The best serialized storytelling is often quite a tease. It leaves you wanting more. Either it thrills you with a shocking cliffhanger or it entices you with a mysterious puzzle, but won’t show its hand quite yet. Of these two approaches, I usually prefer the latter. And that is exactly what the first episode of Boardwalk Empire’s last season delivered.
**This article will include spoilers for those who haven’t yet seen Season 5 Ep 1 of Boardwalk Empire**
Boardwalk Empire has always been plenty entertaining, while lending subtlety to what could be only prurient fascination in the dark side of a specific historical era. If that was all it was, it’d still stand a chance of being worth a watch. Despite this, the show has always had relatively linear storytelling. That is where the first episode of season 5 breaks with the rest of the series.
The seven year gap between this season and last (and the knowledge that this is the end of our story) has given the writers the freedom to play mostly a slow and subtle game. It seems that we will finally be given some real insight into what made Nucky Thompson into the man he is in 1931. Just as he is in his developmental stages in flashbacks to his boyhood (played, it seems by the same young actor who played little Don Draper), so is Atlantic City itself.
The Commodore, who we last saw run through with a large knife by his son in the penultimate episode of season 2, reappears in these flashbacks too, with a nicely subtle aping of Dabney Coleman by a less senior actor. Through the competitions of kids and repeated failure, young Nucky learns lessons about honesty and opportunity that seem to be with him in 1931 Cuba, where he is vacationing with Sally Wheet (the wonderful Patricia Arquette) and planning a jump to a legitimate booze operation once prohibition finally breathes its last. He runs into Meyer Lansky while he’s there. Does he have the same idea?
Lansky has his own history with Havana otherwise, but we’ll see what Terrence Winter and company have in mind. We find out through a casual comment between Nucky and Lansky that Arnold Rothstein has died. With an episode already jumping back and forth between Nucky’s childhood and 1931, we can only hope they got a little more of AR on film before the series wraps. Lansky’s partner in crime, Charlie “Lucky” Luciano is back in New York City, with his signature drooping right eye, acquired when he was jumped one night by policemen. Here the show wastes no time. We get to see the gangland hit on crime boss Joe Masseria, delivered with a quite a bit less romance than has been served up in other dramatizations. So this places us in April of 1931. Events will pile up soon.
Oh, and Kelly Macdonald is back as Margaret, still working in a financial office. Seeing as this is 1931 and the Great Depression is in full swing, this just has to mean a little bit of tragedy. And so it does. Margaret’s boss calls together the employees of his office and regales them with quite a lot of detail about his night at the movies, including plenty of time on this Mickey Mouse cartoon.
Animal cruelty was a specialty of early Mickey pictures.
Margaret’s boss then concludes that since Mickey sailed away on a turtle that everything would be okay. After all, it’s a great time to make money. Or to shoot yourself in the head in front of your co-workers. Either one. As far as I know, nobody cut off his ear and put it in their pocket. But we might get to see more of that later this season.
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