When a group of people have to band together for survival, whether it be due to zombies, bus accidents, or being lost from civilization, there’s no higher stakes than life or death. If we care about the characters enough, the will to survive already drives the plot. However, Netflix show Pending Train doesn’t trust in the entertainment of this survival premise. Instead of focusing on the group’s survival, it constantly shifts to flashbacks depicting everyday drama. When the group finds out that they got lost way into the future, there’s less strategizing, and even more flashbacks. This strange episode structure makes the series feel less like a compelling survival show and more like a soapy melodrama.

Pending Train has an interesting premise, but it’s thwarted at times by the show’s strange handling of its tone. The show doesn’t give an intro to its characters, even its main ones, other than their boarding the train, paired with the whispers of their internal monologues detailing their day-to-day worries. Because of this, the show has to constantly keep shifting back and forth between flashbacks, but does so at the strangest possible times. For example, when the passengers panic over their survival, the show shifted to a cutesy depiction of how Hatano and Shirahama met. But the worst of these strange tone shifts comes from its music. When Kayashima mourns over the fact he’s not able to pick up his brother from juvie, this flashback and his lament is then paired with the bubbliest J-pop track I’ve ever heard. It’s a strange way to treat the desperation these passengers experience when they can’t find their way back home.