Characters / Infinity Train: Cult of the Conductor

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Grace

Grace Monroe

"We're passengers. We do what we have to do to survive."

Voiced by: Kirby Howell-Baptiste

One of the main protagonists of the show's third season. An 18-year-old passenger who has been traversing the train since she was a young child, eventually founding a cult of child passengers called the Apex alongside her best friend Simon. After being rescued by The Conductor early during her journey, she came to believe that the train's purpose is to serve as a glorified amusement park for passengers to enjoy and forget about their pasts.

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• Abusive Parents: "The Origami Car" reveals that she had emotionally distant ones, who never cared about her feelings at all. Grace even mutters "I just want to be noticed" while in the memory of her past self being caught shoplifting.
• Aggressive Categorism: As none of the denizens helped her initially and she found out that one denizen betrayed her best friend, Grace decided all Denizens are non-feeling Always Chaotic Evil beings created to torment and misdirect passengers. Even when she warms up to Tuba, Grace only designates her "as one of the good ones" and a rare exception to the rule. By the end of the season, she has ditched her denizen prejudice, albeit at the cost of all her friendships.
• All for Nothing: The Apex was made so that she would never feel alone, and she manipulated others so she had a sense of superiority and love that she sorely lacked. By the end of Book 3, she has to admit that she did everything not to be alone, and now she lost her closest friend, a sister-like figure and a kind denizen partner and realizing that all of her lies caused her and her followers to be separated from their families for years. It was never worth it over a single lie of knowing exactly how the train works, now was it?
• Ambiguous Innocence: Grace was just an ordinary human child who got snatched by the Infinity Train when she was alone. From there, it's not made clear how much of her eventual evolution into a cult leader is on her personally, and how much of it is because of not knowing what she was supposed to do for years.
• Ambiguous Situation: Grace said that she stole a bracelet because she wanted to be noticed. But noticed by whom? Her parents? The supposed friends she hung out with?
• Ambiguous Start of Darkness: While we know how Grace started her trip, and saw where she ended as the leader of The Apex, the exact point where Grace went from "Misguided Passenger just trying to survive" to "serial wheeler who believes that her number getting bigger is a good thing" remains unclear.
• Anti-Hero: In Book 3, which clarifies that, while she isn't a truly heroic figure, she isn't a bad person either. While showing a lot of noble tendencies, her influence caused a lot of damage to the train and its denizens, which she must learn to accept.
• Arc Hero: She’s the anti-heroic protagonist of the third season. She shared this with Simon until he became the season’s Arc Villain.
• Attention Whore: Ultimately revealed to be this. By her own admission, she began the Apex for the purpose of being noticed and given attention that she felt deprived of as a result of her parents.
• Ascended Extra: From a face in "The Engine", to a minor antagonist in Book 2, to finally a protagonist in Book 3.
• Bait the Dog: This was her modus operandi until meeting Hazel. She wins the carnival game against Jesse and MT to get an exit from the door but uses the victory to let the Apex storm the car. Grace tells them they can use the door but have to come to the Apex lair to "help" Jesse with his number. MT is naturally suspicious but Jesse notes that she's being generous and they don't really have a choice unless they want to stay in the Lucky Cat car for another month. She then tries to wheel Alan Dracula and MT for the crime of being denizens and to get her own number crawling up her body. When Jesse protests but the train boots him off for getting his number to zero, Grace calls the Flecs on MT to arrest her. Later on, Hazel calls out Grace for this, telling her off for pretending to be nice and thinking she knows everything but she's actually a big bully that will hurt other people to protect herself.
• Body-Count Competition: She has one with in season 3's first episode, as the two laugh and compare their rising numbers after killing many denizens in the musical car. Later after Tuba's death, Simon references their old game by trying to compare numbers after he killed Hazel's guardian, but Grace's.
• Boyish Short Hair: She cuts her long hair not long after getting into the train.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: By the end of Book 3, Grace goes from being the proud creator of the Apex's evil beliefs and performer of many hate crimes against denizens to hating the Apex and deeply regretting everything she's done. Simon uses this as reason to betray her and switch to being loyal to the Apex's ideology itself. Interestingly this is a positive version of this trope.
• Becoming the Mask: While she’s only manipulating Hazel with kindness in the beginning, her number starts to go down when her actions start to come from a place of genuine caring. By the second half of Book 3, she's become much more of a sister figure to Hazel, especially since this just came after Simon wheeled Tuba, and is heartbroken when Hazel leaves with Amelia.
• Big Sister Instinct: Quickly becomes protective of Hazel, to the point that her number starts going down as she interacts with her. However a pivotal moment in the "Hey Ho Whoa Car", where she betrays Hazel to protect her relationship with Simon, has Hazel leave her behind and go with Amelia.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She acts nice to the children under her protection, complimenting their gifts and promising to cherish them, only to throw away anything she doesn't like as soon as the kids leave. She gets rid of this side of her by the end of Book 3, becoming a genuine Nice Girl.
• Body Motifs: Her mouth. She's known to give a horse-like trill when she's in concentration, and most of her problems come about when she opens her big mouth.
• Broken Tears: She starts crying these in the last two episodes of Book 3 as all her lies and haughty attitude has crumbled into nothing and she must live with the consequences of her actions.
• Break the Haughty: Grace was taken down from her haughty pedestal throughout Book 3, but the last three episodes hit her hard. From the moment Hazel's cover was blown and she tried to save face in front of Simon, things went downhill. Hazel rejects her and leaves with Amelia, who only saw Hazel as something to observe, completely breaking her heart. Then, as retaliation for lying to Simon about it the whole time, he traps her in her own memories with no way of escaping, forcing her to be tormented by all her mistakes. When she owns up to her mistakes and escapes on her own, she finds her way back to the Apex only to find her group turned against her by Simon. She can't talk Simon down and has to fight him, which ends with him being killed by a Ghom, too quickly for her to save him. Grace may have gotten some character development along the way, but it cost her just about everyone she held dear.
• Brutal Honesty: After she saves Simon from plummeting from the train, he asks her why she did it. She literally replies, "I don't know." Simon is enraged to hear this, since it means he's not worth saving, and he immediately kicks her off the train in response.
• Character Development: In Book 3, interacting with Hazel starts making her improve for the better, which is even reflected by her number going down. Notably, she also starts being nicer to denizens, like using their names and titles more instead of just calling them "nulls". When Simon talks about him murdering Tuba in front of Hazel and pointing out how his number rose (in reference to their earlier game), she walks away from him, upset that he hurt Hazel's feelings (but not upset because murdering denizens is wrong). Later on, through her friendship with Hazel, she realizes killing denizens is in and of itself innately wrong. By the end of Book 3, she starts dismantles the Apex for good and taking the time to tend to some origami birds saves her life when Simon tried to wheel her.
• Character Tics: She has a tendency to do a lip trill when she's steeling herself up for something. She apparently had this in the past as revealed in "The Origami Car".
• Chekhov's Gunman: She first appears on a screen in "The Engine" (at the time her number being "...53821").
• Conspicuous Gloves: She wears a pair of lavender gloves to cover her ever-growing number. As Book 3 goes on, the fact that she doesn't remove them at all to see her number shows off her growth in how she doesn't want a bigger number. By the end, she no longer wears them, to show off her vulnerability and desire to grow.
• The Corrupter: She encourages children to act on their worst impulses and bring their numbers up instead of down so that they'll be stuck on the train and not learn the lessons it's trying to teach them. This is why at the beginning of Book 3 Episode 10, a nightmare-version of Hazel says Grace also shares responsibility in Tuba's death, as while Simon killed Tuba, she plotted to kill Tuba earlier and "He didn't come up with the idea to wheel denizens on his own!" By the end of Book 3, she admits what she did was wrong and wants to help the Apex members get home.
• Cult: She and her gang, Apex, basically worship "The Conductor" (Amelia), exalting them as the true ruler of the train, marking themselves and their holdings with a red waving line much like their faceplate, and following their example to make their numbers higher. By the end of Book 3, she dismantles the Apex and hopes to make it into something better.
• Creator Backlash: In-Universe, Grace comes to hate the Apex ideology she created, viewing it as causing the deaths of Tuba, Simon and countless other denizens, in addition to resulting in Hazel being traumatized and many children on the Apex wasting their lives on the train.
• Dance Battler: She usually fights using dance moves as a result of her upbringing.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: She has a completely messed up understanding of the purpose of the numbers (thinking that making them go up makes you more powerful and reaching zero kills you) and the point of the train (thinking it's a permanent home to be abused and plundered) all because she's too proud to admit that she has no idea what to do. What's worse, she's taught the same way of thinking to all the other members of the Apex, which means she's actively hindered their emotional development and kept them from returning home and corrupted Simon to the point that his number ended up reaching up to his face before dying.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Both she and Simon◊ are some of the passengers listed on the Conductor's monitor at the end of Book 1, ahead of her appearance in "The Lucky Cat Car" in Book 2.
• Entitled Bitch: Acts like the Infinity Train needs to cater to her and her "children's" needs in "The Lucky Cat Car", even stating that they're the passengers so they take priority over the residents in said train.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • She snaps at Simon for his dismissive attitude to Jesse making it to zero, viewing the loss as tragic rather than something to be celebrated.
  • She is utterly furious when Simon kills Tuba without remorse and happily explaining how he wheeled her in front of Hazel... but more so because she was just wanted to break the bond between Hazel and Tuba instead of downright kill the gorilla and she had grown to genuinely care about Hazel, rather than realizing denizen murder, in and of itself, is wrong. This belief changes at the end of the season when she realizes all of the Apex's beliefs are inherently evil.
• Evil Counterpart: To MT. Both actually want numbers (or at least higher numbers in Grace's case), but Grace sees the inhabitants of the train as inferior to passengers and wants a higher number so she can stay on the train indefinitely, while MT, as a train inhabitant, wants the same rights as a passenger, including having a number so she can eventually get off the train (although she selfishly did this by trying to take a passenger's number and stranding an old man on the train itself).
• Expressive Mask: In her first appearance in Book 2, she wears a golden mask along with her cloak, with the mouth moving while she speaks. She wears the mask again in Book 3 Chapter 1, but loses it when the Unfinished Car starts moving.
• Facial Markings: She and the kids under her wing wear a red line across the face that resembles the ones of the Conductor. In "The New Apex", she wipes it off to show that she's left that mentality behind.
• The Fagin: She's an example of the evil variant of this trope, as she encourages her young followers to raise their numbers by being cruel to the denizens. She finally admits the wrongness of her actions in the final episode, and dissolves the Apex so that its members can start their journey home.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Her pride. As she reveals in "The New Apex", she lied and manipulated in order to feel some sort of recognition since her parents never gave her any support or praise. Notably "The Origami Car" reveals that she got the idea of numbers = strength because she herself had no idea what it meant and came up with the lie to Simon instead of admitting she had no idea what it was supposed to mean.
  • Cutting deep into all of Grace's actions is a fear of being alone. This leads to her making the crucial decision to keep Hazel's secret from Simon while pretending nothing is wrong, hoping to keep both Simon and Hazel in her life. Unfortunately, this makes Grace unable to recognize that as Book 3 progressed, it was becoming more and more impossible to keep Simon happy while keeping Hazel safe. She even attempts to keep playing both sides after Hazel's cover is blown, which becomes the breaking point for both Hazel and Simon to cut ties with her.
  • Cowardice. As Hazel states, Grace is a "Coward leading cowards" because in truth, she's too scared to admit that she doesn't have all the answers. Instead of actively trying to figure out what to do, she would rather lie and teach these to others instead of admitting that she's wrong. And she's too afraid to do what's right and protect Hazel, leading to the girl leaving her for good. In fact, before leaving, Hazel points out that if the Apex is supposed to be strong and brave, why is Grace so afraid of her?''
  • Her silver tongue can also be used against her. In "The Mall Car", she almost has Jesse in her grasp until she bluntly states that MT and Alan Dracula are going to be wheeled. Jesse decides that he's not going to play her game and this gets him off of the Train early. Moreover, her charisma and lies end up having a domino effect towards everyone she meets in Book 3. Simon goes on a rampage then dies, Tuba gets wheeled, Hazel is broken and leaves with Amelia, all of the Apex are broken, and Grace has to see how much her lies and haughty belief of being a know it all has destroyed.
• Fantastic Racism: Clearly views the inhabitants of the train as being inferior to passengers and allows her gang to terrorize the ones in the Lucky Cat Car and the inhabitants of other cars without remorse. She even goes as far as to lead the Reflection Police to MT so they'll murder her. In Book 3, she tries to indoctrinate Hazel into this philosophy until she sees Hazel turning into a turtle and how the ramifications of this mindset have affected the girl. By the end of Book 3, she becomes nicer to the denizens, an act that ultimately saves her life..
• Females Are More Innocent: As Book 3 goes on, she is shown to grow as a person and her eyes open up to her mistakes while Simon sinks deeper into denial. But ultimately, as Hazel points out in "The New Apex", Grace is just as guilty, if not more so, than Simon because she's the one who put it in his head to wheel denizens, consider them lesser, corrupted children for her own fun, was the one who constantly told Simon that they're going to kill Tuba, and it's her refusal to accept that she doesn't have all the answers that created the Apex in the first place.
• Foil:
  • She's one to The Conductor/Amelia: both being black-hooded characters in masks with their numbers winding past their hands (Amelia's up to her neck while Grace is up to her forearm). The major difference between them is that Amelia's number rose due to grief and being unable to move on past Alrick's death, with her sadism mostly a way to fill the hole that is in her heart — and that she's actually trying to make amends now — while Grace doesn't care that her number is up, believing that it's a good thing, and just wants to live the rest of her life on the train just because she's a passenger and she thinks this gives her the right to do whatever she wants.
  • Continuing on to that, their mentality is also skewed: Amelia's mentality was about "I want the train to give me back Alrick in anyway it can and no one else can get out of here if I can't get what I want" whereas Grace is "We are the passengers on the train and all the inhabitants made from the train can suffer because we're the ones who need to survive".
  • Grace shows, or at least feigns, a fondness for the passengers on the train while Amelia didn't care who she attacked as long as they didn't get involved in her mission to bring Alrick back.
  • Grace is sociable and charismatic and has a friendship with Simon. Amelia wanted to be alone and is both cold and ruthless.
    • Amelia was a Control Freak, wanting everyone to do what she wanted, whereas Grace doesn't care that she's causing chaos everywhere she goes.
  • It's very telling that The Cat has different reactions to Grace and the Conductor. The Cat is terrified of the Conductor and worked with her out of self-defense (but had safety measures to bite her in the future). As for Grace, The Cat hisses at her and wants her out of her sight.
  • She's also this to One-One, the true conductor, in terms of their Lack of Empathy towards the train's denizens and believe they are supposed to help passengers. Grace's idea of their help involves rampaging through their cars while One-One simply doesn't understand why they would want to leave the train.
  • She also the opposite to Tulip: Tulip tries to abide by the rules of the Train (initially believing that her number going down is a bad thing but later accepts that it going down is okay), learns to accept the train as a learning experience and makes friends with the denizens of the train (especially The Cat) while Grace despises the Train's rules and has an escalating number on her arm because she doesn't care about changing herself and has animosity toward The Cat. Grace has a dancing background and her problems stem from having no friends and very distant/abusive parents while Tulip is into coding and games and her problems related from her parents' divorce.
  • She's also this to Jesse. Jesse wants to make everyone his friend, Grace wants to make everyone her follower. Jesse initially had trouble picking a side, Grace is not afraid to take action. Jesse suffered from a bad influence but later beomes a positive influence to Lake, Grace is the bad influence and her interactions with Hazel broke her spirit and innocence. Jesse sees the train as something to explore, Grace sees it as something to plunder. Jesse was quick to make friends with MT, Grace didn't warm up to Hazel until halfway through Book 3.
• Freudian Excuse: Her parents were neglectful towards her and she was ostracized by her peers for no reason. It got to the point that she tried shoplifting to get some sort of attention. As she sadly puts it, "I just wanted to be noticed."
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Grace ultimately realizes her sad childhood and lack of loving parents or friends does not excuse her for everything she did as part of the Apex and that she needs to start improving herself, something that a memory of Hazel calls her out on in "The New Apex" and she's forced to admit it as well.
• Friend to All Children: Zig-Zagged. On one hand, she does gather children who wound upon the train by her side, but on the other hand, she's not helping them grow so that they can leave the train, making them believe that getting their number to 0 is a sign of weakness and she doesn't give a second thought of having MT — who is the reflection of a 13 year old girl — be killed. Book 3 shows her warming up to Hazel... while also trying to get Hazel separated from Tuba and then killing her before deciding to truly care for Hazel, regardless of Hazel not being human. By the end, she reforms the Apex in order to help them find out the real reasons they're on the train. It's also notable that when Simon takes over as the ruler of the Apex, the children are terrified to work under him and are more relieved when Grace saves Simon and when she's rescued by the origami birds.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Instead of the train helping Grace, she learned to kill, manipulate people, steal, control others, and create an evil ideology based on bigotry and serial murder. Even at the end of the season Grace will now have to live with the knowledge that she manipulated kids and kept them in a hostile environment longer than they should have been, killed many innocent denizens, failed to protect a child who she is now estranged from, lied to her best friend, then watched said best friend try to kill her and die a horrible death right in front of her eyes. Not to mention that when she returns to the real world, she'll have to start over as a young adult with a 4th grade education at best and her family likely has no idea she's still alive.
• Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: In a fantastical variant, Grace was just a shoplifter at worst before the train kidnapped her in an attempt to fix her. By the time Grace is allowed to get off the train, she will have to live down starting a murderous evil cult, stealing from others, killing numerous people and creating an ideology that led to many children doing the same.
• Hates Being Alone: The end of Book 3 reveals that this is her deepest fear: that no one loves her, that nobody cares for her because she's not worth caring about. Thus she acts like she knows everything about the train because that means people listen to her, worship her, and she will be showered with attention and love for the rest of her life. While it is understandable why she hates being alone, it's the methods that she used that put her in the wrong. And she knows it.
• Heel–Face Turn: Spending time with Hazel and Tuba leads her to start shedding her mentality of numbers = power. By the end of Book 3, she abandons her old way of thinking in hopes of giving the children a new start.
• Heel Realization: Seeing Hazel's transformation into a turtle creature, Hazel asking if Grace hated her and Grace then reminiscing about Tuba is what makes Grace start to realize what she's done. Amelia revealing the truth about the Conductor also hammers home just what type of monster she's become. She has another one in Book 3 Episode 10, as a nightmare-version of Hazel chews her out for being controlling and cowardly, and for bearing partial responsibility in Tuba's death; while Simon is responsible for murdering Tuba specifically, Hazel points out "He didn't come up with the idea to wheel denizens on his own!"
• Hidden Depths:
  • Discussed in Le Chalet Car, where Grace admits to Simon behind her tough cult leader mask, she's often unsure of herself.
  • Though she teases Simon about his novels, a Deleted scene reveals Grace really did enjoy reading them.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Amongst the scariest things that can be found on the train, she's perhaps crueler than all of them combined due to her apathy towards them, her belief that character growth is a weakness, and how she doesn't care about brainwashing children to following her ways at all (let alone trying to murder a child reflection) so as long as she is praised and adored and seen as the best of the best. As Book 3 shows, she begins to grow out of this childish mindset and ends up nicer than what Simon turned out to be.
• Humble Pie: After all of the lying and manipulating she did throughout Book 2 and 3, she's forced to eat at least four slices of this when Hazel in her mind tells her that she's a "coward leading cowards" who is at fault for everything because she can't admit that she's in the wrong.
• Hypocrite: She claims that she and her children ransack the Lucky Cat Car to survive, but Grace is actually trying to keep as many people as possible on the train, despite the danger that entails. Also, in Book 3 Episode 10, a nightmare-version of Hazel points out that Grace is also partially responsible for killing Tuba, as while Simon made the ultimate decision, "He didn't come up with the idea to wheel denizens on his own". Indeed, Grace was making plans about murdering Tuba before backing out of it at the last minute only due to not wanting to hurt Hazel's feelings.
• I Choose to Stay: A very dark variant; Grace never wants to leave the train because she lives to abuse and exploit its native residents. She's even trying to convince (or coerce) other passengers into staying as well. By the end of Book 3, she reforms the Apex and decides to help her former followers find a way off the train.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Deep down, all she wanted was to be noticed by her parents and made the Apex so that the children could depend on her and that she would never end up alone.
• In the Hood: She covers herself with a black hooded cloak as shown in the Lucky Cat Car.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: At her core, Grace's bravado and know-it-all attitude is because she wants to be noticed. She is afraid that if she's wrong, she'll end up being alone or never enough...and that's exactly what happens to her.
• Inksuit Actress: Grace quite heavily resembles her VA Kirby Howell-Baptiste.
• Ironic Name: Her personality is certainly in strong contrast to her name Grace. Somewhat justified by her history with dance, specifically ballet, and the standards her parents had set for her.
• Irony:
  • She worships the Conductor for having a huge number...it never occurs to her that the Conductor is also a passenger like she is. She learns this in "The Hey Ho Whoa Car".
  • She also makes it a rule not to trust adult passengers (or adults in general), even though technically she's an adult herself.
  • She has an utter dislike for denizens, "Nulls", but the only reason she ends up being alive at the end are because of the very same denizens that she once wanted to crush beneath her sneakers.
  • She did everything she could to have Lake be killed because she was convinced that "Null" was corrupting Jesse. The pure irony about this is that her actions actually made both Jesse and Lake get their happy endings. Jesse finally made a vow to never be a doormat and got his exit, and by siccing the Mirror Cops on Lake, she ends up killing both of them and get her exit from the Train.
• It's All About Me: To solipsistic extremes. Grace believes that only the passengers are "real" while everyone without a number is a "null" that only has value if they are useful to the Apex. This also means that she has no problem killing "nulls" because she believes that they can't feel pain. She even shows a lack of empathy for the children she's caring for. The kids give her nice things? She thanks them to their face then tosses them aside when they're not looking. "The New Apex" has her admit that she did all of these horrible things because she hated being alone, and finally acknowledging this helps her escape.
• It's All My Fault: After being confronted with the memories of everything she did in "The New Apex", she realizes that corrupting the Apex and losing Hazel, Tuba, and Simon were all on her because of her lies and manipulations. Admitting this is the key to her leaving her memories once and for all.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Very, very downplayed as her only redeeming quality is that she seems to genuinely cares about the Apex and has a close friendship with Simon. Played more straight in Book Three where she genuinely cares about Hazel and is disgusted when Simon murders Tuba. By the end of the season the Jerk part no longer applies to her.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Big number, racism towards the inhabitants of the train, and her hypocrisy aside, she is right in that the passengers have to do what they can to survive seeing as many of the cars hold a lot of gruesome terrors, that many of the people who are going through them are children and most of them had little to no guide to explain how to survive the train for years (thanks again for doing all of this, Amelia). This doesn't forgive her for her actions, though.
• Karma Houdini: She knows that the only comeuppance she gets for not learning her lesson is a bigger number and she is fine with this because there are no other punishments the Infinity Train will give her, and she wants to stay on the train. This is emphasized with how she walks away after summoning the Reflection Police to go after MT without remorse at the beginning of "The Wasteland".
• Karma Houdini Warranty: However, Book 3 started with her losing her cult and gear, and the cars she's forced to go through effectively keep her trapped in them unless she fulfills the requirements needed to unlock their doors. Halfway through Book 3, she even starts to lose Simon, who's implied to be her Only Friend. Then in the last two episodes, she loses Hazel and nearly gets consumed by the tape of her old memories, and then she almost loses her life and only survives because she showed pity to the origami birds Simon crushed. And then she has to see Simon killed by a Ghom, leaving her with an absolutely broken spirit.
• Karmic Jackpot: Showing sympathy and healing the origami birds that Simon crushed ultimately end up saving her life when Simon throws her off the train to be wheeled..
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: A flashback in "The Origami Car" reveals that when Simon first met her, she pretended that she had gotten her number as high as she did intentionally (his was at 55 and she had a 142 at the time) rather than admit that she had no idea what the numbers meant. This ends up causing a lot of problems for the next few years.
  Grace: (hesitates a little before putting on a smile of superiority) Because I totally know how the train works!
• Lack of Empathy: Zig-Zagged; while she's motherly to the children in the Apex, she never views the inhabitants of the Infinity Train as sentient beings, calling them "Nulls" and seeing them as nothing more than 'constructs' with no emotions and doesn't give a flying feather if she decides to throw them onto the wheels of the train. "The Musical Car" shows that she feigns compassion to the Apex kids by showing appreciation for their objects but merely discards them when they aren't looking. By the second half of Book 3, she learns to become more empathetic, to the point where she becomes absolutely devastated when Hazel decides to leave her and travel with Amelia instead. She also comes to terms with the mistakes she's made and vows to reform the Apex after seeing how much damage her lies and haughtiness created.
• Laser-Guided Karma: She built the Apex, she crushes the denizens, and no one could stop her for almost a decade. Book 3 gives her the long awaited karma by stripping everything she had: the girl who she bonded to? She's a denizen and her pride kicked her aside before said girl decides to leave with Amelia. The boy she was close friends with? Her actions made him a traumatic mess that would kill and slaughter anyone instead of accepting he needs help before he dies after he tried to kick her into the very same wheels she taught other kids to kill denizens without pity. The number she was so proud of getting? It's a reminder of all the denizens and people she hurt and how she'll be on the train for another year or so, with no hope that her parents are still around (or if they even changed since her disappearance). All she can do at the end is look on with a tired weary smile.
• Lonely Rich Kid: "The Debutante Ball Car" reveals that her parents were rich enough to hire tutors, particularly tutors for various kinds of dancing. They apparently wanted their daughter to learn from the best, but that led to her not really having any friends because of those skills, and when she got put in a group she wasn't invited to go get ice cream after a recital because her parents couldn't make it and the other girls in the group didn't really know her. "The Origami Car" expands on this, showing how her parents were emotionally distant from her, to the point that she was shoplifting to get some attention and they didn't even understand the reason behind it.
• Manipulative Bitch: She's clearly both willing to and skilled at getting people on her side, hiding the Apex's more unsavory aspects and pretending to care about denizens to gain the trust of potential allies. This slowly backfires over the course of Book 3, where her mostly manipulative friendship with Hazel and Tuba slowly becomes genuine as part of her Redemption Quest.
• Malevolent Masked Man: Or rather woman in this case. She wears a golden mask to cover her identity in "The Lucky Cat Car".
• Meaningful Name: Grace can mean love and mercy, particularly to those who don't deserve it, foreshadowing her character development.
• Moment of Weakness: Throughout Season 3, Grace becomes a sister figure to Hazel. While at first Grace was manipulating Hazel with kindness, she starts genuinely caring about her. After Simon wheeled Tuba (Hazel's companion and adoptive mother figure), Grace learns that Hazel is a denizen who she and Simon view as inferior to passengers, but she keeps it a secret from Simon to protect Hazel. In a pivotal moment in episode "The Hey, Ho, Whoa Car", when Hazel starts stressing out and transforms into her turtle self in front of everyone, Grace acts surprised so Simon would not know that she knows Hazel's secret. When Simon suggests that they leave Hazel with Amelia, Grace angrily calls Hazel a Null to save face in front of Simon, breaking Hazel's heart. Grace is immediately horrified by her backslide but does not apologize to Hazel with Simon there. In the next episode, Grace thinks on it and decides that she wants to protect Hazel even knowing what she is and what her mere presence does to the cars. But the damage was done, and the bond of trust Hazel had with Grace is gone. Hazel rejects coming with Grace, choosing to leave with Amelia despite Grace begging to come with her. Hazel just sadly says goodbye to Grace, leaving her heartbroken.
• Mutually Unequal Relation: Exploited. In the first episode of Season 3 The Musical Car, after raiding a musical cart, many of the young Apex kids offer items they took from the cart to their leaders Grace and Simon. Grace, who knows the children by name, acts like she has a special relationship with all of them, promising to cherish each item they bought her and store them in her special collection, while telling the child to keep it a secret from the other children that she's doing that. This is an act to make the children loyal to her, as once they leave, she discards the items without a care.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The last two episodes of Book 3 make her have a good look at herself and how her lies and manipulations have caused her to lose everyone she cared about — Tuba, Hazel, and Simon — and that her little lie to Simon about "higher numbers is a good thing" and how she "absolutely knows how the train works" instead of admitting that she was just as clueless caused more trouble than good. Notably when Simon gets vaporized, she ends up crying for him.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Jesse and Lake get a happy ending because she had to meddle in their affairs.
  • Almost got Jesse to join the Apex, until she callously mentioned how she and Simon were going to wheel MT and Alan Dracula. This gives Jesse the spine to shut her and Simon up and leave the train.
  • She's the reason the Mirror Cops ended up dead due to her summoning them from her compact mirror to wheel Lake...and then Lake ends up grinding Mace into the wheels and Alan Dracula makes Sieve explode into silver goop and Lake gets her happy ending. Whoops.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Has a history with The Cat, as The Cat is pissed to see Grace unmask herself and bringing the children of Apex to cause chaos.
  • She also mentions how the Conductor saved her as a girl in the Pumpkin Car. However when this is brought up to Amelia, she answers that she doesn't remember it at all. "The Origami Car" reveals that The Conductor stopped the Steward from assaulting her while ransacking the car for control orbs, so she only "saved" Grace from a situation she created and never gave it a second thought.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Grace has a habit of touching Simon very casually, such as slinging an arm over his shoulders or playing with his hair, Justified Trope as she's known and lived with him since he was 10 years old.
• Oblivious to Love: It's implied that Simon has a bit of a thing for her, but if she's aware, she definitely doesn't show it. That said they could just be Platonic Life-Partners or they could be a couple based on how much they hug. Ultimately it doesn't matter as the story is more about their friendship and Simon dies after trying to kill her.
• Only Friend: Grace is this to Simon, being his only friend and confidant since the cat abandoned him. Similarly Simon is this to Grace, she later befriends Hazel, but than loses both Hazel and Simon as friends due to her manipulations. Its implied she may forge real relationships with the remaining Apex members, but the loss of both Simon and Hazel has clearly taken a toll on her.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When she hears how Simon murdered Tuba and happily shows off how his number has grown, she walks away from him in absolute disgust as this hurt Hazel, whom she had begun to care for like a little sister.
• Parting-Words Regret: Near the end of Book 3, Grace apologizes internally to the now-departed Hazel, saying that she deserved better.
• Pet the Dog:
  • While she was the winner of "The Lucky Cat Car", she allows Jesse and MT to leave (even though The Cat says there's only one winner a month) with her. Subverted the episode after since she was trying to separate Jesse from MT and Alan Dracula and wheel them.
  • Even though she is shown to have a social darwinist personality, she really does care for the children in the Apex (albeit in her own twisted sense that they idolize her) and for Simon. She starts warming up to Hazel throughout Book 3.
• Peter Pan Parody: She's comparable to Peter Pan (besides being a girl and significantly older), a leader of a group of rowdy tribal kids who don't want to grow up (in this case, grow up mentally). She's a very negative take on the archetype, basically teaching them to be a bunch of bandits ransacking the fantasy world they've been brought to and not care of who they hurt or the consequences of their actions. By the end of Book 3, she has left the trope behind and become more mature.
• Poor Communication Kills: Grace's biggest flaw is her inability to communicate the truth to others due to her desire to be the total expert in the room. And as this list shows, she destroyed many lies whenever she flapped her gums.
  • She arrived on the train while "The Conductor" was still in charge, and misunderstood One-One reclaiming his rightful place as a coup. Because the way of things was never properly explained to her by either conductor, or at least she didn't believe it if the latter did actually reach out to her, she believes that higher numbers are better and represent strength, which led to her actively refusing to improve herself and boast that she's a total expert on the Train. When Amelia reveals the truth near the end of Book 3, she comes to realize just how much she's messed up.
  • The fact that she had no idea what the numbers meant and lied her ass off to look "strong" ended up harming Simon and the rest of the Apex in the long run; if she had admitted that she also was in the dark about it, Simon probably would've ended up leaving the train sooner (and thus not die to a Ghom) and the Apex would never be born, thus sparing hundreds of denizens from being killed or injured by them.
  • Her last words to Simon on Tuba were to kill the gorilla denizen when she was vulnerable instead of attacking her head-on. Around the Color Clock Car, Grace's feelings towards Tuba soften due to her friendship with Hazel and she abandons plans to kill Tuba, unfortunately she never tells this to Simon, and he kills Tuba thinking that was what Grace still wanted.
  • Simon is consistently shown to adhere to Grace's orders as Apex leader even when his number is higher than hers and if he personally disagrees, Grace never thinks to use this to protect Hazel.
  • And finally, by trying to placate Simon over Hazel — specifically telling Hazel, "I'll do whatever I want Null" — instead of defending her, she basically killed off any happiness and good memories between the two as Hazel decides to leave with the one person who won't murder her and Simon is able to read the lie.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Rather than simply try to destroy Tuba immediately, as Simon suggests, she opts to slowly undermine her relationship with Hazel until they can reunite with the rest of the Apex and overwhelm Tuba through force of numbers or just wait till Tuba is vulnerable as "brute force can get so boring" in her own words. By themselves, not only are they at a disadvantage against a gorilla twice their size, Hazel would never forgive them for attacking her friend.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: In-Universe, she uses the logic that she and her gang are passengers who need to do what they can to survive to justify treating the residents of the train like crap, essentially treating the denizens/"Nulls" as NPCs, as shown by her quote. Getting out of this mindset in Book 3 makes up her Character Development.
• Psychopathic Manchild: She's a sadistic female Peter Pan Parody who does not understand nor cares about the meaning of the Infinity Train's purpose to help people move on from trauma (as she says that Jesse's number going down is a bad thing) and is corrupting numerous children to follow her path, so long as she can feel like the expert. One of her reasons for ransacking the Lucky Cat Car was so she could have a corndog. She grows out of it over the course of the book. Justified as she's been living on her own with no parental guidance for almost a decade.
• Riddle for the Ages: What happened on her Train Trip that caused her to see denizens as "Nulls" or how she decided that to wheel them is never explained. Moreover, we don't know the truth about her trying to steal a bracelet from a mall outside her wanting to be "noticed".
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In "The New Apex" she admits to herself that she did everything she could — manipulating, lying, claiming herself as a know it all — so she didn't end up being alone. But then she glumly admits that those very same actions backfired and left her lonely and isolated.
• Shadow Archetype: She's essentially the darker version of MT, doing whatever she can to survive. The difference is while MT shows empathy towards the residents of the cars, like feeling awkward about kicking Terrence the Toad, Grace treats them like animals to be hunted, as MT herself notes. MT also acted like a positive influence on Jesse, whereas Grace corrupts everyone she meets.
• Ship Tease: Grace has some subtle hints that her relationship with Childhood Friend Simon might be a Childhood Friend Romance. Grace frequently gives remarks to him whilst hugging him, playing with his hair as he blushes and even having a Dance of Romance. This is furthered in deleted scene shows the two having an awkward First Kiss with each other and Grace being comforted when Simon puts his arm around her shoulder. Of course this goes nowhere as Simon undergoes a sanitySlippage, loses all faith in Grace and ends up dead in the end.
• Sleep Cute: She and Simon sleep side by side in the beginning episodes of Book 3. Later in the season Grace sleeps with Hazel whilst Simon sleeps away. Than near the end of the season, Grace sleeps far away from both Hazel and Simon symbolizing how she has destroyed her relationship with both her friends at that point.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine:
  • Grace taught her cult how to kill a denizen by throwing them onto the Train's wheels. Simon does this to her in the end of Book 3, and the only thing preventing her from being a bloody smear on the tracks is the flock of origami birds she refolded coming back to save her.
  • She also loved calling denizens "Nulls". At the end of Book 3, Simon throws a slur back at her, calling her Void.
• Take a Third Option: Deconstructed Trope, Grace is given the choice between keeping her friendship with Hazel or maintaining her childhood friendship with her best friend, Simon. Rather than run off with Hazel or drop Hazel off somewhere safe and leave with Simon, Grace chooses to lie to both individuals and keep them all in the same group when this is clearly a bad idea. Eventually, her lie is exposed, resulting in her becoming a Broken Pedestal to both Hazel and Simon, both permanently cutting ties with her.
• Tears of Remorse: Grace spends a good deal of time in the last two episodes of Book 3 being confronted with her past, going over her many mistakes particularly with Hazel, and admitting that she did so much wrong for the sake of being right.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Her Big Sister Instinct towards Hazel means that she slowly gets much-needed Character Development in Book Three. First she starts to protect Hazel, albeit also trying to keep her with Simon, lying to both and not acting in either best's interests, but ultimately it slips out she wasn't either with Simon and Hazel, as a result Simon loses all trust in her and Hazel decides to leave with Amelia due to losing faith in Grace. In the tape, Grace realizes she'd been acting selfishly all this time and that the Apex's ideology is inherently wrong..
  • It also crucially extends to the inhabitants of the train as well. Towards the end of Book 3, she stops using the “null” moniker in lieu of the more proper “denizen” term instead. She also is careful not to crush the inhabitants of the Origami Car and comes to their aid after Simon crushes them, befriending them. As a reward, the origami birds come to her rescue during her final fight with Simon and one of them decides to be her denizen partner.
• Tragic Villain: Once upon a time, there was a lonely girl named Grace whose rich parents had no time for her and pawned her off on the hired help. She stole a bracelet because she wanted to be noticed, and was picked up by the Infinity Train. She had nobody to tell her what she had to do, so she decided her goal was to make the mysterious glowing number on her palm go up and up, not knowing it was a bad thing. She ended up forming a cult that worshiped who she thought was the True Conductor, and kept a lot of kids from getting home to their families. Her own prejudice against denizens resulted in the death of Tuba and then Hazel, a girl who she cared for like a little sister, cutting ties with her. And because she believed that numbers going up was a good thing, her first friend Simon clung to that philosophy and allowed it to drive him to madness, which killed him.
• Unknown Rival: She thinks "The False Conductor", One-One, is actively pursuing her and the Apex and trying to kill her. He doesn't even know that she exists and has significantly more important things to bother with even if he did.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • The Apex is entirely her fault from her blasphemous boast of "I totally know how the Train works", meaning that she spends the next decade or so spreading nothing but misery and destruction because she's incapable of thinking that crushing denizens beneath her sneakers might be a bad thing.
  • The deaths of the Mirror Cops are also indirectly her fault. If she had just let Lake go instead of opening her compact mirror to let the Mirror Cops get off, Lake wouldn't have gotten to the point where she had to grind Mace into the wheels, and then later get Sieve exploded from Alan Dracula's lasers.
• Villainous Friendship: With Simon, as they've known each other since they were ten. This bond slowly disintegrates as Grace begins to realize that her worldview is flawed while Simon doubles down. By the final episode, they've become bitter enemies.
• Villain Protagonist: Book 3 has her as the main focus, making her this. It also serves as her Redemption Quest.
• Virtue Is Weakness: She believes a higher number is better, taking after the example of "The Conductor." Thanks to this, she's been taking all the wrong lessons away from her trials on the train and getting others (particularly children) to follow her in turn, and as a result, has a number reaching almost to her elbow and she doesn't care in the slighetst that what she's doing is wrong. Upon learning the truth in Book 3 and facing her insecurities and past memories, she decides to do things right.
• Would Hurt a Child: Zig-Zagged. Again, she's fine if the children are passengers with numbers, but if they are a 'Null' then she has no problem wanting them dead. She calmly tells Jesse "We're gonna kill her [MT] without a sliver of remorse and even summons the Mirror Police to grind her down to dust before walking away.
  • Ultimately subverted. Upon seeing that Hazel isn't a real passenger, she decides to protect her from Simon before he finds out and wheels her. However, by not admitting that she knew of Hazel's true self, it ends up severing ties between the two for good.

Simon

Simon Laurent

"Why would I ever want to change if I'm always right?"

Voiced by: Kyle McCarley

One of the main characters of the show's third season. Like Grace, with whom he founded a cult of child passengers called the Apex, he has been a passenger on the train since he was a young child. After being abandoned by his denizen companion a few months into his journey, Simon developed a hatred and distrust for all of the train's creations.

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• Aggressive Categorism: Downplayed. While his disdain towards the Cat for abandoning him and implicitly implanting his more toxic characteristics are understandable, he uses her example combined with the Apex's teachings to conclude that every single Denizen is inherently evil, untrustworthy, and not a full human being. That being said, he was 10 years old at the time, and would innately be petty and small-minded as a result.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Despite everything he's done, Grace still mourns for him after he dies, as she knows the pain he was going through.
• Ambiguous Situation: Exactly what event occurred to make him get on the train is never revealed, but is hinted at by his fear of abandonment, extremely specific references to funerals with the implication of having attended one, and a belief that he had no place in the human world anymore.
• Arch-Enemy: The reason why Simon becomes Grace's main victim, it's because of this:
  • In "The Hey, Ho, Whoa Car", at the end of the episode, while Grace is asleep, Simon extracts the tape of Grace's memories and sees that the former has been keeping Hazel's turtle form a secret from him, leaving Simon crestfallen and betrayed.
  • In "The Origami Car", Simon shows little regard for Hazel's decision to stay with Amelia after Grace sadly bids the two farewell. Simon then torments Grace by trapping her in her own memories, revealing his tragic past and what her lies did to him. Afterwards, Simon leaves Grace's mind trapped in the tape and decides to go back to the Apex alone.
  • In the Book Three finale "The New Apex", after Grace escaped from her memories, Simon has usurped her and leads the Apex calling her a "void" that has less numbers than the Apex as he goes mad with power. Simon fights Grace and blames her for everything that happened. Despite Grace redeeming herself for Simon, he kicks her off the train to her death, and ends up Dying Alone at the hands of a Ghom who interfered with the fight, much to her despair. She later decides to disband the Apex for the better and not make the same mistakes as Simon did.
• Ascended Extra: Similar to Grace's situation where he went from a cameo in Book 2 to main character in Book 3.
• Asshole Victim: Downplayed. His gruesome death comes right after his attempt to murder Grace, the culmination of all of his despicable actions over the course of the season, but it's also presented as absolutely horrific and he's mourned by Grace and the members of the Apex.
• Ax-Crazy: He's gone violently insane by the final episode, being depicted with visibly reddened eyes, and psychotically crying and laughing after he believes he killed Grace.
• Beard of Evil: Heavily downplayed, it's more like Perma-Stubble of Evil by the end of Book 3.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He delights in getting his number higher and hopes to reach a "high score." In the final episode, he accumulates what may be the highest number any train passenger has ever gotten at the cost of his friendships, his sanity, and eventually his life.
• Believing Their Own Lies: It's implied from his reaction to hearing of Tuba's offspring's death and some of his behavior after discovering the Awful Truth that a part of him intrinsically understands that The Apex's ideology is deranged and incoherent, but he's become so attached to it in order to derive meaning and brush over his emotional trauma that he refuses to deviate from it.
• Berserk Button:
  • It turns out The Cat is basically a walking Berserk Button for Simon. He's much more openly hostile to her beyond his normal hatred of Nulls and becomes particularly infuriated when she tries befriending Hazel due to their interactions reminding him of how The Cat befriended him at a similarly young age, only to abandon him to be killed by a Ghom.
  • Simon really hates lying, associating it with betrayal and abandonment.
  • He really dislikes it when the Apex’s beliefs are disrespected in any way.
  • He also hates being called a child or being belittled, as shown when Amelia tells him the truth about the train's true purpose and that he's been deluded in his fantasy for far too long.
• Big Bad Slippage: In Book 3. Simon begins as the book's secondary protagonist, but as the story goes on and as Grace changes for the better, Simon starts to change for the worse, beginning with when he murders Tuba halfway through and continuing with how he's mad at Grace "changing" and "shutting off from him". By "The New Apex" he becomes the true Big Bad of Book 3 and the Final Boss.
• Body-Count Competition: He and Grace have one at the beginning of season 3 by killing denizens of the stage light car and playfully comparing whose number raises more. This is given a dark call back when Simon compares his number to Grace's after killing Tuba, but Grace's developing bond with Hazel means she is highly upset by Simon's actions and isn't interested in playing.
• Bouncer: Has this role in the Apex as seen in the Mallcar, where Grace signals Simon to deal with the denizens, Alan Dracula and MT, whilst she uses her charisma on Jesse.
• Broken Tears:
  • Starts shedding these when he sees Grace's memories, particularly learning about Grace keeping Hazel's true self a secret from him.
  • They start up again when Simon believes he's killed Grace, which mix in with his insane laughter. Notably, he's crying until the literal moment he dies—though whether they're Broken Tears or Tears of Fear in his final moments is unclear.
• Black-and-White Insanity: He is incapable of possibly perceiving "nulls" as anything but heartless demonic machines and follows the Apex teachings to the letter. When Grace abandons the Apex's ideology, he's unable to deal with the concept of her not agreeing with the Apex's beliefs to the point that he decides she has to be in the wrong.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Simon follows the Code of the Apex to a T and believes every tenant of it, the problem is the Apex is an innately flawed morality system that shouldn't be followed by anyone. The only time he considers breaking a rule of the Apex is when discussing whether or not he should've trusted Amelia when talking to the cat.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Develops this towards Grace as it becomes clear that she is no longer going to adhere to the Apex belief system, believing that she has been fooled and is lying to him, and believing that he must take over to continue.
• Byronic Hero: Simon shares several traits with this character type, being an emotionally withdrawn and troubled teenage boy who is only willing to share his emotional impulses with Grace, a strong and unflinching axiomatic worldview, is quick to anger and possesses a sullen and dour persona. His refusal to budge from his beliefs results in him rejecting most attempts at redemption, ultimately culminating in his death.
• Can't Take Criticism: Simon is totally convinced that he's always right and reacts with anger whenever anyone objects to his actions.
• Cassandra Truth: When the truth about Amelia and One-One is revealed in "The Hey Whoa Car", he's in complete denial, the same with both Amelia and The Cat telling him that the whole purpose of numbers is to make them go down so the passenger can leave the Train.
• The Chain of Harm: The Cat's abandonment of him and toxic tendencies results in him inheriting her worst impulses in a more distorted form, which eventually result in him becoming increasingly abusive towards Grace. This is ultimately deconstructed, though. Simon wasn't at fault for the Cat's mistreatment of him, but he is at fault for using it as a justification to abuse others.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Like Grace, he was first seen on a screen in "The Engine" as a passenger with a high number.
• Coat Cape: His new outfit as leader of the Apex includes a red jacket worn like a cape.
• Collector of the Strange: Collects miniature models. In "the Mall Car", he's shown painting tiny figures. This is probably a trait he inherited from The Cat, as he finds a toy soldier in her cabin. Storyboards and deleted scenes also say the cat had Simon collect "junk" for her when they were together.
• Control Freak: Simon believes in doing things orderly and keeping things predictable. Grace has to convince him to stop going on about Apex procedure when they're initially stranded from the group. As Book 3 goes on, Simon becomes increasingly unsettled by his inability to manage anything they face, even Grace's shutting him out goes against his idea of "how things should be." It's reflected in his hobby where he creates and poses figurines; he can make an environment where he's completely in control of everything. Even The Cat mentions this:
  The Cat: And how exactly should she [Grace] be acting, Simon? She's not one of your miniatures.
• Compressed Hair: According to one of the writers, Simon's hair length in the New Apex is how he always looked with his ponytail undone. His ponytail is rather small, but his hair reaches his chest when it's undone.
• The Creon: Simon is completely satisfied with his position in the Apex and prefers following orders from Grace to giving them himself. When Grace's number falls below his, Simon still sees her as his leader and continues to follow her. Even when he turns against Grace, it is motivated by the fact that he can't get the old Apex following Grace back, so decides the current Grace is no longer Grace and he'll take her role. He even states "I liked what [our prior relationship in the Apex]" when turning against her.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Gets his life sucked out of him by a Ghom, melting him to a skeleton then ash.
• Crush Blush: Blushes several times when interacting with Grace in Book 3. There's indications there's an attraction or they're together, or at least they're just that close platonically.
• Cry Laughing: When Simon thinks he's killed Grace, he snaps harder than the camel's back, sobbing and going Laughing Mad at the same time as his number creeps up his neck and wraps all the way around his face.
• Cult: He's the deputy leader of the Apex, a cult of children who idolize "The Conductor" (Amelia) to the point of worship and aim to make their numbers higher. After he's gone off the deep end and decided that Grace has betrayed him and the cult's ideology, he takes over and becomes the new cult leader.
• Deader than Dead: He ends up being the first character in the series to die from a Ghom, and as such shows the full detail of how this happens. When a Ghom catches him in, it successfully drains all of his life force, causing his eyes, flesh, and clothes to melt clean off of his bones, and then having his remains turn to ash, and then having the Ghom that consumed him explode. All onscreen just to show the viewer that Simon is completely and irreversibly gone.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Evil Former Friend that undergoes a Heel–Face Turn, and redemption arcs in general. Simon, like similar characters, is presented to be a person that is capable of humanity and sympathy and could be redeemed, but is too much of a narcissist and emotional wreck to bother with putting the work in, and the narrative doesn't offer him unlimited chances as he continues to squander several possible chances at redemption, Instead of being granted a convenient out, he dies as a result of his refusal to change his ways.
• Deer in the Headlights: He completely freezes up when he sees the Ghom coming for him and makes no effort to evade it.
• Dehumanization: Towards the inhabitants of the train. Despite spending several episodes with Tuba and being extensively shown that she is an intelligent being with thoughts and feelings of her own, he dismisses those signs as a charade and kills her regardless, refusing to see her as a person.
• Despair Event Horizon: Hits it after believing he had killed Grace. His number overflows to such a level that the train simply can't handle it (the numbers representing the ability for the passenger to resolve their emotional issues instead of a Karma Meter), and begins psychotically crying and laughing while making no effort to escape from the Ghom that was just pursuing him.
• Determinator: Once Simon has put his mind into something, he will not deviate from it until he accomplishes it. This ends up being his undoing.
• Detrimental Determination: Simon is incredibly steadfast in his beliefs in the Apex's ideology and only in one occasion (episode 7 of season 3), does he ever remotely question any part of it. This causes him to continue to pursue goals even after it becomes obvious that they are no longer tenable, with his inability to deviate from his goal of continuing the Apex's flawed beliefs resulting in his demise.
• Deuteragonist: The season is as much about Simon's negative character arc as it is Grace's positive character arc.
• Dissonant Serenity: After murdering Tuba, he shows a horrifying casualness, emotionally assuring Hazel that he had helped her as if her toy had just broken. This makes sense when considers he and Grace had been murdering denizens for years and in the opening scene of the first episode, both happily murdered denizens and compared numbers.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The second half of Book 3 has him get into Grace's personal bubble and he acts mad when Grace is "not like she's supposed to be" and how Grace is "shutting him off", giving hints of both a person who is in a toxic co-dependent relationship and an abusive relationship. Notably Hazel wants to use her turtle form to protect her and Grace akin to a child defending their mother from an abusive father, and even pushes Simon away when Simon gets aggressive. Eventually, he decides to outright kill her when her Character Development causes her to stop being who she's "supposed" to be.
  Simon: Why would I EVER want to change if I'm always RIGHT?
  • Simon dying after pushing away his Only Friend when she tries to support him and after looking into the face of his lifelong Trauma Button comes off as being Driven to Suicide out of loneliness and inability to move past the PTSD from his childhood. It doesn't help that it's established that Simon Hates Being Alone and a writer playlist for him included songs about suicide.
  • Simon inherits several of his worst characteristics from the Cat. He refuses to accept the limits of his knowledge or believe he's in the wrong, doesn't take responsibility for his actions, and he's shown to have a nascent obsession with collecting random trinkets and junk similar to her, which is framed in the narrative as a drug addiction. This mirrors children from abusive households sometimes inheriting their parent's worst characteristics.
• Domestic Abuse: Grace is essentially his adopted sister, and as Book 3 goes on, he repeatedly lies to, emotionally manipulates, gaslights and verbally abuses her in an attempt to convince her to not deviate from their belief system.
• The Dragon: Grace's trusted right-hand man with the second-longest number after hers.
• Dragon Ascendant: Following Grace's Heel–Face Turn at the end of Book 3, he usurps her role as the antagonist.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Does not understand why telling Hazel about him murdering Tuba is a bad thing. Not even when Grace walks away from him. Hell he was even smiling when this occured! Justified as Simon's Apex beliefs mean he thinks Denizens are Always Chaotic Evil and that Hazel is being weird by caring about a denizen that was going to betray her anyway.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Both him and Grace◊ are some of the passengers listed on the Conductor's monitor at the end of Book 1, ahead of his appearance in "The Mall Car" in Book 2.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Even after all he has done, Grace still tries to rescue Simon and mourns him when he dies, as do the younger Apex kids. Justified as Grace grew up with Simon, went through much of the same trauma and knows deep down inside he was a confused kid lashing out at the world.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Simon is an asshole to denizens, but his friendship with Grace is nothing but genuine. His most humanizing moments all center around her, perhaps most notably in their chat in "Le Chat Chalet Car," in which Grace reveals that her number has been going down. Despite this, Simon assures her that he'll always be with her no matter what. Unfortunately, as Book 3 continues, Simon just can't understand why Grace is acting so "different" than what he expects her to be, showing that their relationship is far more based on co-dependency than actual friendship. In his distrust and paranoia, he traps Grace in a tape of her own memories and when she escapes and confronts him, he tries to kill her even after she saved him from falling off the train. However, his Tears of Remorse when he thinks he's killed her show that deep down he couldn't stop caring about her no matter how hard he tried.
  • Simon hates Nulls with a passion and won't hesitate to harm or even kill them, even seems to enjoy it, no matter how much he gets to know them. When it comes to The Cat on the other hand, Simon shows hatred and even has a panic attack around her, but never tries to harm her. At one point he trashes an entire room while talking to The Cat, but at no point does he direct any violence toward her. It should also be noted that the lead up to said room trashing was Simon turning to The Cat for help when it seemed everyone had abandoned him.
  • He shows concern for the various members of the Apex and doesn't like the idea of leaving them alone.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Is unable to comprehend why Amelia would even want to leave the Train, or why anyone would want to lower their number deliberately. And when Grace saves his life, he tries to wheel her instead, laughing at how his number has covered his entire face, and is shocked that the denizens they hated would save her.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Book 3 makes him a contrast to Tulip, surprisingly. Both of them are obsessed with rules — Tulip with rules for surviving the train so she's not "gone forever" and Simon with procedures to deal with Nulls — but Tulip learned to be much more flexible, learns to see the denizens as her friends and see her number dropping as an okay thing, Simon is quite rigid in his thinking and will even go as far as to wheel Nulls if he feels that they hinder "progress" and denies the idea of even wanting to go home and improving himself.
  • He also serves as this to Amelia. Amelia is explicitly stated to have entered the train following the death of a loved one, and Simon is heavily implied to have entered under the same circumstances. Both attempt to bend the rules of the Train to their advantage, become tyrannical rulers and ultimately fail, but while Amelia ultimately takes responsibility for her actions, Simon refuses to do so.
• Evil Is Hammy: In "The New Apex", after usurping Grace's position as leader of the Apex, he delivers all his lines over-dramatically, and completely loses it after pushing Grace off the train.
• Evil Makeover: While he was never technically "good", he changes his wardrobe after he reunites with the Apex by letting his hair go down and exchanging his hoodie for a sleeveless black shirt and a red coat he drapes over his shoulders.
• Facial Markings: Simon has the same red squiggly line on his face to honor "The Conductor's" image. The number reaching his face after trying to flat-out murder Grace can also qualify.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: One of the Ghoms gets him and Life Drains him until he crumbles into a skeleton and, eventually, ash. Notably, he gave one of these to Tuba and tried to do so with Grace via the wheels.
• Fantastic Racism: Hates the Denizens even more than Grace likely due to The Cat abandoning him and nearly getting him killed by a Ghom.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Pushes Grace off the bridge even after she saved his life when he was trying to kill her beforehand. He shows brief remorse at the realization that he's seemingly murdered his best friend before descending further into mad laughter. This ends up killing him in the end; with Grace too far away to save him when the origami birds rescue her, there's no one to pull him away from the Ghom before it turns him into ash.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: His left pant leg is torn off at the knee, though whether this is intentional or just the ravages of living on the train is never explained.
• Fatal Flaw: Obsession, perseveration, and his inability to accept he can be wrong. Once Simon gets an idea into his head, nothing will convince him to reexamine it, and there's even less that could make him consider that he might not have all the information. Then, due to his fixation on said idea, it will mutate into something far worse. He even states at one point that he considers himself to be always right. This ends up being the cornerstone of Simon's worst character traits: his hatred of Denizens, his constant denial of reality, his controlling behavior, etc.
• Foil: To Grace. Both have the same background and are pretty similar in terms of personality at the start, but while Grace comes to see the flaws in her worldview and learns to be a better person, Simon sinks deeper into his delusions and ends up being the final enemy Grace must overcome.
• For Your Own Good: His excuse for killing Tuba off to Hazel, as he believes he was sparing Hazel from Tuba's eventual betrayal. Hazel ends up crying and Grace walks off disappointed.
• French Jerk: Implied, considering that "Simon Laurent" is an incredibly French-sounding name, he's associated with the just as French cat and he says some French words to her, it's also implied the machine automatically translates all languages.
• Freudian Excuse: To begin with he was kidnapped by the train at age 10. "Le Chat Chalet Car" reveals that part of why he hates Nulls so much is that he stayed with The Cat when he first arrived on the Train, but she seemingly abandoned him after a few months, and he was nearly killed by a Ghom before Grace saved him. A later episode reveals that The Cat didn't intentionally abandon him, she realized too late that he wasn't following her. But Simon points out that it's still the same; after all, she never came back to him when it was clear he was alive.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Grace states that while he has gone through a lot of trauma and she still feels sorry for him, that it's no excuse for how he treated Hazel, hurting Hazel by murdering Tuba and refusing to let Hazel give Tuba a proper funeral. In "The New Apex" Grace shouts to his face that she's not responsible for his mistakes and his refusal to change is his own.
  Grace: (briefly pauses in regards to Simon asking if she's giving him another "hollow apology") No. I'm not responsible for your problems. I don't owe you anything!
  Simon: You owe me EVERYTHING!
• Get Out!: In season 2, once M.T. make its clear that she and Alan Dracula isn't going to yield to the Apex's control, instead of wheeling M.T., Simon tells her and Alan Dracula to leave the Mall car without Jesse as nulls like them can't help him like the Apex can.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: On the train, Simon went from merely being a kid who was emotional needy to being taught to kill and use violence, was abandoned by his parental figure that was supposed to help him, got PTSD, was forced to be in the same room as his abuser and then finally died a teenage Tyke Bomb.
• Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: A fantasy version, Simon's only apparent problem as a child was being insecure and emotionally clingy, and the train was supposed to fix him, Simon was abandoned to almost certain death by his parental figure which gave him permanent PTSD and a fear of betrayal, then he was the very first inductee of a cult in which the goal was killing and stealing from sapient beings. He finally dies on the train that led to his life's path being corrupted.
• Hates Being Alone: Like Grace, a lot of his behavior is motivated by fear of abandonment, which stems from the Cat inadvertently abandoning him when he was younger.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Quite possibly, when he first meets Amelia, he suggests talking to her to fix Grace’s number, even after finding out she works for One-One. Its only when Grace brings up the Apex rule to never trust adults and that the cat tells him that Amelia is evil that he decides against this and reaches the conclusion Grace was brainwashed by Amelia.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Has a fondness for military-related things: he collects tiny figurines of soldiers and he acts just like a soldier when it comes to rules/procedures and gathering supplies. In "The Musical Car", he's said to have written a fantasy novel which is confirmed when Grace sees a copy of "The Esmoroth Trilogy Book 1" in "The New Apex".
  • A lot of his behavior in "Le Chalet Car", shows Simon is worried about Hazel going through his trauma of null abandonment and that to some degree, he sees her as a reflection of him at that age. Unfortunately this is implied to part of his motivation for killing Tuba.
  • Simon at one point, confesses to the cat, he was unsure about not trusting Amelia simply because she was an adult, showing even he gets occasional doubts about the Apex's rules.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Downplayed, whilst his life on the train has definitely influenced him a lot and Grace introduced Simon to the Apex’s religion, it's also his Detrimental Determination that leads to him still insisting on following the flawed Apex code that leads to his death.
• Hypocrite: He's shown to be a stickler for rules and procedures...but only if they involve the Apex. He hates playing by the rules of the train.
• If I Can't Have You…: Part of his motivation for attempting to kill Grace besides him seeing her as betraying him is his rage at her for rejecting him and the Apex's beliefs, as seen when he attempts to wheel her after she reveals that she doesn't know why she saved him.
• Ignored Epiphany: He's genuinely sad about hearing about the death of Tuba's offspring, but this doesn't change his belief that she's evil and needs to be killed. Even when he seemingly kills Grace, his guilt and grief-ridden crying quickly shifts to him going Laughing Mad and he ends up dying, having never changed at all.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Hinted at. He is shown to be quite rigid and serious, being a stickler for rules and procedures made by the Apex and has a huge hatred for Nulls. But he's shown to have a lot of issues about how he was betrayed by The Cat and his justification for wheeling Tuba is so that Hazel would be "saved" from Tuba's "inevitable betrayal". He also doesn't like being mocked, as shown when Hazel blows a raspberry at him or feeling like he is actually lesser to a Null like Tuba. In "The Hey Ho Whoa" Car, Amelia belittles him for how he's nothing more than a child throwing a temper tantrum and needs to grow up, which causes him to lash out at her. Earlier, he was convinced that One-One saw the Apex, and by extension, him, as a threat, with Amelia bursting his bubble and telling him that One-One barely cares that they exist.
• In the Hood: He wears a white hoodie to contrast the black one Grace wears.
• I Reject Your Reality: As Book Three goes on, he is in increasingly strong denial about things like the fact that numbers are meant to go down, not up, how Amelia is the real false Conductor, etc. Grace even calls him out for this in "The Origami Car" when he traps her in her own tape and he gets mad and accuses her of lying when the clearly altered memory of what happened with Amelia the first time Grace encountered her switches to what actually happened. It gets so bad that he ends up with a humongous number covering his face. His character quote says it all
• Irony:
  • Simon considers himself the most logical of the group when in reality he is the most emotional and irrational protagonist in the series.
  • For all his hatred of lying, its implied Simon is lying to himself about the train’s true purpose as he can’t face the Awful Truth that he wasted his life following a Cargo Cult.
  • One can infer, Tuba would've eventually been able to help Simon with his denizen trauma had he not killed her.
  • Ironically the one time Simon admits to being wrong, which was trusting Amelia, turns out to be something he was correct on.
  • For all his talk about hating being betrayed, he's ultimately the one who betrays his friend Grace due to his paranoia that she had already betrayed him.
• It's All About Me: Simon shows signs of this when he noted how Grace isn't acting like herself, and that all that is important is how she is his rock, showing off his selfishness. When Amelia elaborates on the Epiphanic Prison nature of the Train, he goes into denial, claiming that the Train is "our right". During his fight with Grace in "The New Apex", when Grace tells him that she's not responsible for his problems and that she doesn't owe him anything, Simon retorts that she owes him everything.
• I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: According to Grace, he was wearing tube socks and sandals when they first met. We briefly see this look in "The Origami Car".
• Jerkass Has a Point: He is an asshole to the core, but he makes a solid point on The Cat.
  The Cat: I didn't abandon you, Simon. I ran.
  Simon: And yet, you didn't come back for me!
  • He also points out that Grace was keeping Hazel's denizen form secret.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: He has a good relationship with Grace and like her seems to care about other passengers, then he murders Tuba and gloats to Hazel about it before escalating from there.
• Karmic Death: An incredibly dark example in that Simon's Trauma Button—the Ghom (the same creature who caused his Start of Darkness) — is the force responsible for eventually killing him. When he was ten years old, Grace was there to save him, but in the present day, Simon has (literally) pushed away her help and dies agonizingly when the Ghom corners him again. Ironically, Grace had earlier saved him from an equally karmic fate—the train's wheel.
• Kick the Dog: Whilst killing Tuba was part of the Apex's plans to separate denizens from passegers, Simon didn't have to give Tuba false hope beforehand.
• Kick the Morality Pet: His Villainous Friendship with Grace falters throughout Book 3, as he sees her growth as a betrayal. By the end, he flat out tries to kill her twice, the second time after she just saved him, though he seemingly regrets it when he thought he succeeded.
• Killed Off for Real: Killed off by a Ghom sucking out his lifeforce at the end of "The New Apex" after pushing away the only person who cared for him.
• Knight of Cerebus: Not that the show hadn’t had some quite dark and intense moments before, but Simon’s actions in Book 3 are so horrifying that they pushed the possibility of a series renewal out of the picture.
• Knight Templar: He is a strong believer in the righteousness of the Apex and continues to cling to it even as the evidence that it's wrong continues to pile up.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: He's an even worse case of this trope than Grace, since while she comes to realize that she was wrong about what the numbers meant and what the purpose of the train was, Simon refuses to believe that he could be wrong, and continually doubles down further into denial every time his worldview is challenged.
• Lack of Empathy: Zigzagged. He happily tells Hazel that he murdered Tuba and that she's better off without her, but this is because he believes Denizens are Always Chaotic Evil and that by killing Tuba, he's preventing Hazel from undergoing his trauma of denizen abandonment. He also worries about the Apex kids being on their own, gets protective over Hazel when she interacts with the cat, and shows concern over Grace's lowering number. So it seems he does have empathy, he just uses it on the wrong things.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Stomps on the little origami cranes in "The Origami Car". If he hadn't done so, Grace's empathy for them wouldn't have kicked in, causing her to refold them and having them save her life after he tried to wheel her. This ultimately ends up killing him also — the origami birds dropped her off too far for her to pull him away from the Ghom that sucked out his life force
• Laughing Mad: After thinking he killed Grace and getting his number so high it covered his entire body, he starts to break down laughing with tears in his eyes.
• Loving a Shadow: Simon loves the vision of Grace as an individual that will offer him unconditional emotional support, protect him and never criticize any of his actions. When she realizes the wrongness of her actions and changes as a person, Simon is enraged, and eventually attempts to murder her. Ultimately, this is Downplayed, as after believing he had killed her and repeatedly declaring his hatred, he begins violently sobbing, showing that he did love her as a person on some level.
• Meaningful Name: His surname, mentioned only once, means "the shining one" which fits the large glowing number on his right arm. In "The New Apex" his entire body is covered in numbers and goes up to his face and even down his legs.
• Mirthless Laughter: After he kicks Grace off the train, he appears to start laughing in triumph, but it quickly devolves into a mixture of laughing and sobbing.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: He pulls this after learning Grace's keeping Hazel's secret as a denizen, but this is only from his point of view as Grace pulls a Heel–Face Turn and Simon views this as a betrayal of both their friendship and the ideology. Simon is correct about the latter, but the problem was the Apex was an inherently flawed and evil ideology to begin with.
• Moral Myopia: Simon expects other people to sympathize with him and understand his actions because of his Freudian Excuse, yet he is incapable of empathizing with others himself, as demonstrated by how he shows no remorse after wheeling Tuba and gets angry when Grace begins to stray from the Apex's teachings.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After he thinks he killed Grace he begins laughing madly, but then for a brief moment begins to cry in grief.
• Narcissist: Word of God describes him as a 'clinical narcissist,' specifically pointing out that Simon can't comprehend the very idea he's wrong and thus believes all his actions are justified, no matter how horrible they are. When he sees something that would prove him wrong, he has to rewrite it and rationalize it because he simply can't accept it. His narcissism also manifests in the way he expects others to bend to his will; he thinks his Freudian Excuse means everyone else should understand and accept his actions no matter how awful they are, and his friendship with Grace breaks down because she stops acting the way he wants her to.
• Never My Fault: As pointed out by the creators, Simon is a narcissist and fundamentally incapable of admitting he's wrong or his actions aren't justified. This shows in his Moral Myopia.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: For all his obsession with being in control, many of his actions in the last two episodes contribute to his downfall.
  • The end of "The Origami Car" has him shatter the vial of recording nanites — after he trapped Grace in a loop of the "We won't tell Simon" memory — as he leaves. However the nanites go to Grace to collect her tape, thus making her confront her mistakes and then wake up.
  • His stomping the Origami Cranes in the Origami Car allows Grace to repair them after she wakes up, culminating in the cranes saving her life after Simon tries to wheel her.
  • Him pushing Grace off the bridge to be wheeled means that when those origami birds save her, she's too far away from Simon to save him from the Ghom, resulting in his death.
• No Social Skills: Unlike Grace, he has little talent for manipulation or persuasion and is often awkward in conversations he can't control. This becomes especially clear when he tries using Grace's lines to manipulate Hazel, as his delivery is much more poorly timed after Tuba's death. He tends to mirror actions that he sees pulled off successfully without the understanding of how they're effective and has no grasp on the nuance of a situation, as seen when his attempts to grab and get close to Grace later on in Book 3 backfire when they were effective and reciprocated by Grace near the book's start. Moreover in "The New Apex", many of the children are hesitant to wheel Grace and they flock to her when Grace is saved from death via the origami birds.
• The One Guy: Of Book 3's protagonists amongst Grace, Hazel, and the female gorilla Tuba. It stays the same even after he kills Tuba and Amelia joins the group.
• Obliviously Evil: When he kills Tuba, he genuinely thinks he was doing Hazel a favor by preventing Hazel from going through the trauma of abandonment. He even admits to Grace that he sees himself in the right and doesn't want to change his mindset at all.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Flips out upon seeing The Cat in "Le Chat Chalet Car" because of their personal history.
  • Breaks down into tears when he sees Grace's memories in "The Hey Ho Whoa Car", although whether it's because of Grace keeping secrets from him or believing she's become someone he can't trust is ambiguous.
• Perma-Stubble: He has a smattering of chin hairs on his face, which is justified considering he's an 18-year old adolescent male in a situation where he's unlikely to have access to shaving equipment. The "manly" characterization normally associated with the look is pretty firmly averted however, as he's ultimately shown to a very pathetic and childish figure.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Whilst it's his job to get rid of the denizen companions to passengers and new recruits of the Apex, when M.T. and Alan Dracula arrive into the mall car with Jesse, Simon at first tries to get them to work for the Apex. When that doesn't work, Simon tells them to leave and that they can't help Jesse instead of killing them. Given his beliefs on denizens, Simon may have thought they'd leave Jesse without a fight.
  • Like Grace, he shows concern for the children of the Apex; worrying when a kid breaks his foot against M.T. and mentioning in season 3 they should return to the mallcar for the kids.
  • Early in season 3 when Grace mentions her insecurity because of her low number, Simon say he'll never think less of her for her number and they are a team that will stick together.
• Peter Pan Parody: Like Grace he is a negative take on this. Simon doesn't wanna grow up, has a dislike of adults, especially mother figures, yet also has some desire for one himself and an ambiguous relationship with a female companion that can be viewed as both romantic and/or familial.His outfit at the end of book 3 and the way he's killed by the Ghom also brings to mind Captain Hook.
• Playing the Victim Card: Whenever he's called out for his actions, he'll insist that he's the one who's really the victim because of his past trauma.
• Pretty Boy: Zig-Zagged. He has a slightly grungy aesthetic and Perma-Stubble but he otherwise fits into this with long blonde hair and a somewhat more refined and soft facial structure than other male characters in the series. In-universe, he is described as handsome by a few characters.
• Psychological Projection: Simon has a tendency of projecting his own feelings and emotional insecurities onto other people.
  • His decision to kill Tuba is motivated by the Cat abandoning him as a child, making him believe that it was best to do the same to them in order to ensure that Hazel would be spared his own personal trauma.
  • While in Grace's memories tapes, he states that she boarded the train and had no interest in leaving because she saw no value at her home. In truth, what little is implied from his backstory suggests that that is his actual motivation.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He's an even worse example of this trope than Grace, who at least acts as a parental figure for her followers, Simon included. In the later half of Book 3, he breaks down when he learns the truth about what the train is for and how Amelia notes that he's nothing more than a kid throwing a temper tantrum. He also becomes very obsessed with having Grace being "just as she should be" before he decides to kill her. Justified as he was taken onto the train at the age of ten and has had only other children for company for the past eight years, which would indeed mess up a child.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Downplayed. After killing Tuba, his eyes are visibly reddened, which contrasts horrifically with his calm demeanor and emotional assurance towards Hazel.
• Riddle for the Ages: Just what was Simon's past, all that was given was he probably went to a funeral, his mom told him at some point that socks and sandals were practical and that he believed there was nothing for him back on Earth. Now that he's dead, we'll never know his past, what kind of life he led and if he had any living family members who cared about him.
• Redemption Rejection: He murders Tuba the first chance he gets, despite the two of them having just worked together, he refuses to accept what the train is really for even when Amelia spells it out for him (though this was because the Cat and Grace told him not to trust her) and Grace, he constantly finds someone else to blame for everything he sees as "wrong" and never accepts any responsibility for the mistakes he has made, and he betrays Grace and tries to murder her when he finds out that she was hiding the truth about Hazel from him. This all contrasts with Grace's Character Development throughout the season and eventual Heel–Face Turn, and it eventually leads him to his death by the end of the season. Even Grace points out that he has rejected and ignored every single chance to change himself.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: His number already rivaled Amelia's at the end of "The Origami Car", but trying to kill Grace even after she saved his life gets it to the point that it completely covers his entire body. Not that he gets to enjoy it for long...
• Sanity Slippage: Not that he's all there in the beginning, but he grows more unhinged as Season 3 progresses due to being in denial about how the train works to the point that he tried trapping Grace in her own memories and then wheel her when she tried to reveal the truth of the train to the rest of the Apex and actually does the deed even after she saved him...
• Satellite Character: Most of his characterization comes from being Grace's second-in-charge. Book 3 shows off his past as to why he hates "Nulls" and the lengths he would go to kill them... and contrasts his growing cruelty and lack of empathy with Grace.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Simon has a particularly nasty combination of over half of them.
  • Pride: He refuses to take responsibility for his actions or acknowledge the negative aspects of the Apex's ideology, shows himself to incredibly smug and conceited and dives into evil partially as a result of his inability to swallow his pride to begin with.
  • Wrath: Has a Hair-Trigger Temper and is prone to violently yelling and flying off the handle as Book 3 progresses, viewing himself as having been wronged by others as part of an elaborate conspiracy against him.
  • Sloth: Refuses to reconsider his worldview and process his emotional trauma, as he would prefer to stay in the comfortable lie Grace created for him.
  • Greed: Desires to possess Grace and not have her object to any of his actions. He also desires to covet the items of the train, viewing it has his property to be seized.
• The Smart Guy: The few times he actually goes along with what the train wants, Simon shows himself to be good at puzzle-based cars, such as getting Randall to stop the blizzard by boiling him and using Tuba's color-blindness to solve the Color Clock Car.
• Smug Snake: Simon IS intelligent when the situation calls for it, but he is also convinced he is far more clever than he really is, rejects the advice of others, and fails to reconsider his positions in situations where he very clearly should.
• The Social Darwinist: He is a firm believer that only the strongest passengers deserve the best. He even calls Jesse "weak" after he gets his number to zero and gets to go home. Then this escalates in the Book 3 finale when he gains control over the Apex for having the highest number and commands them to wheel Grace.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Behind his smug and aggressive personality is a young man that is deeply emotionally suffering, insecure and terrified of being abandoned.
• Suicide by Cop: Implied, as he refuses to move away despite audibly hearing the Ghom and seeing it coming towards him and knowing it was there already. Additionally, his creator-produced music playlist includes several songs directly referencing suicide.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: A level isn't enough to describe it, actually. He wasn't the most pleasant person to be around but then he really crossed it when he murdered Tuba and happily told Hazel that he did it for her. Notably, his number has been increasing while Grace's has decreased. By the end of Book 3, his number grew to cover his whole body and up to his face because of his denial and the fact he tried to wheel Grace — who saved him — while Grace admitted her flaws and her number has dropped down to her wrist.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: By the end, his number reaching up to his face somehow causes the Ghom that consumed him to explode, rendering him super dead.
• Tragic Hero: Simon's refusal to accept fault and grow past his childish goals result in him forsaking everything and everyone he cared for and his ultimate demise.
• Tragic Villain: Ultimately, Simon is a child who grew up under a bad mentor, and spent so long in that situation that he can't conceive of changing the worldview he's defined his life by. Over the course of Book 3, every opportunity Simon has to change who he is just results in him doubling down on it, while he and Grace drift apart because Grace has the capacity to change.
• Trauma Button: At first, it seems like Simon is simply angry about having to stay with The Cat in "Le Chat Chalet Car", but as time passes it seems more like being around her is actually giving him a panic attack. He starts breathing rapidly upon discovering her storage room and the stuffed Ghom, and in his own words claims that staying in her cabin is like "having a weight pressing down on his chest". It turns out this is because she was the denizen he befriended when he arrived on the train at the age of ten, and he was left devastated when she abandoned him to be almost killed by a Ghom (even though Samantha states she didn't realize she left Simon alone). This also explains his pained reaction when Grace brought up "that Null of his" in "The Debutante Car". In fact, he ends up dying via his Trauma Button as a Ghom leaps out to attack him and nobody's around to save him because he pushed Grace away.
• Troubled Abuser: His previous emotional abandonment and unhealthy coping mechanisms result in him becoming hesitant to accepting change to the point that he abuses Grace in escalating ways. This is not treated as an excuse for his actions.
• Undying Loyalty: As Grace's second-in-command, he is tirelessly devoted to her, his official bio states he is very loyal towards those he considers friends. This ends up being heavily deconstructed and eventually subverted in Book 3, as it becomes clear that he is more devoted to the idea of what he believes she should be, and is unable to cope when she deviates from that idea.
• Unknown Rival: Thinks that One-One is deliberately targeting the Apex when One-One doesn't even really know that they exist besides being passengers.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: We see in Grace's flashback in "The Origami Car", he was relatively normal, if a bit soft-spoken and insecure at the age of ten, completely unlike the villain that he would eventually become. His number was also quite low — 55 — compared to Grace's 149. Makes you wonder if he could've ended up leaving the Train sooner had Grace decided to swallow her pride.
• The Usurper: After leaving Grace trapped in her own mind, he claims her title as leader of the Apex for himself. It's Played With in the sense that by the rules of the Apex, Simon is in the right to take command as he had the highest number, the problem is that the Apex is an inherently unjust government system.
• Villainous Breakdown: Goes into one of these when Amelia reveals the Awful Truth to him about what the train's real purpose is, and upon seeing Grace's memories of her keeping Hazel's true self secret from him. It gets worse in the final episode as his number extends up to his neck and then to his face when he attempts to kill Grace.
• Villainous Friendship: One of his only good traits is his closeness to Grace. In fact, his profile states that he's truly loyal to his friends. Unfortunately, as Book 3 goes on, it becomes more and more clear that his friendship with Grace is toxic and co-dependent, and when Grace's Character Development causes her to grow as a person, he can't handle her changing, culminating in him trying to murder her.
• Villain Protagonist: He's this for most of Book 3 as the deuteragonist, though he morphs into the antagonist over the course of the story.
• Walking Spoiler: See all those spoilers this guy has? Most of them center on three things in Book 3: murdering Tuba, his Sanity Slippage and his eventual death.
• Wall Crawl: Simon's magnetic boots allow him to walk on both the metallic surfaces of the train and its Hard Light constructs. Book 4 demonstrates that all passengers used to be issued them and they couldn't be removed until Amelia took over, so he must have scavenged them from somewhere.
• Windmill Crusader: Spends a lot of time in Book 3 suspecting One-One of being personally out to get the Apex, accusing him of turning Hazel's number off, and seeing threats at every turn. Amelia reveals that One-One doesn't even know they exist and Hazel was actually a clone of Alrick made by Amelia the entire time.
• Would Harm a Senior: Attempts to kick Amelia in rage, though her force field prevents him from doing so.
• Would Hit a Girl: He's willing to throw MT on the wheels, wheels the female gorilla Tuba, tries attacking Amelia after she tears down his world view, looks downright ready to attack Hazel upon learning she's a denizen, and even kicks Grace, his only friend, onto the wheels of the train.
• Would Hurt a Child: Zigzagged, when Grace gives him the signal to throw MT and Alan Dracula off the train to get rid of Jesse's companions, he first tries to get them to work for the Apex, then tells them to leave, only resorting to violence when they refuse to do so. Later Hazel herself is afraid that he'll kill her like Tuba, though its left ambiguous.
• Yandere: Rare male and ambiguously platonic version towards Grace. His excess emotional clinginess towards Grace begins to emerge over the course of Book 3, eventually manifesting in his devotion turning into psychotic murderous intention. Even after attempting to murder her, he still clearly loves her in a twisted way as he begins bawling while Laughing Mad from stress.

Hazel

Hazel

"I can be special and brave."

Voiced by: Isabella Abiera

The tritagonist of the show's third season. A young, six-year-old girl who traverses the train with her giant gorilla companion and maternal figure, Tuba. With a faulty number and little memory of her past, she's convinced by Grace and Simon to join the Apex.

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• A Boy and His X: A little girl and her gorilla pal.
• Adorably Precocious Child: She's surprisingly intelligent for her age, being smart and knowledgeable enough to recognize how dancing works, including ballroom dancing requiring a partner, and how to properly make a snowball when Grace, who is more than twice her age, couldn't even do it right. That coupled with the fact that she has no memory of her parents hints at the fact that she's not even human, which she isn't. She's a failed clone of Alrick.
• Artificial Human: She's actually a clone of Alrick created by the train. A failed clone at that.
• Amnesiac Hero: Claims to have little memory of her past before entering the train, mostly because, as a failed clone of Alrick, she doesn't have a prior life to speak of.
• Ambiguously Brown: She has brown skin in her human form.
• Ambiguously Human: She looks perfectly human, but her number doesn't glow and isn't registered by Simon's number tracker, she can't recall ever having parents or even a last name, and when Simon gleefully tells her that he killed Tuba, she runs outside and suddenly shapeshifts into a turtle humanoid. It's later revealed that she's a flawed clone of Alrick.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's made poignantly clear she's a failed clone of Alrick but the reason why is never answered. Is it because she's a Denizen of the train? Because instead of being fully human, she's some kind of Turtle Person hybrid? Because of her Power Incontinence that makes her turn into her denizen form when she gets too worked up? Because she's an Opposite-Sex Clone? Because she wasn't Born as an Adult?
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Her skin color turns light green in her denizen form.
• Barefoot Loon: Downplayed. She's always barefoot, and her introduction shows her to be quite quirky. Even after her mental state takes quite the hit during the events of Book Three, she still retains enough of her mental faculties to decide to go with Amelia rather than stay with Simon and Grace.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: See her character quote above? About her being capable of being special and brave? She gets to be special when she discovers she's a denizen who's also a failed clone of Alrick, and gets to be brave when she stands up to Grace and Simon and leaves them to go with Amelia, an event that happens after she's lost everything she ever loved thanks to them, either directly (Simon wheeling Tuba) or indirectly (her optimism is all but gone after all the crap she's been through by joining with them).
• Beware the Nice Ones: She calls out Simon and Grace for their attitude towards her, and how they are basically immature teens with no idea how to be parents. This is while convincing Amelia that Hazel wants to stay with her, any consequences be damned, because at least Amelia is someone who admitted she was wrong and is trying to do better. Grace and Simon are too caught up in their Apex nonsense to consider that committing mass murder and treating Hazel as a thing to be obliterated would not sit by her well. Grace is shocked, and forced to admit tearfully that Hazel has a point.
• Break the Cutie: Where do we begin? She does not take Tuba's death by Simon's hands well at all and it just keeps getting worse from there. She learns she isn't a real passenger, or fully human for that matter, and begins fearing that Simon would kill her without remorse should he find out. But she can't let her stress about that show in any way or else she'll take her denizen form. Later, she learns she is a failed experiment and subsequently gets betrayed by Grace, who degrades her in an attempt to save face in front of Simon. By the time she leaves the story in Book 3, she has completely lost all sense of playful innocence, and the only person she feels remotely comfortable trusting is Amelia, someone who explicitly refuses to be any sort of caregiver for her.
• But Now I Must Go: Leaves with Amelia in the penultimate episode of Book 3, after losing faith in Grace.
• Childish Tooth Gap: She's missing a tooth on her upper jaw, just off center.
• Children Are Innocent: Just a sweet and innocent child...but is also ripe for the picking to become part of the Apex....and then she loses said innocence...
• Clone Angst: As if she didn't have enough on her plate, the revelation that she's a failed clone of Alrick doesn't do good for her mental state.
• Clones Are People, Too: She's actually one of Amelia's flawed attempts at recreating Alrick.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character:
  • She's a young child, only 6 ½ by the end of Book 3, compared to the teenage Tulip and Jesse.
  • While Tulip and Jesse's numbers were low (115 and 31 respectively), she somehow has a 337 on her hand. Moreover, her number doesn't glow at all. Turns out that it isn't even a real number at all; it's a birthmark, with the 337 being Amelia's initial number.
  • Hazel begins the story with a companion in Tuba, whereas it took several days for Tulip and Jesse to meet Atticus and Alan Dracula, respectively.
  • Finally, Hazel isn't 100% human; she was a failed attempt to recreate Alrick.
• Cute Monster Girl: Her denizen form gives her light green skin, a beak-like mouth, sharp fingers, and a backpack-like shell. Compared to the other Turtle People seen before, she's definitely the most humanoid of them all.
• Dead Partner: Tuba is, for all intents and purposes, her Denizen partner alongside a mother figure. Simon killing her in cold blood is just one of the many events that causes Hazel to eventually lose faith in both him and Grace.
• Decoy Protagonist: Makes sense, since she was introduced after Grace and Simon, but her leaving with Amelia in the penultimate episode leaves Grace as the definitive protagonist of Book 3.
• Due to the Dead: Insists on holding a funeral for Tuba once the group have passed the Color Clock Car, much to Simon's exasperation.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: She stands up for herself and declares she would rather be with an adult who doesn't want her dead, namely Amelia, as compared to Simon. Amelia after some Tsundere hesitation gives in, and says that Hazel can stay with her, while warning her that she's not a motherly figure. While Hazel has some bittersweet feelings about leaving Grace, she makes it clear this is the right choice for her while wishing Grace luck in navigating the next car.
• Emotion Suppression: Since her shapeshifting powers are activated by her feeling intense negative emotions, she goes through a lot of effort to keep her emotions under control.
• Establishing Character Moment: Announces that Grace and Simon are sacrifices to Tuba... before it's revealed that Tuba is tickling them and she laughs at how they reacted with glee. She also is shown to be Tuba's Morality Pet and has a sense of maturity usually not seen in a girl her age.
• Et Tu, Brute?: The look she has while Grace dehumanizes her to try save face with Simon says it all. This moment, in fact, fuels her decision to leave with Amelia near the end of the Book.
• Expendable Clone: Implied. After discovering her denizen form, she worries that Simon will wheel her just as he did with Tuba. Coupled with the reveal that she's a failed clone of Alrick, and Amelia doesn't seem to like her at first, it's pretty easy to connect the dots.
• Friendless Background: Downplayed. While she had Tuba by her side, the fact she decides to join the Apex to become friends with their members suggests she didn't get many friends in the Jungle Car, passenger or denizen.
• Five Stages of Grief: Falls into Denial and Bargaining upon learning about Tuba's death, promising that she'll be good from now on and trying to deny that Tuba died in the first place. She later moves onto Acceptance after giving Tuba a funeral.
• Heroic BSoD: Falls into this when Simon tells how he murdered Tuba and that she was better off without the gorilla, transforming her into some strange turtle humanoid in the process. She falls into a bigger one when she realizes that she's a train person, meaning that Grace hates her and fears that Simon will also wheel her.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Going by her character quote, at the very least. And oh boy, does she get her wish...
• I Just Want to Have Friends: She's really eager to join the Apex so she can be around other children. By the end of Book 3, she's given up on that dream entirely to work under Amelia instead. Good thing too, considering what those kids are like...
• Innocence Lost: Before meeting Grace and Simon? She was cheerful, happy and had no worries 'cause she was with Tuba. After? She lost her mother figure, sister figure, and all of her optimism before heading off with Amelia (who doesn't even see her as nothing more than something to observe rather than babysit) for good.
• Interspecies Friendship: Is very close to her gorilla friend Tuba to the point that she breaks down crying when Simon reveals that he killed her. She later gains one with Grace, seeing as Hazel is not human but rather a turtle creature but then that becomes shattered after Grace decides to save her own skin than protect Hazel.
• Ironic Name: Hazel trees symbolize peace and health. Her presence is one of the things that destabilizes the Apex and the harmony of Grace and Simon's friendship. And if we take health to mean mental health, hers is most definitely damaged by the time she leaves the story.
• Leaving You to Find Myself: A heartbreaking, platonic example. After being put through the wringer by the events of the book, up to and including finding out she's a failed clone, Hazel decides to go with Amelia in order to find out more about her nature as a clone.
• Like Parent, Like Child: Technically she's a clone, but it's more accurate to describe her as Amelia's child, with some of Alrick's quirks given the turtles. She shares Alrick's cheerful nature, combined with Amelia's Smarter Than You Look temperament and eventual cynicism when she lost someone close to her. It's also why she says she prefers Amelia to find out more about herself, but also affirms to Amelia that not only does she like her but also she can take care of herself, showing her mother figure's streak of independence. Amelia seems surprised at how much they have in common, providing hope that she can move on from Alrick's loss while taking in Hazel.
• Messy Hair: Her hair is bright and bushy with a few leaves in it. It's also one of the things that remains the same in both her human and denizen form.
• Meaningful Name: "Hazel" is the name of a type of tree, and she's introduced in the tree-filled Jungle Car.
• Morality Pet: Towards Grace, whose Character Development is spurred by protecting Hazel. Then Grace had to save her own skin and kick Hazel down...
• Mysterious Past: Hazel's life before entering the train is a complete enigma, and one of the recurring mysteries of the third Book. The most we eventually find out is that she's a clone of Alrick.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Played a prank on Grace and Simon by stating that they were going to be sacrificed to Tuba and states to Grace during a snowball fight in "Le Chat Chalet Car" that she would "die until she's dead" without Hazel's help.
• Only One Name: When being introduced in the Debutante Ball Car, she's called "Hazel, Last Name Unknown". Given she's not only a denizen, but a clone of Alrick, she probably doesn't even have a last name.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: She's a failed clone of Alrick, Amelia's deceased husband.
• Plucky Girl: Described as optimistic, and considering she's on the train and tagging along with the sociopaths who lead the Apex, she better be. Unfortunately, said pluckiness doesn't survive the events of the Book...
• Power Incontinence: After discovering her shapeshifting powers, the only way she can think to control them is to keep her emotions under control, lest she transforms at the worst possible time. She gets a little better by the time she leaves with Amelia, but it's clear she's still got a long way to go.
• Protagonist Without a Past: Decoy Protagonist, but it still fits: She's a clone of Alrick created by Amelia on the train, meaning she doesn't have any life prior to entering the train.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: By the time she leaves with Amelia, it's clear that part of the reason's that she's outright done with Grace and Simon's nonsense, and would much rather go with anybody else than stay another minute by their side.
• Small Role, Big Impact: While she's the tritagonist of Book Three, Grace and Simon's journey takes center stage, and she doesn't even stay the whole trip, but her becoming Grace's Morality Pet changes things for the Apex irrevocably: Grace learns empathy and grows for the better, Simon goes deeper down the rabbit hole, and the Apex themselves go from focusing on getting their numbers as high as possible, to lowering them in order to exit the train.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Leaves at the beginning of "The Origami Car" to signify that the already dark Book was going to get darker real fast.
• Token Mini-Moe: The young child in a group of her, two adults and a gorilla. It stays the same even after Tuba's death.
• Token Good Teammate: She's the only human protagonist that isn't a member of the Apex in Book Three. She also ultimately becomes this to the group by the time she leaves the story, as she's the only one to not have hurt the people around intentionally (Simon) or otherwise (Grace).
• Tomato in the Mirror: Even before Tuba's death at the hands of Simon, she has no idea she's able to turn into a turtle, let alone that she's a flawed experiment of Amelia, created as a way to bring back her deceased husband.
• Tragic Keepsake: Tuba's satchel and the glowing rock in it, which she wore just before Simon murdered the gorilla. Hazel uses the rock as a makeshift corpse to conduct Tuba's funeral.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Discovers she can shapeshift into a Turtle Person-like form from the horror of Simon wheeling Tuba.
• Walking Spoiler: She is not what she appears to be, that's for sure.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: After she was revealed to not really be a human and then Amelia revealing she's a clone of Alrick, things become more hectic. Grace, who has just realized what she's done is wrong, wants to protect her from Simon and the Apex. Amelia wants to "quarantine" her (and even remarks "Debatable" when Hazel states her name) and there's the fear of Simon wheeling her like he did Tuba. She ends up leaving with Amelia after Grace saves her own skin instead of telling the truth because even though Amelia isn't a caretaker, at least she isn't a backstabbing liar or a murderer.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Thee manifestations of her appear in Grace's memories in "The New Apex", chewing Grace out for all of the horrible things she did.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: In "The Debutante Ball Car", she wears a tuxedo and top hat. Her first outfit might be because she's a failed attempt to clone Alrick because it resembles the school uniform from "The Past Car".
• Wild Child: Her backstory (raised in the Jungle Car by Tuba) and appearance (Messy Hair with a distinct hint she prefers going barefoot) give off the physical impression of the trope, but she's much more well adjusted than the average example.
• Wrong Context Magic: One of Book 3's mysteries is Hazel's number and why it doesn't glow, unlike those of normal passengers. It also never goes up or down, no matter what she does. It's revealed that Hazel is a creation from the Train, specifically by Amelia who was trying to recreate Alrick. Her number is a copy of Amelia's original number and is essentially just a birthmark.

Tuba

Tuba

"Don't be a worry baby. No need to hurry, baby, when you're with me..."

Voiced by: Diane Delano

A large purple gorilla with two tubas strapped to her back. Following the death of her own children, she became Hazel's companion and adoptive mother figure shortly after meeting her. Despite having little trust in Grace, and especially Simon, she acquiesces to Hazel's desire to travel with the two teenagers to the Apex.

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• The Adjectival Man: Is initially introduced by Hazel and in the Debutante Ball car as "The Mighty Tuba".
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Has purple fur.
• Big Guy Fatality Syndrome: She is physically huge to the point of being nearly unstoppable; naturally, she's the first major character to get Killed Off for Real.
• Color Blind Confusion: Simon realizes she has red-green colorblindness during their team-up in the Color Clock Car. Overlaps with Artistic License – Biology since apes are trichromatic and can see just as many colors as humans can, though this could be explained by Tuba not being a normal gorilla or that it's something unique to her.
• Contralto of Strength: Has a very deep, almost masculine voice, probably because she's a gorilla, and the physically strongest member of her group, because, again, gorilla.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character:
  • Previous companions Atticus and Alan Dracula were both male, while Tuba is female. Also Tuba was already with Hazel since the beginning whereas Atticus and Alan joined later.
  • She also acts as one to MT. MT didn't want to be a companion and hoped to live a life outside of the wants of others. Tuba has already lived a rich and full life without a human and chooses to travel with Hazel because she cares about her.
  • She dies halfway into the series while Atticus and Alan Dracula survive till the end (albeit the former was briefly transformed into a Ghom).
• Dark and Troubled Past: She used to have a family, but lost them under unknown circumstances.
• Deadpan Snarker: With a hint of Silent Snarker in her facial expressions. She isn't afraid to give a semi-sarcastic delivery to her companions.
• A Death in the Limelight: "The Color Clock Car" is the episode where she explains her past...it's also the episode where Simon kills her.
• Disability Superpower: Being colorblind, Tuba is able to perceive and interact with both the red and green parts of the clock car when usually only one color is visible and solid, allowing her to grab the green key when it isn't shifted in and use it to unlock the red lock on the door.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Similar to Mace's death, except she falls into the wheel back first thanks to Simon.
• Female Monster Surprise: Tuba is female, but this isn't immediately obvious because she's a gorilla and her voice is very deep (but still female). In something of a subversion, Grace and Simon inexplicably seemed to know she was female just by looking at her.
• Gentle Giant: Described as a "gentle gorilla" who towers over Hazel. However, she is shown to be very aggressive if she sees anyone threatening to hurt the girl.
• Gentle Gorilla: She's very gentle most of the time, and is especially caring towards Hazel, though it's still not a good idea to threaten her charge.
• Killed Off for Real: Simon kills her by tearing her hand off a ledge, after electrocuting it, dropping her into one of the train's wheels.
• Mama Bear: She's very protective of Hazel and nearly bashes in Simon's head with a rock when she senses that he doesn't have the best of intentions.
• Meaningful Name: Her name is likely based on the fact she wears two of said musical instruments on her shoulders.
• Musical Assassin: Her tubas can create concussive shock waves. Though she never uses this on a living thing onscreen, she manages to blow apart a cage.
• Nice Girl: Downplayed, considering she initially acts rather distrustful of Simon and Grace, but it makes perfect sense since they see her as an emotionless automoton, and she's incredibly pleasant to everyone else.
• Outliving One's Offspring: They way she talks about Bugle makes it seem Bugle has passed away.
• Parental Substitute: She is this to Hazel, as the latter doesn't know her parents and was on the train for some unknown reason.
• Properly Paranoid: She's immediately distrusting of Simon and Grace but lets it go for Hazel's sake. And the minute she puts her trust in Simon, it ends with her wheeled.
• The Quiet One: Hazel says she's a little shy and only speaks when it seems necessary to provide a statement.
• Sacrificial Lion: Is killed halfway into Book 3 to symbolize that things are getting serious.
• Talking Animal: She's a talking gorilla, albeit a quiet one.
• Team Mom: As a former mother, she does her best to take care of Hazel.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Does not get along with Simon in the slightest and the feeling is mutual.
• Theme Naming: Was once a mother and snarks to Simon how Bugle behaved more maturely than he. "Bugle" is a musical instrument in the same family as the Tuba.
• Token Non-Human: A gorilla compared to the humans Hazel, Grace and Simon until it's revealed that Hazel is also non-human.
• The Quiet One: She doesn't talk much, and when she does it's usually only a few sentences at a time.
• Walking Spoiler: Somewhat. While she doesn't have as many spoilers, it's what Simon does to her that spoils a lot.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Simon and Grace see her as nothing more than a construct. Simon takes it to extremes by telling her that she's "not a person" before letting her fall to her death, grinded by the wheels of the train. Grace, however, was shown to be disgusted by Simon's cruelty and even admitted that she liked Tuba.

Supporting

The Apex

"Apex! May our spirits be high! And our numbers higher!"

A bunch of children who follow Grace and Simon's philosophy of higher numbers.

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• Ambiguous Innocence: It's hard to debate how much of their cruelty is on them, how much it's on Grace being her corrupting self, and whether or not they could've figured out what the Train did on their own or would've become a Lord of the Flies—esque group that would slaughter anyone who stood in their way.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: To them, it's better to have a high number. This leads them to do villainous actions against others without any care in the world, despite how the numbers are supposed to go down to 0 so you can leave the train. Many of them do object to Simon almost killing Grace, though.
• Break the Cutie: The final episode of Book 3 does this, given how they're so disillusioned by Grace's thinkings. Simon has made them even more radical and caused them look miserable at having to serve him and are afraid of throwing Grace onto the wheels. They have to see Grace and Simon argue, Grace nearly wheeled by Simon after she saves him and then a Ghom turns Simon into ash right in front of their eyes. Needless to say, they're going to stop being the little brats they've been for the past few years.
• Enfant Terrible: Under Grace's direction, they act like little psychopaths, trashing the cars, beating up the denizens and stealing whatever they can find.
• Everyone Has Standards: For all their behaviors and beliefs on destroying lives and throwing out slurs like it's candy, many of them want nothing to with Simon's demands to wheel Grace and are mortified when Simon tries to kill Grace after she saved him. They don't seem happy to have been working for him exclusively, either. All they can do is watch with horror and help catch Grace after the origami birds save her.
• Facial Markings: They all wear the red wavelength markings of the Conductor on their faces.
• Harmful to Minors: The end of Book 3 has them see Grace nearly dead by Simon kicking her into the wheels and then watching Simon reduced to ashes by a Ghom, shattering their innocence for good.
• Heel–Face Turn: The remaining ones do this after Grace disbands the Apex.
• Heel Realization: Being put under Simon's thumb, Grace admitting the truth about the Conductor and Simon nearly killing Grace before dying to a Ghom make these little hellions finally realize that they're the bad guys, not the heroes.
• Innocence Lost: Seeing one of your parental figures nearly wheeled to death and the other one disintegrated into ash by a Ghom (said parental figure doubling down on being a tyrant and forcing you to worship him) will kinda do that to you.
• Kids Are Cruel: They gleefully destroy cars and harm the denizens without a care with the only thing that matters is their numbers rising. They draw the line on wanting to wheel Grace though.
• Lack of Empathy: They don't really care about how they wanted to hurt MT and Alan Dracula in "The Mall Car" and are rather glad when their number rises from hurting them. They realize how horrible it is to not have it when Simon kicks Grace to the wheels after she saved him.
• Meaningful Name: The apex of something is its highest part or point. The kids in the Apex want their numbers to get as high as possible.
• Missing Child: Each of them was taken aboard the Train and has no intention of getting off it, meaning they are missing in the real world.
• Moral Myopia: If they kill or hurt a Null? Yay, look at how my number rose! I'm so strong! No one can stop me! But if a Null hurts them? WAAAHHH! Kill the Null now!
• No Name Given: Only a few children get named, like Toby and Lucy.
• No Sympathy: They don't care if you're a denizen...unless they can use you to raise their numbers.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Downplayed, several of the kids that sided with Simon such as the boy whom raised the alarm, are nowhere to be seen after Simon's death and Grace's disbanding of the Apex. That said it can be guessed they simply left the Mallcar with their leader's death.

Lucy

A minor recurring character that gets the most characterization out of the Apex kids.

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• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Lucy didn't mind pulling a Stage Light person off his stand and taking it with her, but didn't like the idea of it being wheeled and is likewise upset, when the Light cries when being treated as a mere toy.
  • In the New Apex, Lucy isn't at all enthusiastic about trying to raising the alarm on Grace when she arrives to the Mall car and gives subtle signals for Grace to leave quietly, giving a worried look when another boy alerts the Simon. Similarly she reacts with horror when Simon tries to kill Grace after she saved him and is relieved to see Grace alive. Lucy also reacts with horror and cries out Simon's name when he is attacked by a Ghom, mourning his ashes with Grace, showing she still cared for him too.
• Eye Scream: According to Grace in "The Mall Car", Lucy lost one of her eyes thanks to a harpoon-pack related incident. She's seen in the beginning of Book 3 with an eyepatch.
• Morality Pet: Downplayed, both Grace and Simon clearly like her, but are in no way willing to listen to any suggestion of hers that they be nice to denizens and still induct her in Apex propaganda.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Downplayed, she tears off the head of a Stage Light person as it pleads for mercy, but later tries to get Grace to let her keep the light as a pet, isnt' happy when Grace says to wheel it, and looks unsure when the Stage light pleads he's a person and not a toy.

Amelia (UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR BOOK 1!)

See the main character page

The Creation (Unmarked Spoilers for Book 3!)

One of Amelia's failed attempts at recreating her long lost husband. Their origins remain a mystery until a chance encounter with Grace and Simon set in motion the events that led to the discovery of their true identity.

See Hazel's folder above for the tropes regarding her.

Minor

Frank

Frank

Voiced by: Owen Dennis

A talking bear who resides in Le Chat Chalet Car.

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• Badass in a Nice Suit: His real first appearance shows him in a blue three piece suit. It gives the impression that he's The Cat's agent or bodyguard.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Not at first, he only wore a bathrobe when onscreen in the lodge for the first time, but he later shows up in a flannel shirt and jeans.
• Beary Friendly: Considering how he's willing to cook pancakes for the "guests" unprompted; he even asks if Hazel has any allergies.
• Cool Shades: Part of his uniform, he never took them off, even on vacation.
• Creator Cameo: Voiced by Owen Dennis, Infinity Train's creator.
• Early-Bird Cameo: His first appearance was actually in Book 2, in the Lucky Cat Car. He was shown whispering into The Cat's ear.
• Interspecies Romance: He and The Cat reside in the cabin together, he's even first seen in a bathrobe, seemingly naked underneath. It's heavily implied that they are an item. Since he supposedly works for her, this also makes it a case of Sleeping with the Boss. Later confirmed by the creators.
• Moment Killer: Has a habit of showing up in the worst possible moment.
• Nice Guy: Very mellow and willing to make pancakes for the guests.
• Real Men Can Cook: He's willing to make pancakes for everyone.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Isn't seen in the cabin when Simon enters it in "The Canyon of the Golden Winged Snakes Car" to signify a darker turn.
• Talking Animal: A talking bear.

Roy

Roy

Voiced by: Justin Michael

A talking clock with arms and legs who resides in the Color Clock Car.

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• All Your Colors Combined: After the main characters solve the puzzle, his arms and legs are overlayered with a gradient.
• Alternate Identity Amnesia: One explanation for why he keeps introducing himself again and again after the clock changes its color is that his separate personalities don't share memories.
• Character Catchphrase: "Teamwork begins when two people trust each other!"
• Meaningful Name: His name is based on "ROYGBIV", the acronym to remember the colors of the rainbow. "Roy" is short for "Red, orange, yellow".
• Split Personality: Whenever the clock changes color, he introduces himself in a different tone of voice and demeanor.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Him telling how "teamwork begins when two people trust each other" may have been the catalyst for Simon wheeling Tuba as he felt like he couldn't put full trust in the gorilla after The Cat left him to die. If this is correct, then he's the reason the second half of Book 3 becomes an absolute trainwreck.

Grace's parents

Mr. and Mrs. Monroe

Voiced by: Keith Ferguson & Kirby Howell-Baptiste

Grace's mother and father who were diplomats, pushing Grace to be the best and the reason why Grace is on the train.

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• Abusive Parents: They were emotionally distant from their daughter, not even caring that she was caught shoplifting so that they'd finally notice her. They also didn't come on the day of a big recital with the other dancers.
• Ambiguous Situation: Since we only see them through Grace's memories, we never know how much the parents actually do care about her. Maybe they are tough on her but more out of concern for her safety since they're so busy or they are as abusive as the show presents them to be.
• "Ass" in Ambassador: They appear to be international diplomats of some kind, and are cold and neglectful of their daughter.
• Failed a Spot Check: So busy arguing with a police woman in absolute denial that their child was a thief that no one was there when the Train picked her up. Smart move, you two.
• Foil: To Tulip's parents. Tulip's parents were divorced and going through a lot of issues but still loved their daughter, while Grace's parents are married and wealthy yet
• Hate Sink: Mr and Mrs Monroe are very abusive and neglectful parents who's very emotionally abusive towards to their own daughter Grace, which means the latter caused Grace to take the infinity train and create The Apex along with Simon.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While he was being a jerk about it, Mr. Monroe was right that Grace had no business shoplifting.
• Never My Fault: Grace's father doesn't accept that his and his wife's hands-off parenting was what caused Grace to shoplift and states that they provide everything for her...except love apparently.
• No Name Given: They're never named.
• Parental Neglect: They don't see their daughter as anything but a doll, pushing her to other caretakers, not appearing for a big rehearsal and not allowing her to let her have ice cream with the other girls, and don't seem to understand that what she needs is comfort and love and not her father denying that she was a shoplifter.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Being neglectful of their daughter and not raising her to accept responsibility for her actions is what caused Grace to be lured into the train and later create the Apex.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If they just accepted that they were horrible parents and let Grace take the fall for the shoplifting, Grace would never have been taken by the Train and create a cult since they were just behind a single sheet of glass.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Whatever happened to them — if they're still alive, if they're aware of their actions, or if they're on the Train itself — is unknown since they're only seen in Grace's memories and it's been eight years since Grace last saw them.

Origami Birds

Origami Birds

Animate paper cranes that live in the Origami Car.

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• Aborted Arc: One of them chooses to travel with Grace at the end of Book 3, but unless the show gets un-cancelled, we'll never get to see what they end up doing together.
• Androcles' Lion: They are the first denizens that Grace starts being nice to after she starts becoming a better person. She apologizes to and refolds them after accidentally stepping on them. They save her life after Simon pushes her off the train car.
• Art Initiates Life: They’re living, sentient origami cranes. Other origami life exists in the Origami Car, including other plants and animals.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Thanks to Grace unfolding them, they come to her aid when Simon kicks her onto the train's wheels.
• Big Damn Heroes: An insane Simon usurps control of the Apex and throws Grace under the wheel, only for the origami birds to reappear and fly her back up to safety.
• Loyal Animal Companion: One of them decides to become Grace's denizen partner.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Grace carefully steps over the origami birds (and later, apologizes to them and refolds them) while Simon simply crushes them underfoot, as a sign that she is getting better as a person while Simon is getting worse.
  • In Japan, it is believed that successfully folding 1,000 origami cranes will allow one to have a wish granted. At the end of the book, after realizing her previous actions were wrong and what they cost her, Grace now desires to become a better person and get off the Train, which coincides with her meeting the origami cranes.
• Small Role, Big Impact: They only appear in the last two episodes of the Book, but they're the final catalyst to Grace's change.
• Stronger Than They Look: While they are pretty small, several of them working together can carry a grown woman effortlessly.
• Walking Spoiler: Spoil their role in the last half of "The New Apex" at your own peril.

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