuming he ever told them what she did to warrant that title. Then he spends several months ruling with an iron first until Grace miraculously returns. And then the two people who cared for them and protected them and became their new family fight to the death, with the winner telling them that everything they've believed this whole time was a lie.
• Simon's villainy really reaches its apex here (pun intended). Not only is he the villain, going as far as to make the Apex wheel Grace (calling her "Void", which in Simon's terms, is a leader unfit to lead and must be terminated) but he gets a number so big that it covers his face when he throws her off even after she just saved him. A scarily impressive feat considering that it took Amelia 33 years of misdeeds to let her number reach her neck. Simon surpassed Amelia's number in a tiny fraction of the time!
  • Also, compare the Apex kids' demeanor serving under Simon compared to when they served under Grace. Note how uncomfortable they seem to be. It seems quite clear that while Grace used charisma to command her followers, Simon rules them through fear. Tellingly, it doesn't take long for the kids to switch their loyalty back to Grace.
• Once Grace shows kindness to Simon, saving him from falling to the ground below... Simon kicks her off the train to let her die the same way as Tuba before her. Worse still is the way he switches from mad laughter to crying and then doing both at the same time, presumably upon having realized he just pushed away his Only Friend and questioning whether it was worth it. Not that he has much time left anyhow.
• Simon learns the hard way what happens when a Ghom gets a person. They slowly melt their flesh, sucking in every bit until the person is reduced to bones and then to ash, and he keeps screaming even as his skeleton is visible and his throat has dissolved. Makes you realize just how much more lucky Tulip was to avoid having this happen to her not only once, but twice back in Book 1.
  • Then the ghom in question explodes. Whether this was a consequence of Simon's number being so big or what always happens when Ghoms drain somebody is unclear...

Book 4

The Twin Tapes

• The unified One is very eerie, with his voice reminiscent of Satan from the Mysterious Stranger clip linked at the top of this page.
  One: And once these two arrive at their seat, it is up to them to sort things out.
  Amelia: And if they don't?
  One: Then they die here.

The Art Gallery Car

• The art gallery is seemingly devoid of denizens and unnaturally cold. The source of this cold reveals itself as shadowy hands that emerge from the artwork and remain constantly unseen, which chill Min-Gi and Ryan with a touch and coerce them to reveal their innermost negative feelings, the hands getting more 'aggressive' as time goes on.
  • Once Ryan leaves the art gallery, he realizes he can't go back in right as the hands converge into a huge shadow before emerging from the painting to reveal its true form: a three-legged monster made entirely of twisted arms, one of which even has a very long unlit passenger's Number on it. Had Min-Gi not found the door by chance, he'd have likely joined that passenger.

The Castle Car

• The Steward arriving and apparently malfunctioning, and then announcing everyone is on their own with Amelia's voice.

The Train Documentaries

• "The Movie Theater Car" starts out pretty light, with a bunch of Anthropomorphic Food singing a "Let's All Go to the Lobby"-type song. But then their song takes a dark twist ("Let's add one to our number / To sate his endless hunger"), which One-One picks up on almost too late, as the Concession Stand itself turns out to be a horrible monster that tries to eat unwary passengers ("MY TUMMY NEEDS A TREAT!")

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