The primitive-looking man dressed in animal skins sits alone inside a broken-down cabin that’s covered in snow. The icy winds blow without mercy through the cracks between the boards as he slips into hypothermia and starvation.
Is he lost in the Land of Always Winter from “Game of Thrones”?
No, it’s the Old West and it’s just a typical day in season three for Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount), the anti-hero of “Hell on Wheels.”
In fact, freezing to death is nothing for a man who’s been shot at, beaten, starved, scorched and left nearly insane from finding his son dead and his wife hanging from his old home after the Civil War.
When the season opens, Bohannan knows he’s freezing to death, yet gets up the energy to run outside and throw his freezing butt into the snow to stay awake. Then he gets into a wolf fight.
He’s filthy, presumably frost- and wolf-bitten, alone and covered in smelly animals skins — and damn! if he isn’t still the best-looking man in the world.
Anyway, even though we all thought the former Confederate soldier would never stop seeking revenge for the murder of his family, he apparently has done just that.
Extreme cold did for him what other extremes never could — turned him into a corporate climber while he’s overseeing the building of the transatlantic railroad. Anyway, after recovering from the wolf fight, Bohannan knows he’s gotta get out of there or die, so he figures out how to get an abandoned locomotive running.
He then drives himself into Omaha, where he finds Elam (Common), whose wife with the tattooed chin, ex-prostitute Eva (Robin McLeavy), is almost ready to give birth. Like a modern-day Laurie Silverman (see Cowell, Simon), Eva’s married to one guy but may be carrying the baby of another.
Bohannan bursts into their home and tells Elam to get his stuff together because they are going to Union Pacific headquarters in NYC to convince them to make Bohannan the railroad’s chief engineer. With Thomas “Doc” Durant in jail, Bohannan finds the railroad’s owners, makes his case and takes time out to have a fistfight with Elam.
Those characters who weren’t killed off last season are back, and there are some new folks — including Louise Ellison (Jennifer Ferrin), a NYC reporter who is (so far) an unnecessary tough-dame-reporter caricature.
What this well-written series does not need is a character whose only job seems to be moving the story along with expository dialogue in the guise of interviews. At least that’s what this real-life NYC reporter thinks.