S05.E08: Two Soldiers

[Skyfall]

Once the episode thread is made move this to that thread. The effects or whatever on the flashbacks seemed off/poorly done.

[Ottis]

What a bummer that the first 21 minutes of the new episode are a pointless chase that leaves us where we started. Edit after the ep: The whole thing was a waste. It could have started from the point where the bullet was removed. Was it supposed to make us feel sympathy for The Swede? Why would Cullen even think of shooting him in the cell, after dragging him all that way for justice? The smartest person in this episode was the soldier who wouldn't give The Swede the harmonica.

Edited June 12, 2016 by Ottis

[Ohwell]

Well, since there's no thread yet:

For once, I agreed with Naomi and she has a right to be royally pissed at Cullen.  He should have drowned the Swede.  Actually, he should have killed him loooooong ago, but that would have meant the viewers wouldn't have been tortured watching the Swede for five fucking seasons!   

Oh well, at least next week it appears that we'll get back to the regular crew. 

[TV Anonymous]

Thor Gundersen is finally dead! Praise to the Lord!

Seriously, his story arc should have stopped at the rail bridge. Now that it is the final season, I guess TPTB just wants that arc to be out of the way.

[riverheightsnancy]

Crap, I have to go back and watch the prior season. This episode felt like it should have been 2 years ago. I could not remember how or why Cullen was back with Naomi. Hated that you could see the makeup that she was wearing. 

[Dowel Jones]

Well alright, then.  Unless Gunderson has some supernatural talent for holding his breath and digging out from a casket six feet under in yet another absurd escape from the netherworld, I'm pretty sure his story is done.  Curiously though, the death warrant only mentioned two of the family members. 

That surgery sequence was more than enough.

I realize that the journey was important to the plotline, but that was about the dumbest thing Cullen could have done.  Tie Thor up and send Isaac for the doctor and the soldiers.  60 miles on a horse is a one day ride (a long day, to be sure).

[Dowel Jones]

Then again, Naomi should have killed him, but apparently five bullets through the door didn't do the trick.

[Commando Cody]

I'm glad they didn't drag the Swede's story out any longer. He should have been dead in season one. At least they got rid of him in the first episode of this season. 

The leg scene was gross, but it was better than seeing another leg getting cut off. That went way too far for me. Even after the pig scene, seeing the guys leg getting cut off was the worst thing I've seen on this show. 

Dragging the guy off to get hanged seemed a little much. Bohannan was ready to hang him himself in season one. Is this supposed to show us progress in Cullen's thought process? Thor was right though. Cullen would rather drag a guy off to get hanged than hang around with Naomi. I think a large chunk of the viewing audience finds that understandable. 

[snowwhyte]

I'm glad the Swede is finally dead but I didn't particularly enjoy this episode. I don't  think we needed to see the Swede in Andersonville. We knew it was hellish and that his past experience's drove the Swede to fixate on Cullen as a representation of that hell.

I was also annoyed by Cullen's actions. He finally finds the wife and child he's been searching for for months, he's been shot and his wife has just lost both of her parents and been hunted down by a crazy man. He can't take a few days to see a doctor and support his wife? He must ride off and take the Swede to be hanged even though there was a chance he wouldn't make it and the Swede could have gotten away again. I get that they wanted to show that Cullen had changed and was no longer willing to murder for revenge but I would have preferred if Naomi had shot the Swede to protect her son or something. It's strange but I preferred early seasons Cullen even though he was a murderer. He had a spark that made him interesting to watch. The current incarnation of Cullen, not so much.

[BusyOctober]

I've only been hanging in with this show because I feel like I need to see it to the end for some reason.  Personally I really started hate watching after they hanged Ruth.  But I **hated ** this episode.

 It felt like it was written (and performed) by a troupe of 15 year olds.. The extended fight scenes, the extended surgery scene, the extended snake killing scene, the extended hanging scene all seemed like they were excerpts from a creative writing course taught by a frustrated unpublished Stephen King fanboy at the New School.  I skipped a lot of it just to get to the end to see how they would let the Swede escape death for the eleventy hundredth time.  To my surprise, they actually killed off a character whose expiration date was up seasons ago.

Looks like next week we return to see more machinations of the would be railroad barons.  Sigh...like Cullen, I will see how long I can limp along to the end.

[snowwhyte]

I wondered what they would do for the rest of the season. I forgot that they needed to finish the railroad. 

[Ohwell]

I don't think he just stood at the door. 

[Ohwell]

For once, I agreed with Naomi and she has a right to be royally pissed at Cullen.  He should have drowned the Swede.  Actually, he should have killed him loooooong ago, but that would have meant the viewers wouldn't have been tortured watching the Swede for five fucking seasons!   

Oh well, at least next week it appears that we'll get back to the regular crew. 

[JWalker]

Now that the Swede is dead(finally) the rest seems somewhat anticlimactic namely the finishing of the railroad. He was left to linger far to long. It would appear that Cullens fate is sealed. I don't see him straying to far from his son. The fate of Mei is yet to be played out. Does she survive or does she get to suffer the same fate that others who have gotten close to Cullen have suffered?

[nodorothyparker]

I nearly forgot this was back and then I had to talk myself and my husband into it, mostly for no other reason than we've stuck it out this long and should really see how it ends.  That's really not much of an endorsement, I know.

I have no idea who Cullen Bohannon is anymore and I don't get the sense that the writers really do either.  WTH was that, dragging a man 60 miles across some fairly inhospitable terrain when you're hurt so badly you can barely hold yourself upright?  If he dozed off, if the Swede managed yet another of his improbable escapes, if anything at all went wrong, there's no way he didn't know that the first thing the Swede would do is kill him and then turn around to go back and kill Naomi and the baby.  And at that point, there would be no contorting the facts around to where it wasn't his own damn fault.  For maybe the only time ever, I was in agreement with snitty Mormon wife in that he should have just either shot or drowned the Swede and been done with it.  I think there was supposed to be some idea in there about justice vs. vengeance, but I'll admit I zoned out sometime around the Wile E. Coyote-Roadrunner fight scene on the trail.

I'm honestly surprised they dispensed with this in the first episode instead of dragging it out until the finale, which I once would have bet would have been them killing each other in a nihilist blaze of glory.  As it is, Cullen will probably still have to go back at least once or twice a year and dig him up just to make sure he's still dead. Maybe now they might actually think about finishing the railroad that was supposed to be the main premise of the show in the first place if we can even remember who any of those characters are.

Edited June 12, 2016 by nodorothyparker

[Swiss]

 I have watched this show since the first episode.  After the mess of last season, swore I wasn't going to watch these last few episodes.  Ended up watching last nite and I am mad at myself for doing so.  What a boring show HOW has become.  That whole thing of Cullen taking the Swede back to hang was ridiculous, almost comical. I actually laughed when Cullen was hopping around, grunting and groaning for most of the episode.   Hopefully next week, Naomi will kick Cullen's you know what to the curb.   She should have shot both Cullen and the Swede.

Edited June 12, 2016 by Swiss
wrong message

[Ohwell]

1 hour ago, nodorothyparker said:

I think there was supposed to be some idea in there about justice vs. vengeance, but I'll admit I zoned out sometime around the Wile E. Coyote-Roadrunner fight scene on the trail.

Hilarious, because that's exactly what it looked like--Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadrunner.  The only thing missing was an Acme anvil to fall on Cullen's damn leg. 

What happened to the Cullen I used to know?  He's so stupid now that I'm ready to say screw him and I'm looking forward to seeing Durant and Mickey and the rest of the railroad crowd.  I'd jump for joy if I saw Psalms again.

[Ohwell]

From the Yahoo website about the episode:

https://www.yahoo.com/tv/hell-on-wheels-postmortem-anson-mount-talks-the-021512917.html

This particular passage is supposed to explain why Cullen didn't kill the Swede.  I'm not buying it, dammit.

"Over the course of the episode, Cullen could have drowned the Swede, let a snake bite him, or shot him. But he didn’t. “When I first read it, it hadn’t really sunk in what the writers were doing. My first response to [showrunner] John Wirth was to say, ‘You know you are denying the audience what they’ve been hoping for, for five years, which is Cullen putting a bullet in that Swede’s head.’ And he said, ‘Exactly.’ And then I read it again, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ The path that Cullen has been on, one of healing and maturing, it just would have set him back to square one. So the challenge for Cullen to not kill The Swede, to get him to that fort, it was both internally and externally a fantastic arc to play in just that one episode.”

[Swiss]

Not buying that lame excuse for why Cullen didn't kill the Swede himself.   I figured they were running out of money to shoot the show as well...resulting in the long scene back to town. Heck..all they needed was Cullen,Swede, two horses, and one cameraman. 

[JWalker]

I think it goes back to the start of season 3 when they started "reinventing" Cullen and put him on the road to"redemption".

[Ohwell]

Yeah but "redemption" doesn't have to mean "stupid" as well.

Oh well, at least the young soldier at the fort wasn't stupid when he was watching the Swede in the jail cell.  I was so afraid he was going to walk over to the Swede and get gutted or something.   I loved it when he just walked away and the Swede's face broke.

[NorthstarATL]

Was making me suffer through the Swede's death supposed to make me somehow sympathize with him, because it did not work. When the guy said "he's dead" I still wanted a second opinion. Have hated the character for several seasons, and outliving far more interesting and engaging characters did nothing to endear him to me. I did think it was amusing that even with the two zombie shows on hiatus, AMC managed a scene of someone gnawing on an arm.

[nodorothyparker]

I'll say the same thing I sometimes say about The Walking Dead and its aftershow.  If you have to have the showrunners or actors or whoever come out and tell me why a scene that I don't think worked actually did or you have to spell out a character's motivation, that's a fail.  No, I don't need everything spoonfed to me as a viewer, but when I'm sitting there for the better part of an hour asking WTH are you doing and why am I watching this, telling me how great it is doesn't actually make it so.

The thing is I'm one who actually did think the two actors have great chemistry before they ran the Swede into the ground.  I did really love the first couple of seasons and thought there were great individual episodes well into seasons 3 and 4.  Even now, I'm still rooting for the show to end strong.  Don't make it so hard for me, show.

[lidarose9]

I guess you can see how much of a hurry I was in to watch this episode. NOT. Within 10 minutes, I was fast-forwarding. It was just torture porn.

I feel like it was the showrunners' way of saying FU to the fans who complained they'd left the Swede alive far beyond his Sell By date.

[juniemoon]

On 6/12/2016 at 3:19 PM, JWalker said:

I think it goes back to the start of season 3 when they started "reinventing" Cullen and put him on the road to"redemption".

Yes, and I haven't enjoyed the show since. Like others, I just felt I needed to see the show to its end. Why must "redemption" mean "lose your edge, marry a God-fearing woman, change diapers, eat your vegetables and fart quietly"? This is a Western, for god's sake, with the central character initially wanting "frontier justice" for his murdered wife and child. Not an After School Special with old-timey costumes. Cullen should have been allowed to shoot, strangle, stab, poison AND drag the Swede 100 miles behind his horse after all the horror between them, and we would have felt every minute was justified and cheered. Instead we get an anticlimactic, garden-variety hanging -- with lots of writhing and bodily emissions to satisfy the adolescent boys they apparently think watch this show -- and zero sense of payoff. I feel sorry for Anson Mount, who apparently questioned the writing and then had to explain it to fans.

There are many ways for Cullen Bohannon, even watered-down Cullen Bohannon, to defeat his demons, and they don't require his retreating to a little house on the prairie. Too bad this team of writers doesn't have the maturity or creativity to deliver them.

[Duke2801]

On ‎6‎/‎12‎/‎2016 at 1:58 AM, Dowel Jones said:

Well alright, then.  Unless Gunderson has some supernatural talent for holding his breath and digging out from a casket six feet under in yet another absurd escape from the netherworld, I'm pretty sure his story is done.  Curiously though, the death warrant only mentioned two of the family members. 

That surgery sequence was more than enough.

I realize that the journey was important to the plotline, but that was about the dumbest thing Cullen could have done.  Tie Thor up and send Isaac for the doctor and the soldiers.  60 miles on a horse is a one day ride (a long day, to be sure).

Yeah I wondered the same thing.  I guess it was because they (Naomi's parents) were the only 2 deaths that they had "proof" of the Swede killing?

On ‎6‎/‎12‎/‎2016 at 1:31 PM, nodorothyparker said:

I nearly forgot this was back and then I had to talk myself and my husband into it, mostly for no other reason than we've stuck it out this long and should really see how it ends.  That's really not much of an endorsement, I know.

I have no idea who Cullen Bohannon is anymore and I don't get the sense that the writers really do either.  WTH was that, dragging a man 60 miles across some fairly inhospitable terrain when you're hurt so badly you can barely hold yourself upright?  If he dozed off, if the Swede managed yet another of his improbable escapes, if anything at all went wrong, there's no way he didn't know that the first thing the Swede would do is kill him and then turn around to go back and kill Naomi and the baby.  And at that point, there would be no contorting the facts around to where it wasn't his own damn fault.  For maybe the only time ever, I was in agreement with snitty Mormon wife in that he should have just either shot or drowned the Swede and been done with it.  I think there was supposed to be some idea in there about justice vs. vengeance, but I'll admit I zoned out sometime around the Wile E. Coyote-Roadrunner fight scene on the trail.

I'm honestly surprised they dispensed with this in the first episode instead of dragging it out until the finale, which I once would have bet would have been them killing each other in a nihilist blaze of glory.  As it is, Cullen will probably still have to go back at least once or twice a year and dig him up just to make sure he's still dead. Maybe now they might actually think about finishing the railroad that was supposed to be the main premise of the show in the first place if we can even remember who any of those characters are.

I've actually felt this way since season 4.  If Mr. Duke wasn't a fan, I am pretty sure I may have just skipped season 5 altogether.  Maybe watched the finale.  I used to love and adore me some Cullen, but now he's mostly just .... there.  It's too bad because he really was a compelling character-and this used to be must-see TV for me during seasons 1 and 2!