'Snowpiercer' Episode 5: The secret of the Drawers is related to the survival of humanity
Spoilers for Season 1 Episode 5 'Justice Never Boarded'
In the very first episode of 'Snowpiercer', Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly) tells Jinju Seong (Susan Park) that once they revive Nikki (Madeleine Arthur) from the Drawers, "the work can continue". After they wake Nikki up, she seems mentally incapacitated from the sedative administered to "drawer her". In case you don't remember, Kronole is the street drug version of the sedative – the same one Brakeman Oz (Sam Otto) was slinging for blowjobs.
Nikki, in her mostly incoherent mumbling, says, "It's not like sleep" after she is revived. In short, while Dr. Klimpt (Happy Anderson) cuts their hair and toenails and tries to make them comfier in their drawers, the people in suspended sleep are not really sleeping. We get a glimpse of what their "eyes wide shut" consciousness is like through Andre Layton's (Daveed Diggs) experience. He first sees dead Nikki, her throat slit, singing and then dives into one of his worst memories – of killing the cannibal in the Tail section and dividing his heart into pieces for all the Tallies to eat, while they promise each other – "Never again". It is the visual portrayal of a story we have heard from his lips before and it is nightmarish – a traumatic memory that Layton is forced to relive again and again. If Nikki kept seeing the murder of Sean Wise on a loop when she was in "suspended animation", no wonder she went crazy!
Later, Josie (Katie McGuinness), beating all odds, gets into the Drawers with the help of the janitors. When she starts opening them one by one to try and find Layton, she is shocked to find other familiar faces from the Tail who had been taken away before, both children and women, all lying in suspended animation. Her discovery comes during the same time cunning teen murderer LJ makes an "appeal" to Mr. Wilfred for mercy that is actually a threat. In a brilliant chess moves, she says that Sean Wise's fear just before he died made him honest and that he revealed that he was Wilfred's "informant". LJ then says just enough about the "400 secrets" (the number of people in the Drawers) to convince Melanie that Sean Wise had spilled the beans. So, she engineers the release of LJ, masking it as a gesture of Wilfred's mercy, just to shut her up. And LJ later promises Melanie that she will keep Wilfred's "Drawer a secret".
But what is "the work" being done in the Drawers that necessitates this secrecy and the spending of precious resources to keep some supposedly 'worthless Tailies' – who die all the time in the Tail section of starvation and illness – alive in suspended sleep? Melanie lets some crucial bits of information slip while talking to Jinju. Melanie muses, making educated guesses as to what Sean might have said under torture. "He could have told her the Drawers are experimental? He could have told her about the List," she tells Jinju.
This tells us two things. One, that Layton and Nikki's reaction to being sedated wasn't an aberration. There are serious side effects to being Drawered and it is not a perfected technique yet. Two, the presence of the Tailies shows that they are human guinea pigs for making the process safer. Melanie seems very concerned about the mental deterioration aspect of sedation and she is constantly asking Dr. Klimpt about the state of his "patients" aka the human test subjects.
So, "the work" could be making the process safe enough to put a large number of people under sedation in the future. And why would Melanie need to do that? We already know that there are 3000 survivors on the train, the last of humanity. We also know that balancing the resources on the train with its population is a delicate dance. What if Melanie and the engineers know that there is a predicted shortfall coming their way in a few more years. They have already lost the bees and the cows.
As more resources get jeopardized, maybe the only way to 'save' the last of humanity would be to Drawer them till the earth thawed and the train could stop running. Or maybe, the train itself is breaking down and putting people in suspended animation after the train stopped would be the only way to save the 3000 onboard, with just a few caretakers keeping the minimal systems running as humanity hibernated. Maybe "the List", is the names of the people who will be Drawered first, their names drawn by the same lottery system Melanie used to pick the jury for the tribunal.
If word of this eventuality got out, it would spark chaos aboard the train. And maybe, that is why Melanie is willing to let a psychopath like LJ go, just to keep that secret safe.
'Snowpiercer' airs every Sunday at 9 pm ET/PT on TNT. It is also available to stream on Netflix.