All aboard for Bohannon’s brand of hell
HAIL the return of Hell on Wheels screeching into the SoHo schedule on Wednesday at 8.30pm, carrying with it the resurrection of Cullen Bohannon, that most hirsute and handsome of railroad workers.
We see him in raccoon furs living in a gutted train carriage in the burned down railroad town that once supported the railway. Madly scribbling sketches, he’s in the middle of a hallucination and stumbles outside into the deep snow to become embroiled in a fight with a wolf. With his wild hair and strange apparel he himself looks part-wolf partCharlie crazy man Manson. So much loss the former Confederate soldier has endured – a wife, a son, and last season the death of his sweetheart Lily Bell, who gave him brief hope of real happiness before she too was murdered.
The season three premiere treated viewers to two episodes – Big Bad Wolf and Eminent Domain played back-to-back with the return of old players – the now emancipated former slave Elam Ferguson, and D Thomas Durant, the corrupt railroad baron recently sprung from prison to reenter the race to build the Union Pacific Railroad.
The Swede got bumped off in series two’s finale, but there’s an equally tall and unsavoury dude among the ranks of railroad workers, casting a shadow to remind us of the Swede.
Ruth the church bringer is back, as are the two Irish McGinnes brothers, one of whom (Sean) is now employed as
TV3. The usual giggle suspects – Jeremy Corbett, Paul Ego, Jono & Ben – plus the All Blacks entertain for charity tonight in
at 7.30pm on Bohannon’s accountant, at the same time doubling as a spy for Durant.
There’s also a scribe in the mix, in the sharp-faced shape of Louise Ellison, a reporter for the New York Tribune, who files her missives from camp starting with the folksy: ‘‘As another sun sets on another muddy day for the folks of Hell on Wheels . . .’’ She’s a tough nut and warns Bohannon she’s neither whore nor lady, while he says she must be a bit of both to do her job. By the end of the episode she’s sporting a black eye, courtesy of the tall man, who tried to rape her, and is waxing lyrical in her reportage of chief engineer Bohannon. Will she become his next love interest? I lay odds, yes.
As the railroad lays down the track, privately owned farmland has to yield to progress, with a Mormon family refusing to sway, culminating in the hanging of a minor for killing Bohannon’s chief of police. We suspect the father did it, but rough justice, with the army watching, has to be seen to be done.
The only merry note is the sound of the choo-choo in this take-no-prisoners historical murderous romp, which, grisly though it might be, would have me catching that train tomorrow.