‘Hell on Wheels’ season 5: Cullen Bohannon stands front and center in latest poster

The fifth and final season of AMC’s “Hell on Wheels” is coming your way starting on Saturday, July 18, and the network is finally starting to unveil some assorted information on what to expect.

Take, for example, the latest poster that features Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) front and center while standing at a railroad crossing with Chinese workers from the Central Pacific in the background. This is obviously meant to be a reminder of where the character is after heading further west at the tail end of season 4, and his journey now has him at a metaphorical crossroads. Is he doing this out of a desire to find his wife, or a thirst to continue working on the railroad, one of the only lives that he still knows and understands?

The crossroads in a certain way are also representative in the sense of how eventually, the two sides of the railroad are eventually going to connect. We would like to assume that this will happen by the time we get to the end of the series in 2016, but there is no guarantee of that. Historically, we do know where the story is going; the majority of the mystery now lies on the individual character stories, and how the likes of Cullen, Durant, and others say farewell to us as viewers.

For Cullen especially, we hope that he finds happiness; the problem standing in the way of this is that we are not quite sure he knows exactly what happiness even is. He’s been forced to deal with struggle so long that it has become his normal.