It’s unlikely that cast and crew had much time to think about life imitating art on that Thursday in late June when rising waters from the Bow and Highwood rivers flooded the set of the AMC western Hell on Wheels.

But not unlike the post-Civil War series, those hours when the sets flooded and cast and crew were frantically evacuated were action packed and dramatic and, at least vaguely, mirrored one of the underlying themes of the series: The perils of building in the unforgiving wilderness.

More than a month later, evidence of ruin from that day are still visible on the land near Okotoks where Season 3 of the western is still being shot. Uprooted trees lie everywhere. There’s still a thick sheet of humidity in the air. The mosquitoes still haven’t left.

“It was precarious,” says Anson Mount, who plays protagonist Cullen Bohannon on the series and was on set the day of the flood. “We had (production assistants) posted along the river with measuring sticks. We were continuing to work through the day until the local government told us we had to leave. So we hightailed it out of there. Our first (assistant director), I believe, was the last man out and he barely made it up the hill.”

The cast was sent home and the production screeched to a halt for two-and-half weeks as producers met with designers and other crew members to figure out how to put it all back together again. It wasn’t as if Seasons 1 and 2 were shot in ideal conditions. There was hail, frigid temperatures, wind, thunderstorms and lots of mud. Yet, the crews prevailed. The mobile town of Hell on Wheels sprang to life. The series came in on time and on budget and actors went home with plenty of stories about Alberta’s unruly climes.

But this was different.

Now that those nerve-racking few days after the massive flooding have passed, Calgary producer Chad Oakes of Nomadic Pictures is candid about how the damage put the season — and the entire series, for that matter — in serious jeopardy. “It was a true defining moment in my career,” says Oakes, in an interview on the set late last week. “How do we react? The credit goes to people who gave up their hiatus, worked around the clock, seven days a week, over the long weekend and having their families and kids understanding that this was so critical ... We could not fail. The repercussions of losing not only the season but the whole series was definitely sitting in our laps.”

With memories of the flood still fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s doubtful many are in the mood to point out similarities between real life and the against-all-odds theme that has chugged through the series since it began. But it’s hard not to see a certain thread linking the herculean efforts to get the show up and running again to the herculean efforts builders of the first Transcontinental Railroad faced during the latter stages of construction. In Season 3, the show’s grander themes of ambition and the cost of progress will come into sharper focus as the principals of Hell on Wheels and the Union Pacific face off with the competing Central Pacific to become the first to make it across the land.

“There’s a theme through the show of creation through destruction, destruction through creation,” says Mount, taking a break between scenes last week. “Maybe we’re on the creation upswing of this particular part of the story.”

As fans of the series know, there was plenty of destruction to go around when Season 2 came to a fiery and death-addled end last year. Hell on Wheels burned to the ground after a bloody attack by natives. Major characters were killed off, including the hapless Mr. Toole (Calgary’s Duncan Ollerenshaw). Cullen’s love interest — the lovely and ambitious Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott) — was throttled to death by the baldheaded Swede (Christopher Heyerdahl), who himself plunged headfirst off a bridge and into the river to escape Cullen’s noose.

Emancipated Slave Elam (Common) lost his pride-and-joy cabin to the fires and attempted to sort out his complex relationship with former prostitute Eva, who is carrying his child.

Meanwhile, Thomas (Doc) Durant (Colm Meaney), the corrupt head of the railway, was arrested and charged with fraud and embezzlement. As Season 3 opens, he is in prison and Bohannon has been appointed new chief engineer of the Union Pacific. All this drama, of course, says nothing of the behind-the-scenes turmoil the show was facing as Season 2 came to an end. Writers Joe and Tony Gayton announced they were leaving series they had created. Showrunner John Shiban quickly followed and AMC put Season 3 planning on hold until someone new could be found to oversee the producers and writing room.

So with all this as the backstory, it’s perhaps not surprising that the shorthand assessment of Season 3, which debuts on its new night Saturday, is that it will be giving viewers a bit of a reprieve from the show’s dark tone.

“Lighter?” says Mount, offering one of his famous scowls. “That word can be interpreted a million different ways. I guess only in the sense that Cullen is more focused on creating something rather than destroying things.”

John Wirth, who took over from Shiban as showrunner, is a little more blunt on the subject. Hell on Wheels began its journey two years ago as a revenge story. Cullen, a former Confederate soldier, joined the railroad as a way of seeking out and killing the men who murdered his wife and son. But the revenge motive was “wearing thin,” Wirth says. So there will be more humour this time around and a renewed focus on the business of building the railroad.

“I thought the show existed between earnest and grim,” Wirth says. “I thought there was a wider bandwidth for the show. I’m not funny. But I think funny sometimes and I can write funny dialogue. So we have opened it up a little bit in terms of the humour, both with Cullen and Elam and other characters.”

Of course, building the railroad is still serious business. Wirth promises gunfights and fist fights and a continuation of the grander themes the show has always offered. He even hints that a character who viewers care about will be killed off early in the season. Racism will still be a prevalent issue as the railroad picks up Chinese workers for the first time. Historical figures — including Ulysses S. Grant and Central Pacific Railroad builder Collis Huntington — will make appearances. Even the new lead actress, Jennifer Ferrin, plays a character based on a historical person. New York Tribune journalist Louise Ellison, who has been sent by her paper to chronicle the building of the railroad, is very loosely based on Nellie Bly, a real-life investigative reporter from that time period. As the season progresses, a group of black-hatted Mormons will provide the appropriate antagonism for Cullen and the Union Pacific.

“The Mormons of the 19th Century were not like the Mormons that we think of today,” says Wirth. “They had declared war on the United States government. They had bad-ass militias. They were bad people. They were violent, they were tough and they were cultists.”

A quick tour of the sets near Okotoks reveal that the show will still have its epic look. Even if production hadn’t been interrupted by a ravaging flood, the detailed sets would be nothing short of spectacular. Led by art director Bill Ives and production designer John Blackie, the production team not only built a New York City neighbourhood in a Calgary studio and two separate towns along the banks of the Bow. Hell on Wheels is as grimy as ever, a filthy mobile town littered with grave markings that seems to made primarily of dirt, mud and tents. But down the river a ways, set builders have also created an impressive-looking Cheyenne, Wyoming. An opulent hotel is at the heart of the rising town, which is where Durant will go about rebuilding his empire.

For actor Colm Meaney, the show’s renewed focus on work and empire-building will allow writers to focus on the universal themes that attracted him to Hell on Wheels in the first place.

“For me, the reason for doing the show, having read the pilot, was that I felt it connected very strongly with issues like the government and the private sector and how they co-operate and how that opens up fertile ground for corruption,” says Meaney, who plays Durant as a ruthless but often curiously relatable villain. “What kind of development do you want? There’s the treatment of the land and the environment and how we treated the native population, which is still an ongoing issue. These are all fascinating issues to me and they make for great drama. I felt we had so much fertile ground for great drama and I’m not sure we’ve covered all that. Sometimes the show turns in on itself a little bit and has a tendency to get a bit soap opera-ish. You want to tell stories that touch humanity, of course, not just an issues-based show. But I love it when we do deal with issues.”

That said, Hell on Wheels will also be a character study, chronicling the changes in Cullen Bohannon. He will face off against Durant, who desperately wants to take back his railroad. But, as with many shows on AMC with protagonists that occupy the grey zones between hero and villain, the battles will also be internal and deeply psychological.

Season 3 begins in the dead of winter, with Cullen Bohannon having come to some conclusions about himself in the snowy wilderness.

“The dirty little secret that Cullen Bohannon has always been hiding from himself is that he is ultimately just ambitious,” says Mount. “Once you accept who you are, you can begin to rebuild. But you have to accept that first. Cullen is someone who is addicted to conflict because it is his way of achieving his ambition and his ambition is very simple: It’s not money, it’s not sex, it’s not love, it’s not power. He just wants to win. He wants to win whatever is exactly in front of him.”

Season 3 of Hell on Wheels debuts Saturday on AMC.

evolmers@calgaryherald.com