By Matt Schoenman
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This week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire did not keep my attention. I’m starting to feel like nothing amazing will ever happen in this show. Every action seems like it’s counterproductive: leading towards more of nothing, rather than causing the situation to climax in every character and storyline coming together.
So what happened this week? Well, everyone wants to get their hands on the lone survivor of Jimmy and Al’s roadside massacre. Nucky and Elias want to silence him. Van Alden wants him to talk before he dies. Rothstein wants to know who took his liquor.
Van Alden certainly does make him talk: He throws him into a dentist’s chair and sticks a hand into his bulletwound. All it takes is some mild torture before the guy recalls that he heard the name “Jimmy.” Somehow, Van Alden is able to come to the conclusion that it must have been Jimmy Darmody, as if there weren’t a million Jimmy’s in the 1920’s. And then, if you can suspend your disbelief even more, every main character finds out what happened between the shooting victim and Van Alden in about two seconds. Umm…did everyone have smartphones in the Prohibition Era? I didn’t know news could travel that quickly by word-of-mouth and wired telephone.
So Nucky informs Jimmy that he has to leave Atlantic City. Jimmy, in turn, yells at his wife for posing all sexy-like in a photograph before departing by train for Chicago (YES. More Al Capone. Maybe the show WILL pick up). When Jimmy’s name gets back to Rothstein, the Jewish gangster sends Luciano (who we find out has an STD, Erectile Dysfunction, and a bad temper) to take care of the situation.
Margaret Schroeder is as boring as ever, but now with a job! She’s such a battered wife that she’s trained to not ask questions about anything. What happened to your husband? Why is Nucky so interested in you? Just keep accepting what people tell you without question…good girl. It’s ridiculous because the high point of her storyline is when we see Nucky’s hot piece-of-ass Lucy in the buff.
Then there are even more side characters with their own storylines. It seems like there’s at least two new characters each week: It’s way too much to keep up with. I don’t understand the part that the former bootlegger Doyle has to play in the story. All I know is that he owes some money to other gangsters for all the alcohol he lost in the FBI raid. And what about Chalky White? He was given Doyle’s job managing the distillery, but we don’t know much about him yet. In the end of the episode we see that one of his men is lynched, and the preview for next week shows us that it has something to do with the Klan. Race war, possibly? Could be good. But are these two men going to be major characters or just filler in between Rothstein and Capone: the two strongest characters thus far, in my opinion.
