Thinking about how Hickey is framed as an outsider to his very core, in every facet of the show. This is very important to me. It might not always be superficially visible, but is narratively enforced with every decision the showrunners made and its delightful:
Obviously, he, EC, is an impostor to the navy and the ship, from the moment he steps on deck. He has a secret he bears that will forever keep him apart from the men.
He's a homosexual man in victorian england - and despite himself being on good terms with it, knows that he stands outside the community of society ar large, a feeling amplified when the man he sleeps with, the one he thought he had a commonality with, rats on him to save his own hide.
In the Carnivale, he is the only man outside the tent. He doesn't see Dr. Stanley set himself and everything around him on fire, he doesn't share that experiece, and when he helps the men from the outside, he still ends up killing someone.
His clothes were designed by the brilliant costume department to be ill-fitting, pants too long, shirt sleeves too short, which is highlighted by his stature - nothing that one could consider abnormal, but very much falls out of norm when compared with his compatriots.
He is, for most of the walk-out, the only man left almost completely untouched by disease, starvation or pain, physically. His skin is smooth and unmarred, he looks fit, and his body is described like the most powerful in camp - a very apparant stranger to his fellow sickly sailors, almost otherworldy, so.
When, in the climax, he reveals that secret about his true identity to the men he has tried to integrate himself with, he is attempting to join with another power - namely the Tuunbaq - which bites him in half in response.
Hickey can represent so much, britishness, colonialism, the monstrosity of man, take your pick... but he is also just a character emotionally alone and outside of the group, by design of his being. I believe he appropriates things, be it clothes, identities, knives or cultural practises, in an ill-fated attempt to be a part of something he doesn't feel that he is. (And sometimes he isn't. Sometimes he could have been.)
