TV Review: HELL ON WHEELS 1.4, “Jamais Je Ne T’oublierai”

rating: 2.5

The more Hell on Wheels continues on, the more it reveals that it is a show without a primary purpose. On the one hand, it€™s a revenge tale, on the other, it€™s a story about progress and the struggles that come with it. There€™s plenty of other themes you could argue are the main focus of the show as well €“ greed, corruption, loss, faith, genocide €“ the list goes on and on. Every character here has their ideal to push, often in the most transparent, unsubtle way possible, resulting in a show with a lot of messages and a lot of ideas but very little time to explore any of them. In more capable hands, a lot of these themes would be chock full of narrative possibility, but because the show never spends enough time with any one character before moving on to another, nothing here ever manages to go beyond the surface level. Let€™s take a second to review where we stand. Cullen Bohannon has had very little to do for two weeks in a row now. Despite being our protagonist, he€™s been behind the scenes quite a bit, and whenever we are with him, he€™s often reduced to spouting off one-liners about how the world has gone to poop and plotting against, but doing very little, about the men who killed his wife. Other characters, like Reverend Cole (Tom Noonan) and Cheyenne turned Christian Joseph Black Moon (Eddie Spears), despite being with the show since the beginning, continue to feel like they€™re in their own separate world. Cole appears every so often to force sermons on characters whenever they happen to be in the immediate area, and Joseph€™s sole purpose thus far has been to struggle with an identity crisis too vague and too unrelated to the majority of the story to hold any sort of weight. It€™s the same story with Elam and his new muse, prostitute Eva (Robin McLeavy). They function as talking heads for one dimensional conversations on race and class, talking a lot about these issues yet saying very little. All these players are linked together in the slightest of ways, often solely because they reside in the same Hell on Wheels campground. They€™ve run into each other, sure, but only for the briefest of moments and never to any sort of real, meaningful end. In fact, looking at where we stand now from a plot perspective, the show is basically still exactly where it was in its pilot episode. Movement, if there is one thing to whittle it down to, is what is damning this show the most. Each hour that rolls by has a staggering lack of it, add to this the substance missing from what the show does feature, and you€™re left with something that is so cold blooded it€™s almost maddening. I have no idea what moves could be made to fix these issues. They are issues that are the very skeleton of what makes a serialized television drama great. If Hell on Wheels felt a little dead on arrival, it€™s only, sadly, reaffirmed this as we€™ve continued on from chapter to chapter. Excluding the better-than-average €œImmoral Mathematics,€ the show seems to constantly fall into a territory that is derivative, forgettable, stagnant, and completely unfocused. And as we move toward the halfway mark of the show€™s freshman season, it feels like the only hope one could have is that, at the very least, it injects some sense of life into itself. Something, anything really, would be better than what we€™ve been given thus far.