Who does Cullen end up with in Hell on Wheels? The finale answers it without ever showing it
The Hell on Wheels series finale, "Done," aired on AMC on July 23, 2016, and closed five seasons of railroad building with a question the show had been circling all year: what does Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) do once the railroad is finished?
The answer involves a woman who isn't even in the episode.
The short answer
Mei. In the final scenes, Cullen turns down every job he's offered, rides to San Francisco, and boards a ship to China to find Mei (Angela Zhou) — the woman who left him in episode 12 to draw her pursuers away. The show ends as the ship sails. The reunion itself is never shown.
How the finale gets him there
The golden spike goes in at Promontory on May 10, 1869, and Cullen is immediately a man without a job. Two offers land in front of him:
- President Grant's commission — a military post protecting the railroad in the West. One conversation with a swaggering George Custer convinces Cullen he's not a soldier anymore.
- Collis Huntington's Southern Pacific — more railroad, based out of San Francisco. He passes on that too.
Instead, he wakes a Chinese railroad worker in the middle of the night to translate the note Mei left him. It 's not a goodbye letter — it's an address in Ningbo, China. Cullen takes the train west and trades it for a ship.
Why the show never filmed the reunion
On purpose. Showrunner John Wirth told CarterMatt in 2016 that the writers' room kicked around versions where Cullen actually arrives in China and tracks Mei down — along with versions where he dies, stays in Washington, or keeps the army job. One scrapped draft even had a boy approach Cullen on the ship, say the knife was from Chang, and dump his body in the ocean. Tong grudges apparently have a long shelf life in the writers' room too.
They landed on the open ending instead. Anson Mount explained the thinking to Yahoo TV in 2016:
"All I knew is when I was standing on the bow of that ship, I wanted to close my eyes and feel at peace," Mount said.
So is it confirmed?
As confirmed as it gets. The note, the address, the ship — the destination is Mei, stated by both the showrunner and the star in the 2016 postmortem interviews. The show just declined to spend its final minute on the doorstep scene. Whether Cullen actually found her in a country of 400 million people is a question Hell on Wheels left as homework.