Boardwalk Empire Recap: Breathe, Nucky

He hands Moceri a sample and just lays it all out. $200 an ounce, straight from Chinatown. Moceri signs lifting all five fingers then flashes them three times and that’s supposed to mean something to a numbskull like Luciano. Charlie agrees with me and asks what the fuck those signs mean. Per the other guy (IMDb tells me his name is “Caiozza”) it means he wants five pounds for $15K and for Charlie to stop being a dick. But Charlie can’t figure out which sign called him a dick so he just goes slackjawed like the mouthbreather he is.

Richard’s slowly making his way back to his room, all casual and dreamy, and drops a handful of sand on the floor as he takes out his room key and remember the night before. But as his theme songplays in the background he notices that his door is open. This gets his sniper back up and he quietly opens the door to see Gillian inside, looking through his scrapbook. She puts on her patronizing voice and tells him she was worried because he didn’t come home. He tells her he lost track of time and she “kindly” says that’s what happens when you’re in love. Richard’s even more awkward than usual so Gillian tells him there’s no need to be embarrassed.

You’re not my MOM!

She’s still being soft and sweet when she tells him she envies him a little then gets all steely and mean when she tells him he has to be careful. Richard’s all “The fuck, lady?” but she tells him he has to be careful about dreaming of things he’ll never have and were never his to begin with. It will only end up hurting him. She starts to walk out of the room but stops to smell Richard and gets taken aback because he smells like the beach. With Gillian gone, Richard walks into his room to see she was looking at the “family portrait” of him, Julia and Tommy. Oh, I’m sure she’s going to take that well.

Nucky drives up to a row of beach houses in the black part of town as Eddie keeps speaking gibberish in German. Or taking advantage of his “state” to call Nucky a dummkopf. Could go either way. Nucky’s already on edge and all that German’s only making him tweakier. He leaves Eddie in the car to go in the house, but the door’s locked. Nucky pulls his gun and starts to walk around back, but all he sees is the family next door, hanging laundry and playing in the sand of their glorious beachfront because people in the 20s were stupid and didn’t understand what “prime real estate” meant.

This was the poor part of town.

Before Nucky can get two steps forward, Dunn Pernsley and his mayhem-making spidey sense come up behind Nucky with a shotgun, telling him to put his gun down. When Dunn sees it’s Nucky he “jokes” that a man could get killed doing that, and Nucky’s all “noted,” but he picks up his gun so Dunn can take him inside.