Recap: 'Hell On Wheels,' Season 1, Episode 2, 'Immoral Mathematics'

"Hell on Wheels," Season 1, Episode 2, "Immoral Mathematics" continued the examination of how business was done in the post-Civil War 19th century, at least from the point of view of the producers of the show.

Spoilers surely follow.

Cullen spends most of the episode dealing with the consequences of his killer of the foreman who had helped to rape and murder his wife. This involves his incarceration by a man with the more menacing Scandinavian accent since the Viking age, a man known as "the Swede," who is in fact Norwegian. The Swede had been a bookkeeper before the war and during the war part of the quartermaster's corps. He had the bad fate to be locked away in Andersonville, the Civil War's version of Dachau. In order to survive, he learned to be evil, something which he now accomplishes very well. Besides being the head of security for Durant's railroad, he runs his own private protection racket.

Cullen escapes being hanged and takes a meeting with Durant. He suggests that Durant hire him to replace the man he killed as he is the only one who can get his railroad tracks laid in time. Durant, always appreciating a go-getting self-starter, agrees to the promotion. One does not see Steve Jobs treating a man who had whacked one of his division heads in such a manner, though.

Durant has been very busy. Using the media, he is trying to use the Indian massacre to his advantage. The idea is to create outrage and horror back East so that the Army will be sent in to clear out the Indians.

It is not that the war band that had committed the massacre is a bunch of nice guys. Turning on its head the stereotype of the gentle Native American that has inhabited the small and big screen since "Dances with Wolves," the Indians really are savages, living just for killing. Even more interesting, the one sympathetic Indian in the episode is a man who has become a Christian, in effect taking up the white man's religion. He manages to rescue the one survivor of the massacre, Lily, and more importantly the maps Durant sets such store in.