While the entire series has centered on the theme of starting over and trying to evolve, while the past catching up with you, Season Four of Hell on Wheels has taken this concept to a whole new level. Several times this season, we’ve started off an episode at the beginning of the day, with most of the town still asleep. There have been beer bottles scattered around from the night before, sometimes a dead body or too. But before the town awakens, these bottles and bodies must be swept away from the public consciousness. Every day is a new beginning.
Right now, Cullen Bohannan’s narrative is about avoiding the past, and fighting forwards to a better future, but it hasn’t been so easy for him. He wants to finish the railroad and begrudgingly support his shotgun marriage, but he keeps being reminded of the horrible things he did in the war, and the fact that his disappearance at the end of last season has had consequences. However, this week brought on his biggest trial: the return of Elam Ferguson.
If anyone has a more tragic past than Cullen, it’s easily Elam. He’s a newly-freed slave, still working for his independence. His wife,, Eva gave away their child, and he was almost killed after fighting a bear, as we saw last week. Now Elam is at an all-time low, returning to Cheyenne with three female slaves in tow, and confused about who everyone is, and where exactly he is, both in terms of time and location. He’s trying to sell his slaves to people who just laugh at his actions—actions that wouldn’t have seemed all that strange a few decades earlier. And the damage done to his brain leaves him jumping back and forth through different points in his life. When Psalms tries to stop Elam, he acts as if he’s once again a slave, not allowed to go near his master’s house.