Note: This article will contain major spoilers of the above mentioned episode.
Hell on Wheels is entering its fifth and final season, even though they are spreading it out over two years, similar to what AMC has done with Breaking Bad and Mad Men over the last couple of years. There will be eight episodes in the first half and then next year there will be a final eight episodes to finish the series. I will be completely honest up front, I have mixed feelings over this show, as I feel that the show has had wonderful peaks and unfortunately extreme lows (Elam Ferguson...the show will just not be the same without him). But, I continue to watch anyway, and so I enter this final season with low expectations and high hopes.
The first episode of the final season picks up where the fourth season ended, with Cullen Bohannon taking on his new role as the surveyor for the Central Pacific Railroad (which happens to be the rival of the Union Pacific Railroad that Cullen has worked for since the beginning of the show). We are introduced to what I can only assume is the new antagonist of the show, a Chinese man by the name of Chang. Chang is in charge of the Chinese workers that the Central Pacific have hired, and the show makes no sort of cover to show that this Chang is a bad man, so far as to have multiple characters even say as such in the first few minutes. When Cullen finds out that Chang is not paying proper wages to the workers, he then goes to confront Chang and tells him that it would be in his best interest to pay his workers what they are owed, in true Cullen Bohannon fashion. This of course causes Chang to make a statement of his own to Cullen by beating the father of the boy who told Cullen about the lack of correct paid wages. And so, we have the set up for at least the first half of this season, as we will see Cullen and Chang wrestle over who has the most control when it comes to the railroad.
That is the main set up, but the show also doesn't allow us to forget about (in my opinion) the best part of this show. And that is Thor Gundersen, or better known as "The Swede." Although he has been around since the first season, I still feel that Thor has been underutilized by the show. He is an amazing and complicated character, and he always finds some way to weasel out of whatever predicament that he gets himself into. But at the same time, he always feels like he is just the secondary bad guy on the show. And in this episode, it is more of the same. We see Thor stockpiling guns in a barn, and at the end of the episode, we see him come to Cullen's house to let Cullen know that he is still there, ready to be the thorn in Cullen's side that he has always been, but we don't get to see his true intentions at all. If I have one hope for how this show comes to an end, it will end up with the second part of this season focusing on the relationship between Cullen and Thor, and we get to see one big climactic end between the two of them when they finally get to settle their differences once and for all.
This episode focused on setting up the rest of this season, and also saw Cullen continuing to look for his wife and son, only to find out that they have been exiled from all Mormon settlements, causing Cullen to have no idea where they could be. In doing this, they almost completely left out other series regulars Thomas Durant (though we do see one brief scene with him getting upset at Cullen, per the norm), Mickey McGinnes, Eva Toole, along with others. I know that the main focus is on Cullen, but these other characters are still owed their own conclusions during this final season, and so I hope that the writers give them their due as well.
Overall, I feel that the episode was solid, but all the setup for future episodes kept it from becoming something great. Other seasons have started off slow and have come crashing into solid finishes, so I will not base my feelings of the season on this episode alone. I will say that I'm optimistic, but I will need to see a few more episodes to see just where they are heading. I feel that the character of Chang has potential to be a good bad guy for at least this first half of the season, but I will need to see more of him to make a final judgment call on him as well.
My rating for the episode - 7/10
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