The Grid Car

**Overview**
Gallery
Transcript

## **Guide**

"**The Grid Car**" is the 1st episode of Season 1 of *Infinity Train* and the 1st episode overall. It was made available on the Cartoon Network website on July 20, 2019 at 5:00 PM (PST), and aired on television on August 5, 2019 at 7:30 PM.

## Synopsis

Tulip, a headstrong 13-year-old girl, finds a mysterious train where every car contains its own universe.

## Plot

The episode opens on November 22, before Thanksgiving, with Tulip discussing her upcoming trip to a coding camp in Oshkosh, Wisconsin with her friend Mikayla as they walk to Tulip's house from their school bus stop. Tulip is eating a raw onion, something Mikayla teases her about. Mikayla also remarks that although she hates video games in general, she likes the one Tulip has been working on. When the two reach Tulip's house, Mikayla asks Tulip about her parents' relationship, revealing that they are divorced.

When Tulip enters the house, we see her mother, Megan, for the first time. She is talking on the phone with Tulip's father, Andy, and tells Tulip that they need to talk. Tulip, ignoring her, proceeds upstairs to her room, where she sits down at her computer and begins testing her game. Consulting the book "Coding is Cool", she changes some lines in the game's code, fixing a bug which had caused one of the sprites to be unable to move.

Tulip's mother calls to her from downstairs, and, with a heavy sigh, Tulip comes to the top of the stairs to talk to her. Megan informs Tulip that her father can't take her to camp because he mixed up the dates and planned an out-of-town trip for his work. Tulip is visibly upset by this, and points out a contract she had previously made with her parents --- they agreed to let her go to the camp if she raised her grade in English. Megan explains that she can't take Tulip, either, because she had scheduled shifts at the hospital where she works, assuming that Tulip would be gone the whole time. Tulip responds by attacking her parents for "messing things up" with their divorce, and being "too busy to be [her] parents".

Tulip then retreats to her room, where she crumples up and throws a flyer for the Oshkosh coding camp. Her phone buzzes, and she notices that Andy has sent her an apology text message. After looking thoughtfully at her window, which looks out over a snow-covered field, she puts on boots and gloves, opens the window, and runs away across the field.

After Tulip has walked for some time, the sun begins to set. She takes out the crumpled flyer from earlier, remarking that the 300 mile distance to the camp is "not a quick hop". At that moment, the Train passes by, with green light shining out of its windows. It stops with the door of one car directly in front of Tulip, and the sign above the door changes to read "Oshkosh". Remarking on the apparently lucky occurrence, Tulip steps on to the train, only to shield her face as a glowing ring flies toward her. She gasps, and the camera cuts away to show her waking up in a snowy landscape similar to the one she had been walking through before the train appeared, but this time in daylight.

Speculating that the incident with the train was a hallucination, Tulip chides herself for hallucinating something so "boring" as an "outmoded form of transportation". As she walks along, kicking at the ground in frustration, she runs into a group of three snowmen. The head of the last is made from the spherical white robot One-One. Tulip is taking aback by the robot's sudden appearance and screams. One-One asks her if she is their "Mum", and then if she has come to bring him "the sweet release of death". Saying no to both questions, Tulip wonders aloud if One-One is a toy, and praises their speech recognition. One-One informs Tulip that they're looking for their mother, but that they doesn't know what she looks like --- she might be large, or "small, like a nurturing bagel". They ask Tulip if she is also looking for her "bagel mother", and she responds that she definitely isn't, and she isn't looking for her dad either. She tells One-One why she is going to Oshkosh, and then tells him to "go back to being a snowman, or whatever you are". One-One responds by asking themselves "What am I?"

Tulip and One-One then come across a door in what looks like a large snowball. Tulip guesses that "North St. Paul kids" probably built it, and One-One claims that it is impossible to open. Tulip scoffs at this and proceeds to open it by twisting the half-lemniscate shaped handle clockwise. Behind the door is the outside of the Train, which prompts Tulip to realize she is still aboard. Initially, she is as excited by the revelation that she's on "like, a really weird big train" as One-One is by the revelation that she can reach doorknobs. She asks One-One a string of questions in quick succession, to which they respond "yes", but refuse to clarify which question they're answering.

Tulip and One-One continue into the next car, the Grid Car, which is an empty room with regular grid patterns covering the walls. When Tulip steps into the car, they discover its main feature --- when pressure is applied to the walls, floor, or ceiling, a tone sounds, and a colorful cube appears. They experiment with building things from the cubes. Tulip recreates the sprites from her game, which, as she tells One-One, is called "Good Guys Poppin' Bad Guys". When Tulip admits to One-One she's only ever made one game, the robot seizes on the word "one", saying "that's my name! One-One!", with the first "One" in Glad-One's voice, and the second in Sad-One's.

In an attempt to activate the ceiling of the car, Tulip takes off her right glove and throws it at the ceiling. This succeeds, causing a tone to sound and a cube to come out of the ceiling, but in the process, Tulip notices that a glowing number 115 has appeared on her hand. As she is exclaiming over this, the train stops. Tulip opens the door of the car and goes outside. She is disturbed to find that the land around the train does not look like Wisconsin, but rather a reddish desert landscape with ominous clouds in the sky.

As Tulip watches, a finger of light, resembling a glowing tornado, extends from the center of a rotating cloud to a car in front of her, and we see a human silhouette get pulled out of the car into it and disintegrate. The finger retreats to the cloud, and then a column of light bursts from the cloud to the ground, making a loud noise and throwing dust in Tulip's face. Panicking, she gets off the train and starts running away from it, across the ground. When her foot gets stuck in a patch of mud, three giant creatures known as Gohms emerge from the ground. With renewed effort, Tulip frees her foot from the mud, and the Gohms chase her back to the train, as One-One (riding on her shoulder) sings "a wacky getting-chased song."

By now the train has started moving again. Tulip manages to get back on by riding one of the wheels up to the bottom of a car and climbing up, and the Gohms fly up after her. She runs back into the Grid Car and shuts the door, but one of the Gohms gets caught in it and, when it tickles her face with a feeler, Tulip lets go of the door, releasing it into the room. Tulip briefly stops the Gohm with a by using the car to make a short wall, but it soon corners her and appears to start sucking the life-force out of her. Saying, "I can help, Miss Tulip!", One-One splits in half and knocks the Gohm backward, freeing Tulip. Tulip asks One-One to build a wall around the door and attempts to hold off the Gohm by throwing the Good Guy and Bad Guy sprites at it. This buys One-One enough time to build a wall, or "actually more of a house" around the door, with a small opening in it. Tulip jumps through the opening, which is too small for the Gohm chasing her to fit through, and makes it out the door, which she shuts behind her, trapping the Gohm in the room.

As they sit on the platform just outside the car's door, Tulip tries to reason out her situation, saying that "even crazy things have their own logic". She asks One-One if the train has a conductor. The robot tells her that he thinks they do have one, but "he would most likely be at the engine." The episode closes with Tulip looking out over the train and at the glowing number on her hand, and saying determinedly, "I'm getting off this train."

## Features

### Characters

* Tulip
* One-One
* Mikayla (debut)
* Megan (debut)
* Andy (mentioned/pictured)
* Gohms (debut)
* Snowmen
	+ Linnette Ramsey-Wilkinson
	+ Hot Dog
	+ Joe

### Locations

* North Branch, Minnesota
	+ Megan's Residence (debut)
	+ North Middle Branch Area Middle School (referenced)
* North Saint Paul, Minnesota (mentioned)
* Oshkosh, Wisconsin (mentioned)
	+ Oshkosh Game Design Camp (referenced)
* DolphWorld (pictured)
* Wasteland
* Infinity Train
	+ Snow Car
	+ Grid Car

## Trivia

* In the Official Infinity Train Trailer, the destination of the train is referred to as "Osh Kosh" instead of "Oshkosh" as it is in the episode. This was a mistake by Owen Dennis that was noticed at the very last minute and corrected mere hours before the final episode was due.
* A small binary code poster in Tulip's room translates to "love is love". This was discovered by a user on Twitter and liked by Owen Dennis.
* When Tulip runs against the Ghoms, One-One (Glad-One) sings "Yakety Sax" (better known as the closing theme to *The Benny Hill Show*) to express the moment.
* Upon seeing the giant snowman, Tulip remarks, "North Saint Paul kids probably built this." This is a reference to the North Saint Paul Snowman, a 20-ton concrete snowman that is the logo of North St. Paul, Minnesota. Owen Dennis grew up within 10 minutes of this snowman.
* **End tag:** Tulip's hand, against a backdrop of the Wasteland, with her number rapidly changing.

### Continuity

* According to Tulip's smartphone lock screen, Tulip runs away from home on Friday, November 22. Around three months after this episode released Owen Dennis pointed out that the season 2 trailer was set to release on the exact same day Tulip gets on the train. Confirming that Tulip left in the year 2019.
* In a "12 Things You Need To Know about Infinity Train" video released around the time the series first season was announced, fact number 6 is that Tulip first meets One-One as a snowman head, which happens in this episode.
* Tulip witnesses a passenger get disintegrated by a portal that latches onto the train.
* The picture Tulip looks at is from her family's trip to DolphWorld.
* When Tulip wakes up on the train, a mysterious circular object can be seen flying away in the background. What exactly this is becomes obvious as the series continues.
	+ Owen Dennis remarked in the Book One commentary that it was spotted by viewers long before its purpose was revealed in the show, and expressed shock that they were able to spot it when it only appears onscreen for a few frames.

### Behind the scenes

* The original version of this episode was titled "The Bliss Car" and featured a car populated by passengers who were stuck staring at television screens.
* At one point in its development, *Infinity Train* was scripted as a traditional half-hour time slot cartoon, with 19-page scripts. As a result, a number of scenes and lines originally scripted for this episode were cut when it was decided each episode would run for approximately 11 minutes.
	+ During Tulip and Mikayla's conversation, Mikayla would have talked about being forced to hang out with her "boring" Uncle Nate, who asks if kids are still into magazines these days.
	+ The inciting incident for Tulip running away was learning of her parents' divorce. This scene was later moved to "The Cat's Car".
	+ At one point there was a scene where Tulip leaves some money at a ticket booth before boarding the train, commenting, "Well, I paid for it, not getting in trouble, bye!"
	+ The person getting sucked out of the train would have shouted, "You were right, Bobby, I am coming home!" This line was written by Cole Sanchez, who added it during the storyboarding process.
* Storyboarding for this episode began during additional development after production on the pilot. It is the only episode on which Cole Sanchez receives both a writing and storyboarding credit: he departed the series after initial development to serve as supervising producer on *Summer Camp Island.*
* Tulip's room features a number of things based on objects from the crew's childhoods: "Good Guys Popping Bad Guys" is inspired by the first game Owen Dennis made when he was twelve-years old, while the desk is based on Madeline Queripel's childhood desk. More specifically, the room is based on Dennis' cousin's daughter's bedroom, while the house's is based on that of a family friend of Dennis.
* Lindsay Katai based the scheduling argument between Tulip and her mother on her own experiences with divorced parents, noting her father frequently had issues with scheduling.
* Lindsay Katai wrote the text from Tulip's father, but one of the designers added the emojis at the end of it.
* When Tulip first walks up to the train, the name "OWEN" can be seen above the door for a single frame each time the animation loops.
	+ This is an easter egg added by the creator of the show, Owen Dennis, because one of the animators added the initials "GM KEP" in another frame of the loop.
* The issue the writers ran into with Tulip and One-One's introduction was how she would accept the existence of a robot considering her obsession with logic.
* The show where Tulip opens the door into the Grid Car is one of the few times the team used a hand-drawn door, as opposed to the more-commonly used CG doors throughout the series.
* The fact that Tulip's first major experience in a car took place in a grid, like her video games, was unintentional.

## Videos

Episode 1 First Minute Infinity Train Cartoon Network"The Grid Car" Recap Infinity Train Cartoon Network

## Gallery

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## References

1. ↑ Cartoon Network promotes book 1 as a "five night special event" on Twitter.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 According to Tulip's smartphone and Owen Dennis' tweet announcing Book 2 trailer releasing on the same day.
3. ↑ Infinity Train book 1 trailer for reference to "OSH KOSH".
4. ↑ Owen mentions the Oshkosh mistake during a panel. (Timestamp 33:25-33:55)
5. ↑ "Love is love" binary code poster.
6. ↑ Owen Dennis, Twitter. "North St. Paul is a real place with a real gigantic snowman made of concrete. I grew up about 10 minutes from it." (archived link)
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 Book 1 DVD Commentary.
8. ↑ https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1275640039607808005?s=20

Infinity Train (pilot)

**Book One**
**The Grid Car** • The Beach Car • The Corgi Car • The Crystal Car • The Cat's Car • The Unfinished Car • The Chrome Car • The Ball Pit Car • The Past Car • The Engine

**Minisodes**
The Green Car • The Tiny Wizard Car • The Kaiju Car • The Tech Support Car • The Snow Car • The Hill Car • The Movie Theater Car • The Cross-Eyed Ducks Car • The Minecart Car • The Wedding Cake Car

**Book Two**
The Black Market Car • The Family Tree Car • The Map Car • The Toad Car • The Parasite Car • The Lucky Cat Car • The Mall Car • The Wasteland • The Tape Car • The Number Car

**Book Three**
The Musical Car • The Jungle Car • The Debutante Ball Car • Le Chat Chalet Car • The Color Clock Car • The Campfire Car • The Canyon of the Golden Winged Snakes Car • The Hey Ho Whoa Car • The Origami Car • The New Apex

**Book Four**
The Twin Tapes • The Iceberg Car • The Old West Car • The Pig Baby Car • The Astro Queue Car • The Party Car • The Art Gallery Car • The Mega Maze Car • The Castle Car • The Train to Nowhere