Basket of Kisses

Brother! Choose hate. The Season 1 finale of Hell on Wheels packed a wallop. Maybe it wasn’t as shocking as the “mid-season finale” of The Walking Dead but, of the nine major players listed on AMC’s cast page, four are in a very different place than I expected them to be at the beginning of [...]

How’d you pay for the extra slides? Win money in a fight or something? Let’s pause in our rush to discuss the episode and acknowledge the extraordinary visuals of this show. There isn’t a whole lot on TV, or even in theaters, as committed to showing you beautifully composed moments where sky and humanity intersect.

In which everyone kills or wants to kill everyone else and in which everyone forms alliances both bizarre and expected. As an episode, a solid “B” grade. It did right by most of its characters, it was fun and interesting to watch, but it mostly felt like it was establishing conditions for the next two [...]

New Year’s Eve: On Sat., Dec. 31 AMC will air a full-series, back-to-back The Walking Dead marathon beginning with the series Pilot, “Days Gone Bye” at 11AM | 10C and culminating with the Season 2 Midseason Finale, “Pretty Much Dead Already” at (when else?) Midnight | 11C. New Year’s Day: Sun., Jan. 1, AMC will [...]

Hell on Wheels comes back this weekend (January 1) after a short holiday break. From SalientLuna, here’s gorgeous Hell on Wheels wallpaper for the obsessed.

Cullen, talking about his wife insisting he free his slaves: Pissed me off, tell you true. This is actually my favorite line of the episode. It sketches his character beautifully, it expresses his honesty, his self-deprecation, his ease with himself even while he is, yes, tortured. And it is utterly anachronistic. Pissed off “angry, fed [...]

Episode 107, Revelations (Cullen had previously said to Elam that a slave woman had raised him when his mother died.) Cullen Bohannon: Yeah, I gave my slaves their freedom before the war started. Damn near went broke paying the wages. Elam Ferguson: I’m ‘posed to thank you for that? Cullen: No. I did it for [...]

Knocked it out of the park. Revelations was the best episode of Hell on Wheels so far. They surprised me, they deepened the characters, they shifted things around, and the pacing remains solid (I have a bee in my bonnet about pacing). There’s a level at which you watch a show like this knowing the [...]

Hell on Wheels is fun to watch. Set aside all the discussions of quality and art and history, it’s fun to watch. The direction can be playful, like the opening shot of the band rehearsing into the camera, and at its best, there’s a whirlwind quality to the progression of events. Pride, Pomp, and Circumstance [...]

Aaaaaaaaand Hell on Wheels is back in my good graces with an excellent episode. While there were some flaws, it was overall an hour of fine and thoughtful entertainment.

The title of this episode, Jemais Je Ne T’oublierai, is from the song À la Claire Fontaine and means “I will never forget you.” Our characters, this week, are all engaged in the act of memory. Cullen, as always, remembers his wife, and Lily remembers her husband. Elam remembers slavery. The Irish brothers discover, though, [...]

I’m not going to have a lot to say about this one. It was a disappointing episode, a definite step down. It was mired in characters doing inexplicable or stupid things because the plot needed them to, or because it adhered to type. Only Elam Ferguson was genuinely interesting, and even he pushed angry and [...]