Note: There will be major spoilers for the above mentioned episodes.
So, I have gotten behind a bit on writing up my recap/reviews of Hell on Wheels, so I'm going to try to make up for it in one post here. I am not going to provide the rundown of the full episodes as I have done with the first three episodes of the season, but will just give some overview and my thoughts on the last three episodes.
In episode 4, we see the Chinese staging a strike after the white men that almost killed Chang, and did kill one of his men, are set free. Chang is not happy about this, and so he sets forth a list of demands that need to be met before the Chinese will go back to work. This causes Cullen to take matters into his own hands and withholds the Chinese trains brining in food, thinking that hunger will get them back to work. Chang instead decides to gather up a posse and take the food by force, but Cullen and Tao work out an agreement to get the men back to work by sending their dead back to their homeland to be buried, as is their tradition.
This episode fell really flat for me, as there was a lot of buildup for pretty much nothing. You thought that maybe we were going to get some big showdown at the end, but instead it came to a crashing halt before anything could happen. I'm sure this is better in the long run, as no blood was shed, but I just feel like the point could have been gotten across without such a waste of an episode. There were some other minor things going on in the episode, but on the whole, it just felt like a throw away episode to me that really didn't add anything to the overarching story.
Episode 5, however, made up for the shortcomings of episode 4. In episode 5, we see Cullen warning Chang not to deal with Thor Gundersen, because he is bad news. Chang looks to be making amends with Cullen throughout the episode, and even shows Cullen that the Swede has been hiding guns in the rice that Chang has been getting for Thor and the other Mormons. This causes a big confrontation between Cullen and Thor, and also Phineas Young, where Cullen is trying to get the Swede to tell him where the guns are hidden, but they are nowhere to be found. Cullen then realizes too late that he has been tricked by the Swede and Chang, and rushes back to town to find that Tao has been killed by a white man, and that the only witnesses are Chinese, and so the man will not be able to be tried, just like the other white men that had been set free.
This was, in my opinion, one of the best overall episodes of the whole series. The show flew by, with not a scene wasted, and we got some really nice scenes that felt like they were overdue. Cullen going after Thor, and Phineas protecting him, was a wonderful scene. And then the realization that Cullen had been played the whole time by Chang as well, it just reminded us and Cullen that he can't let his guard down no matter what. This episode really upped the intensity of the season and made some of the slower moments in earlier episodes well worth the wait to get to this.
Episode 6 fell somewhere in between the other two episodes above. Mei is attempting to take her father's body back to their homeland, and Cullen gets dragged into helping her, as he is also making his way to San Francisco to try to get a new translator, since Mei is leaving. While trying to cross the river, Cullen's coach gets capsized, and Tao's body goes floating down the river. Mei continues to search for the body, with Cullen reluctantly following behind, and when they find the body, Cullen convinces Mei that they should just bury the body there, since there is no way they can get the body to San Francisco without their coach. Mei decides to go back with Cullen and continue to be his translator, and when they get back to town, they find out that Brigham Young has found out that the Central Pacific is not going to pass through Salt Lake City, as Huntington had promised. Cullen must leave immediately to go to the meeting with both railroads, and President Grant, in Salt Lake City.
This episode was more about continuing to develop the relationship between Mei and Cullen than it was to advance the story, and I think that is good, as the relationship has taken on some sort of weird dynamics. You can't really tell if they are attracted to each other, or if Cullen just looks at Mei more like a father/daughter relationship, and so the episode tries to develop that relationship a little better. In the end, we get the setup for the last episode of the year, before we get the final 7 episodes next year which will end the series. I'm anxious to see how this half of the season ends, as I'm expecting some big things to happen to leave us all hanging until next year, but we will see just what happens. The last episode is on tomorrow night, and so I will try to get back to my recap formula for the final episode after I get a chance to watch it.
My ratings for episode 4 is 6/10, episode 5 is 9.5/10, and episode 6 is 8/10
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