Summary
Curtis leads the way through the next car. Peering in the windows, the group sees doctor's appointments going on. In the next car is a formal dining room filled with fancily dressed people who stare as the revolutionaries pass through.
Meanwhile, we see the man who killed Gilliam, Franco, walking through the classroom, following closely behind the revolutionaries. He looks out the window of the classroom, and sees the revolutionaries in an adjacent car and begins shooting at them wildly. Curtis shoots back, until they both run out of bullets. After Curtis reloads, he aims at Franco again and they shoot at each other, but miss. Franco continues on his way through the cars.
Soon enough, Franco catches up to them and follows them through a spa of some kind into another car, a sauna. Grey jumps out and stabs Franco in the shoulder and the two men struggle. Curtis goes to shoot Franco, but as the men move, he struggles to steady his aim. After Franco knocks Grey unconscious, Curtis shoots at him, but Franco shoots Curtis in the arm, injuring him. They fight, and Franco eventually kicks Curtis unconscious. As he goes to stab Curtis in the throat, Grey stops him.
Franco then stabs Grey in the chest and goes to leave, but opens the door to one of the sauna stalls where a woman is bathing. He finds Nam hiding behind the woman and the two of them fight. As Nam strangles Franco, Yona throws a knife on the ground and Curtis stabs Franco in the side. Curtis comes to and rushes to Tanya, who is still alive. She says Timmy's name over and over again, as Curtis pulls the drawing of Timmy out of her shirt. Curtis promises to find Timmy as Tanya weeps and dies.
Curtis continues on through a dark car, and at the end of a long hall comes upon a dimly lit and decadent party, where people wear flamboyant costumes and take drugs. At the end of the party, they go into another room, where people sit in conversation pits doing drugs, which Nam and Yona steal.
In an engine room of some kind, Curtis walks over a bridge and comes to a large vault door, as Yona and Nam follow behind. Curtis tells Nam to open the door, and when Nam requests more of his drug of choice, Curtis throws it at him and begins beating on the door. Nam kicks him away from the door, then throws him his last cigarette, which Curtis lights and smokes. Nam tells him that it's the world's last cigarette, and Curtis tells him about life in the last car. He tells Nam that they had to eat the weak in the early days on the train, and he cries as he recalls that "babies taste best." He tells a horrible story about nearly killing a baby and cries as he reveals that the baby was Edgar, and that Gilliam stopped Curtis from eating him, offering his own arm instead. "18 years I've hated Wilford, 18 years I've waited for this moment, and now I'm here," he says.
He tells Nam to open the gate, and Nam tells him that he has been stocking up on the drug, Kronole, in order to dynamite the door to the outside, as he has seen signs that the environment outside the train is thawing. Suddenly the woman with the yellow coat who took Timmy and the other child earlier in the film comes out and shoots Nam, before telling Curtis that Wilford would like to extend a formal dinner invitation to him.
In Wilford's lair, Curtis finally meets the train's dictatorial leader. He is an older handsome gentleman who invites him in with a friendly demeanor and asks if he's hungry. "You are the first human being to have walked the total length of this train," Wilford says, as Curtis takes a seat. He cooks a steak on a small grill and tells Curtis that he's never been to the back of the train. He tells Curtis, "Curtis, everyone has their preordained position, and everyone is in their place except you," to which Curtis responds, "That's what people in the best place say to the people in the worst place. There's not a soul on this train who wouldn't trade places with you."
Wilford extols the virtues of balance, and reveals that his organization had to keep the population down in order to ensure ecological balance. He talks about the fact that natural selection would have taken too long, and that it was essential to have "individual units kill off other individual units." As he eats, Wilford marvels at Curtis' ingenuity, before revealing that he and Gilliam had been working together all along.
Analysis
An enduring motif in the film is violence, particularly brutal, hand-to-hand combat. In the hierarchical and oppressive world of the train, the only option is violence, and it often is horribly brutal and intense. Revolution is a bloody affair, and we watch as character after character gets gunned down, impaled, stabbed, and killed in the most brutal of ways.
What started as a straightforward (if difficult) journey of escaping from the rear car of the train and staging a coup becomes a much more complex journey for Curtis when all of his associates and friends start getting killed. While in the beginning, Curtis was surrounded by supportive friends who provided council, encouragement, and advice in difficult scenarios, in this middle portion of his journey, he loses all of them, including Edgar, Gilliam, and Tanya, and must continue on alone. These losses are traumatizing, but they also give Curtis a renewed sense of purpose, and propel him towards Wilford with an even more vengeful spirit.
For the first time in the film, we see Curtis's fortitude challenged by the losses he has faced. He walks through cars of indulgent party-goers with a stony but intense expression, and when Nam gets distracted by his itch for more of the drug he loves, Curtis becomes impatient and begins beating on a large vault door with a vengeance. After sacrificing so much for a greater good, Curtis begins to feel the pain of his heroic obligation, and loses some of the reserved seriousness that has made him such a steady leader.
For the first time in a while, as Curtis and Nam sit outside Wilford's room, Curtis talks about his biography and relays some personal details about how difficult life in the last car has been. It turns out, life in the rear car was even worse than it has hitherto seemed. If the viewer thought that eating cockroach bars was bad, Curtis dispels this when he tells Nam that in the beginning days on the train they "ate the weak," resorting to cannibalism in order to survive. Curtis confirms that life as a rear passenger of the train under Wilford has been truly horrible, and even the emotionless Nam seems shocked as Curtis recalls eating a baby.
In this section of the film, we finally meet the infamous Wilford, who on the surface is far less nefarious than we might have imagined. He is a greying man in his 60s wearing a robe, cooking steak for himself and drinking red wine. The fascist dictator responsible for genocide, environmental manipulation, and so much struggle appears to us a simply a wealthy man cooking for one who insists that everyone is in their deserved position in the world. He espouses traditionally oppresive logics about class—that class hierarchy is for the best, and that each echelon of society has its benefits and burdens. The most disturbing thing about Wilford is how calm, kind, and inoffensive he is in temperament, so buffered is he from the violence he has created.
