'Boardwalk Empire' recap: The grand finale

For a lot of people, "Boardwalk Empire" had to have a dynamite finale in order to have a successful first season. I would have been more forgiving of a finale that simply moved things forward an inch or two, given how much I've enjoyed much of the season, but even I was feeling deflated by the first third of "A Return to Normalcy." There's not a lot that happens, and while everything in that first third is beautifully written and acted, it's hard not to fear that this is all going to end with a long, quiet exhale, rather than the bang the season's been leading up to. It's often realistic to end on a bit of anticlimax, honestly, but Nucky and his team had been tracking the D'Alessios for so long that the audience could be forgiven for just wanting to see a little violence. "Boardwalk Empire" has always been handsome, but it hasn't often been visceral, and "Normalcy" was the season's last, best shot at hitting the audience square in the gut.

Fortunately, "A Return to Normalcy" delivered that punch to the gut in spades, probably starting with the scene where Margaret sees the names of Nucky's dead wife and son on a gravestone while she's out for an All Saints' Day prayer service on Halloween night. The election's in a few days, and Nucky's been so busy that he and Margaret haven't had to have contact in the wake of her leaving him. Seeing those names on the grave, though, brings back to her all of her feelings for the man, which originally went well beyond the simple pleasure in the nice things he could buy her. When this show started, there was a deep, almost needful connection between the two, perhaps based on a subconscious understanding of how much each had lost. So Margaret goes to Nucky, and as he tells her the long, sad story of how he lost his wife and child, that connection seems to come back ... until she tells him that, no, she's not going to be anything other than Mrs. Schroeder to him from now on.

People take steps toward change in "A Return to Normalcy," but they don't actually change, not really. Margaret takes this stand; she needs to know just how much sin she can live with. But when she gets the rag that prophesies destitution in her cake, how close she could come to losing everything is thrown right back in her face. It's rather too cute, honestly, and a bit too easy to just have Margaret rush back to Nucky in the wake of this, but run back she does, as the episode ends. The closing montage, set to a Vaudeville performance, reveals all of the characters in moments of crisis, save Nucky and Margaret, who seem happy to be back together. They seem happy, that is, until they walk out onto the boardwalk, the sun coming up in the east, and look out over the waves. For just a moment, the briefest hints of indecision cross both of their faces, and then the camera pans up to take in the whole of the boardwalk, with all of its delights slumbering for the moment. They and the series will be back in due time.

But if "A Return to Normalcy" found its spine in the story of Margaret and Nucky coming back together, much of the rest of the episode was devoted to the election of 1920, the election that gives the episode its name (from the speech Warren G. Harding gave upon being awarded the presidency). Nucky marshals every trick up his sleeve to make sure that his Republican candidates win, which means finally closing off the business of the massacre in the woods from the pilot. He makes a deal with Rothstein to end the war; Rothstein won't serve time for fixing the World Series, and in return, he'll give Nucky $1 million and the locations of the remaining D'Alessios. The sequence where Harrow, Jimmy and Al Capone track down the D'Alessios is thrilling, intercut as it is with Nucky's speech about how the Republicans stand for law and order and are closing off the massacre the Democrats have tried to make political hay of. Drums beat ominously on the soundtrack, the D'Alessios are mowed down by gunfire, and Nucky turns it all to his advantage. It's no christening montage from "The Godfather," but as a way to close off this season's major mob plotline, it more than does the job. Nucky's on top of the world, and there's nothing that can take him down.

Or is there? The Commodore, still festering with rage at how Nucky pushed him out years ago, gathers his son to tell him that it's time to take back Atlantic City in the Commodore's name. Jimmy, understandably, is a bit disturbed by this notion, but the Commodore has one last ace up his sleeve: Eli Thompson, who's been reinstated as sheriff but still rankles over the way that his brother treated him after he was shot trying to keep the wheels of his brother's corrupt machine spinning. It's a wonderful twist, in that it's at once completely expected and completely unexpected. We suspected Eli would turn on Nucky somehow, but like this? It makes the Commodore instantly more compelling as a character (apparently, he's got a grand plan), but it also sets the stakes for season two up in grand style. The Commodore, Jimmy, and Eli against Nucky? I'm thrilled to watch that.

In fact, "A Return to Normalcy" works well as a way to close off the stories from season one but even better as a way to introduce new stories for season two. Van Alden (who has somehow managed to skate by with the lie he's constructed about how Sebso died, perhaps because he made a major bust between last episode and this one) has gotten Lucy pregnant, putting a stake through the heart of any dreams he may have had of pursuing other employment. Nucky and Rothstein have become strange bedfellows. Margaret has her doubts about what she's chosen to do. Chalky remains an enigmatic figure on the story's edges. And somewhere out there, the Commodore is plotting his revenge. This is all juicy, juicy stuff, and it makes season two that much harder to wait for.

A first season is usually all about introduction, about making sure that everybody watching the show knows the characters and world so well that subsequent seasons can tear those characters and that world apart. If "Boardwalk Empire" moved too slowly for some, it was worth it for the way the series pulled all of these stories together in grand, sweeping fashion at the end. The world and characters have been intricately, beautifully set in motion. Now, we wait to see where Terence Winter and his writers take them from here. If "A Return to Normalcy" is any indication, these characters, like the nation they're a part of, can't expect anything like normalcy any time soon.

Some other thoughts:

• --Seriously, the Van Alden stuff is getting a little predictable. I thought his killing of Sebso would force him to confront his growing insanity, but it seems it just made him even more entrenched. Fortunately, the show has thrown him together into a storyline with Lucy, which should be fascinating.
• --I hope this show releases a soundtrack. I really enjoyed the music throughout the season, and some of the original performances would be nice to have on disc too.
• --Season two wishlist: More Richard Harrow, please. He was a great character.
• --One of the things I love about the show is how it drives home the fact that political corruption is the same, no matter the era or party. There will always be people looking for dead voters to cast ballots and other ways to subvert the actual will of the people. And there will always be a substantial ground game by all sides to turn out their voters.
• --And with that, we're done for the season! I will hopefully be back later in the week with some thoughts on where we've been and where the show might be going.

--Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photo: Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) gets called out on the carpet by Nucky (Steve Buscemi). Credit: HBO

Related articles:

Michael Kenneth Williams' jump from Omar on 'The Wire' to 'Boardwalk Empire'

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: Here come the payoffs

Complete Show Tracker 'Boardwalk Empire' coverage

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: Here come the payoffs

It's taken a while (some would say too long), but "Boardwalk Empire" finally sent its characters careening off into potential devastation with this, the next-to-last episode of its first season. Stuff that's been boiling away all season long came to a head, and major secrets were revealed, both to the characters and the audience.

The list of terrific scenes and setpieces is lengthy, and although there's one major casualty with the death of a character audiences have gotten to know quite well, it's a character few would have predicted would die, much less in the manner in which he did. All in all, "Paris Green" should make anyone who worried none of this was going to add up but stuck with the show anyway feel as though they're in good hands. It's a swift-moving, fascinating episode of television, one that reveals a picture the show's been constructing all along. It's not my favorite episode of the season (I tend to prefer the more character-heavy hours such as "Home"), but it's bound to keep me buzzing right up until the finale airs.

"Paris Green" is full of moments that have been a long time coming, some since the days of the pilot. In particular, we get to see Nucky make a break with both Margaret and Eli, two issues that have been hanging over the show for weeks now. If the first half of this first season was an old-fashioned, boy-meets-girl love story about two unlikely lovers who found each other after a series of unlikely circumstances (including the boy having the girl's husband killed), the second half has been about Margaret's growing disenchantment with the situation she finds herself in. In many ways, Margaret is the true face of where the world of "Boardwalk" is headed. She's the face of a country that gradually will take power from the networks of powerful men who control the levers of society and distribute it more evenly among more people. And yet she finds herself sharing the bed of one of those powerful men, even as she's acutely aware of where his power comes from.

So she launches into an angry tirade against Nucky. He thinks it's because his friend's lady friend, Annabelle, came on to him. And, yeah, she's upset about that, but she's also upset about all of the compromises she's made to be his girlfriend and live in the lap of luxury. To be fair, both parties get in some good digs here (including Nucky taking her to task for acting upset about how she gets her nice things for a moment or two, before giving in to how nice it all feels), but ultimately Margaret raises the issue neither of them has talked about, suggesting that perhaps Nucky had her husband killed to get closer to her. It's true, but she doesn't know it. She just suspects. At the same time, Nucky doesn't deny it either, a move his brother castigates him for later. The next day, Margaret is gone, having left a few items with Richard Harrow to take to the neighbors. She wants nothing to do with Nucky any more or so it would seem.

Meanwhile, Jimmy's about to undergo a breakup of his own, though he has no idea that's the case. He's too wrapped up in taking care of his dying father, the Commodore, a man he doesn't seem exceptionally close to and with good reason. (The Commodore requested Nucky procure Jimmy's mother for him when she was but 13. Yikes.) Still, he's doing it for his mother and, possibly, for the possibility that when the Commodore dies, all of this will be Jimmy's. The Commodore even suggests as much, wondering why the city he built out of swamps into a great empire is now in the hands of Nucky and not his son and heir. Jimmy, so closed off he doesn't even seem that moved by his father's dead dog lying in a casket, just shrugs this off, but it's clear the man's words sting on some level. As it turns out, someone's poisoning the Commodore with arsenic (Paris Green variety), but a large dose hasn't been enough to kill the irascible old man, a situation that leads to any number of questions. All of this taken care of, Jimmy heads home ...

... where we know that he'll discover a goodbye letter from Angela, who's headed off to Paris with her son and her girlfriend. The arrangements have been made between Angela and Mary (the girlfriend), and all that remains is to pack a couple of bags and get ready to go to Europe. But when Angela and Tommy arrive at the photography studio to embark on their voyage, there's no one there, just the landlord sweeping out the place. Mary and her husband sneaked out the night before, possibly headed to Paris, and the devastation on Angela's face is more moving than pretty much anything else in this storyline. She heads back home with Tommy, where Jimmy is and has, presumably, read her letter. But instead of reacting in anger, he does nothing, just returning to the patterns the little family has had in the past.

Finally, there's Van Alden, who continues to try to figure out just what his partner, Sebso, did when the star witness was shot a few weeks ago. Van Alden knows something is wrong here, continually pointing out the flaws in Sebso's story, but it doesn't seem as though anyone cares about any of this or about how Sebso has those nice, new wingtip shoes. Sebso, as we learn, is on the take from Nucky, rather than some other player, and Nucky turns over the location of some bootleggers, the better for Sebso to make a bust and regain his partner's trust. Instead, the location Nucky describes is occupied by a large group of Baptists, who are in the process of full-immersion baptism. (Apparently, they're always there, too, as Van Alden and Sebso make two visits to the group.)

On the second visit, Van Alden asks if he can baptize Sebso, who's actually Jewish and doesn't seem keen on the idea but eventually goes along with it. In a long, terrifying scene (among the most horrifying in the show's run), Van Alden tries to break Sebso with a series of long dunks beneath the surface of the river, dunks that get longer and longer until Sebso drowns. Van Alden screams in righteous fury, then emerges from the river, gun held high, daring any one of the witnesses to say anything about what they've seen. In some ways, I wonder if the show has done enough to distinguish Van Alden from the many other unstable lawmen in this genre over the years, but man, the writers have done a great job of finding ways to make him seem out of his head.

If you've stuck with "Boardwalk Empire" all this way, then this is the episode that rewards you for your faith, that lets you know that this is a show that can do the big payoffs when it needs to. And, what's more, it seems like all of this is mere foreshadowing for what's coming next week (when, among other things, it seems like Harrow will strike back at the D'Alessios). It's important that a series with an epic sweep like this nails the payoffs. If it can do that, we'll forgive any number of narrative digressions. And in "Paris Green," "Boardwalk Empire" suggests that it very much knows this fact and it's more than happy to give us our dessert.

Some other thoughts:

--Rothstein continues to be confined to the edges of the storyline, and we don't see Chalky at all. Honestly,? I don't know if we'd notice how far out of the loop these characters were if they were cast with unknown actors, rather than Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael K. Williams, two actors who've distinguished themselves in other projects.

--According to Nucky, the Daughters of the American Revolution appeared from the ground like pumpkins back around the Revolutionary War. He's joking, but it's still good to know.

-- We finally get to see Harry Houdini's brother Hardeen perform his act. It's about as disappointing as you'd expect, though he spends most of his private show for Nucky and company offering up offhand remarks of great thematic importance.

--Nucky seems concerned about how much time the Republicans spend joking around in their club, compared with the Democrats, who are working hard for every vote. Relax, Nuck! I've read Wikipedia, and I know how this all turns out for Warren G. Harding and friends.

--I don't have a screener for the finale, and it seems unlikely HBO will send one out. Next week's piece, accordingly, may go up a little late.

-- Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photo: The Commodore (Dabney Coleman) is a monster of a man, but he's still Jimmy's dad. So when he gets sick, Jimmy's gotta do something, right? Credit: HBO

Related articles:

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: The long shadow of Tony Soprano

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: The song remains the same

Complete Show Tracker 'Boardwalk Empire' coverage

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: The long shadow of Tony Soprano

At my other job, one of my recent projects has been working my way back through "The Sopranos," episode by episode. I'm early into the third season now, and I'm reminded of both why I enjoyed the series so much and why it became such a television legend. At the same time, "Boardwalk Empire" is approaching the end of its first season, and while the critical opinion of the series remains high, I get the sense that there are quite a few audience members who remain unconvinced, who compare the show to its most obvious ancestor and find it? wanting. To a degree, I agree with these people. "Boardwalk Empire" is not as good as "The Sopranos" was, not yet. But that's just the thing: FEW TV shows are as good as "The Sopranos" was, and ultimately, "Boardwalk Empire" and "The Sopranos" have very different aims, even if they're both about gangsters. The story of Tony and the gang was a collection of short stories that slowly cohered to tell a story about the end of something. "Boardwalk" is more novelistic in its approach, putting a bunch of pieces on the board, then seeing how they all come into conflict. Plus, it's about the beginning of something. A better comparison point, as I've said before, is probably "Deadwood" or "The Wire." ("Boardwalk" falls short of those two series, too, but, then, almost everything on TV does, so it's not a big deal.)

On the other hand, I do think that a comparison between "Boardwalk" and "The Sopranos" is instructive in a few senses. It helps explain why a lot of people have been let down by the first season of this show, even as they've enjoyed bits and pieces of it or individual storylines and episodes, but it also helps show just what this show is trying to do and how that's different from what "The Sopranos" was trying to do. Creator Terence Winter, who worked on the earlier show, clearly learned much of what he knows from working on that series, but he also seems to be skewing away from copying the earlier series intentionally and in ways that may have hurt his narrative here and there. I still think "Boardwalk Empire" is one of the best shows on TV, but I can understand the complaints leveled against it, and looking at three major comparison points -- particularly in light of tonight's episode, where a bunch of storylines finally collided in unexpected and often thrilling ways, in very "Sopranos"-esque fashion -- might be illustrative.

1.) "The Sopranos" was legitimately like nothing else that had come before. When it arrived, it caused such a sensation among critics and the slowly growing audience it attracted because it was intelligent, thoughtful television for adults that acted as though viewers had a certain amount of intelligence. It didn't talk down to anyone, and it told its stories through visuals as often as it did through dialogue. Now, of course, the model pioneered by "The Sopranos" is everywhere on cable television. While that show could stand alone, "Boardwalk Empire" has to go up against (conservatively) "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," "Sons of Anarchy," "Terriers," and a host of other terrific programs that all have very similar mission statements. "The Sopranos" was unexpected; "Boardwalk Empire" is very much expected. Getting exactly what you wanted for Christmas is fun, yes, but getting something you didn't know you wanted is almost always more exciting, and I think it's that sense of the visceral that a lot of the show's detractors are missing.

2.) "The Sopranos" hurried its initial narrative to a close. If you think back to the show's first season, the major conflict initially seemed to be between Tony and his uncle, Junior. The two were at odds over who would take over the family in the wake of the death of its leader, and neither seemed to have a firm upper hand. It seemed almost inevitable that everything would end in bloodshed, and there were a few minor skirmishes. Had the first season played this plot out over its entire length, it would still have been one of the most influential seasons in television; it just might have been a little slower-paced. Instead, the first season brought this conflict to a close in episode four, where Tony and Junior sat down to come to a peace agreement, one that shut down conflicts. The story wasn't entirely gone -- indeed, much of the final three episodes of that season dealt with it -- but it was placed on the back burner in favor of more standalone stories like Tony taking his daughter on a college visit (one of the series' best episodes), Tony's nephew Christopher fighting depression and Tony's wife Carmela considering dallying with a friendly priest.

Compare this to "Boardwalk Empire," where much of the middle section of the season was, again, devoted to less ambitious tales. We got to see Nucky deal with his decrepit father and revisit his childhood home. We saw Margaret slowly realize the power she really had. We spent an inordinate amount of time chilling with Jimmy in Chicago, before he realized his potential as a gangster. But the major storyline of the pilot -- the conflict developing between Nucky and Arnold Rothstein, the conflict that boiled over in blood in that late-night massacre in the middle of the woods -- has also been placed on the back burner, despite receiving little to no resolution. I admire the choice to have it overhang everything that happens this season, to get little glimpses of the forces aligning against Nucky as he's doing his own thing, but it does give the entire season a bit of the sense of feeling like it's not dealing with what's really important. Tonight, finally, we begin to get the fallout, as Van Alden is kicked off his case and Chalky goes off book to take out the D'Alessios and Jimmy turns unexpectedly ruthless. But at the same time, it's been so long since some of this stuff happened that it's hard to feel the momentum underpinning the episodes. (I suspect one reason critics have been so friendly to the show -- including myself -- is because we all get to see it on DVD, which is a format generally better suited to shows of this type. It becomes easier to see the connections developing between stories.)

3.) "The Sopranos" had a gigantic cast, but it was very tightly focused. In general, everything on that show revolved around a member of the Soprano family or Christopher. It was rare to see scenes or long, drawn-out storylines that didn't involve one of those characters, and the outside characters (like the family from New York) really only entered the story as they came into contact with Tony and his crew. "Boardwalk Empire," by contrast, has a gigantic cast of characters, but it treats every single one as the lead of his or her own series. This approach is usually extremely rewarding in the end. (As an example, look at how "Mad Men" gives all of its characters their own, very important storylines that then come together in the season finale.) But it can be enormously difficult to stomach when watched one episode at a time, particularly in the first season of a show, where we're just getting to know everybody.

"Boardwalk" has been good enough to set up a clear hierarchy of characters, starting with Nucky, then going down to Jimmy and Margaret, then going along to a whole bunch of supporting characters, but it also tends to never leave anyone behind. With Jimmy gone from Chicago, there's not an immediate reason to return there, yet we still get tonight's storyline featuring Al Capone attending a bar mitzvah. Is it entertaining? Sure. Does it provide oblique commentary on the rest of the story? Absolutely. But is it an absolute necessity? Not really, and it has a tendency to ramp down the momentum, just as it's getting turned up back in Atlantic City. Similarly, Angela's dalliances with her friend Mary are heartfelt and moving, but they have a little trouble competing with Jimmy shooting one of the D'Alessios in the head (after saying the sure to become a classic line, "I wasn't going to, but you kinda talked me into it," in response to the brother asking if Jimmy's going to shoot him after mouthing off). The way things are boiling over carries such impact that checking in on everybody else, while admirable, can't help but sap some of the episode's momentum.

But what do I know? "The Emerald City" is still an absolutely terrific episode of television, complete with at least four or five scenes that should go on to become classics of their kind. What's more, it sets one of its most thrilling and tautly paced scenes not out on the mob battlefields but inside a political meeting, where Margaret talks up the new Republican candidate for mayor to the newly minted women voters of Atlantic City, then has hammered home to her that no matter who's in charge, the same people (the ones with the money) will pull the strings. It pulls all of the show's characters, in every location, back onto the playing field, and it sets them in conflict in interesting ways. (There's an early scene where Mickey Doyle tells Nucky everything he knows, and even though WE know it all already, it's still exciting to watch Nucky figure out exactly how big the problem facing him is. This is not to mention that the scene works well as a refresher course for all of us at home.) And there are plenty of scenes that offer a foreboding sense of what's to come, like Van Alden ordering a whiskey and having rough sex with Lucy. If the next two episodes contain as many payoffs and exciting moments as this one did, then it will make the whole season come together in a satisfying way and hopefully convince the naysayers they were too quick to judge. But if it doesn't, maybe Winter and his writers will look back at the ways they've strayed from a previous series' template and reconsider for Season 2.

--Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photo: Lucy Danziger (Paz de la Huerta) finds comfort in the arms of Van Alden in tonight's "Boardwalk Empire." (Credit: HBO)

Related articles:

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: The song remains the same

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: Struggling against history

Complete Show Tracker 'Boardwalk Empire' coverage

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: Struggling against history

The pieces are drawing closer and closer together on "Boardwalk Empire," and now it's to the point where a casual moment in one storyline can have a ripple effect on another way over in another storyline. Consider: Nelson Van Alden has been intercepting the checks Jimmy sends home from Chicago to Angela, that she might care for herself and the child the two share. Since Angela's not getting that money, she's grown embittered toward Jimmy, and she's looking for a new way to make a little extra cash. (Jimmy's mother suggests becoming the period's equivalent of an Avon lady.) But if she were able to make that extra cash, then she just might run off to New York to live the Bohemian life with her lover, Mary. So when Van Alden drops that sum of cash in the mail to Angela, seemingly spurred by his wife's desire to have a corrective procedure that will allow her to have a child (which Van Alden is opposed to, since he believes God will give them a child when He's good and ready), it dangles, like an idea of what Angela COULD do.

What we know is that Jimmy is coming back. We don't actually see him get on the train back to Atlantic City, but when Nucky dangles an offer that's too good to refuse in front of his nose, we know he's going to be headed back. He doesn't really fit in Chicago, best shown in a scene where he says nothing, but stands outside the Italian mobsters he's fallen in with, watching as they trade insults in Italian. He's accepted by them (particularly by his friend Al Capone), but he'll never be one of them. Much as he might hate to admit it, much as he hates the way the man ran him out of town, his place will ultimately be at the side of Nucky when the chips are down. Being in Chicago hasn't changed him so much as it has shaped things that were already present in him, making him the ruthless man Nucky will need at his side in his own mob war. So, we expect, he'll jump on the train to Atlantic City (with Richard Harrow in tow, I hope), and when he gets back, everything will explode.

Or maybe it won't. Maybe things won't get a chance to explode because Margaret will have turned on Nucky. Because here's something else that happens in this episode: Eli gets shot in the midst of a casino heist. He's there to collect the payment for Nucky (who's away in Chicago at the Republican National Convention), and he gets ambushed by the Italians who've been making so much trouble for Nucky's operation. While he's in the hospital, Nucky has to make sure that his ledger is protected, so he sends Margaret to go get it and keep it at her place. But the temptation of seeing just what it is her new boyfriend is up to ends up being too great, so she flips the pages open at episode's end to see a bunch of stuff she can't unsee. Nucky, whom she first saw at that Temperance League meeting in the pilot, is the guy who's in charge of bringing liquor into Atlantic City. And with that, all her illusions of the man she's in love with will have to disappear, and she'll be left with the question every mob girlfriend in every mob movie ever has had: Do I stay in comfort, or do I go because it's the right thing to do?

In a way, "Boardwalk Empire" is about evolution. There have been complaints against the series for being slow moving, but that may be because evolution is a slow-moving process. Dinosaurs don't become birds in a day, and a person like Nucky doesn't become a ruthless mobster in a day either. He gets pushed in that direction by circumstance, and the events since the pilot have been relentlessly making sure he heads toward that, whether he wants to or not. The pace of the show can feel glacial because the process of what the show's depicting is glacial. Nucky's still at the place where he thinks everybody can be bought, but with the shooting of his brother, he's begun to realize that some men who would depose him cannot be reasoned with. And those men are going to have to be met with equal violence and equal fire. That's where the man he sent away for being too much of a liability comes back into play, and that's why Jimmy's on his way back (we assume).

It's fun to watch a show like this begin to grandly play cards it's been holding since the very beginning, and in that regard, "Hold Me in Paradise" is a very good episode. I preferred last week's slightly, if only because I enjoy the character-driven hours just a bit more, but "Boardwalk" is at the point where it needs to begin making good on its promises of not just telling us a good series of stories about mobsters and others in their orbit but also a grand story about the foundations of organized crime in the 1920s. This plot-heavy hour begins the process of that, even as it shows us how Nucky's political skills help turn the tide at the Republican convention, that Warren Harding might garner the nomination. History now tells us that Harding was one of the most corrupt presidents in U.S. history, offering cushy government jobs to many of the people who supported him at the convention. And yet that's not really so different from what Nucky does every single day with people in Atlantic City. It's just more acceptable because the office is more acceptable. History condemns Harding as a failed president, but it condemns the basis for Nucky's character as a very evil man.

There's this sense of history and fate passing their judgment throughout "Paradise." Harding's wife is convinced that her husband will die in office because of what a fortune teller told her (again, the theme of soothsaying comes to the fore). The series keeps returning to Rothstein's preparations for the Black Sox scandal trial, even though they, at present, don't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the show. And, of course, we know where the antipathy between the Irish and Italians in both Chicago and Atlantic City is headed. In some ways, all of the characters in "Boardwalk Empire" are ignoring what's right in front of their faces, until there's simply no way to stop doing so. Margaret must have known where most of Nucky's money came from, but she chose to play dumb because it was more fun that way. Nucky must have known that there were very few ways his current game could end without bloodshed, but chose to consolidate power anyway. And Jimmy must have known he would be drawn back to Atlantic City at one point or another. Yet there's an attempt to race away from what both they and we know must happen. We know Harding will die in office; we know the bloodshed that is coming; we know who Al Capone becomes. At the same time, we watch, transfixed, because we see these people trying to escape the trap we know they're doomed to remain snared in.

Some other thoughts:

• --For a very interesting alternate take on the death of Harding, the novel "Carter Beats the Devil" (optioned to become a miniseries or series by AMC at one point) is highly recommended.
• --Jimmy's really rolling in the dough in Chicago. If he chose to stay with Al and the gang there, I wouldn't blame him.
• --Incidentally, those were the first scenes between Nucky and Jimmy since episode two or three (I think three, from reading my old reviews). It's amazing that the show would make the relationship between the two so central to the pilot, then separate them for so long.

--Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photo: It took a while, but Jimmy (Michael Pitt, left) and Nucky (Steve Buscemi) are together again. (Credit: HBO)

Related articles:

'Boardwalk Empire' recap: Iconic characters and memorable images

HBO picks up 'Eastbound & Down' and 'Bored to Death' for a third season

Complete Show Tracker 'Boardwalk Empire' coverage

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here