MiniCap: Boardwalk Empire

Wow. Didn’t see that coming, even though it was pretty much in last week’s preview. But first, let’s see where everyone stands.

Nucky still believes he can make his problems disappear by throwing money at them because he’s never come up against an ambitious, educated woman who can make more of a name for herself by persecuting prosecuting the Thompsons than by taking their money. Sadly, Nucky didn’t read Donald Rumsfeld book about known unknowns because he’d have spent more time building a defense and less time scoring free booze from Ireland if he had.

Meanwhile, showing that he, too, didn’t fall far from the Thompson tree, Eli believes that all he has to do to make his problems disappear is just beat the shit out of them. It’s an even less successful approach than bribery.

Van Alden gets some expected bad news from Rose and gives vague and unsubstantiated information to Esther Randolph which doesn’t hold water for Lathrop but is enough for Randolph  to arrest Eli in the hopes of setting a bigger trap for Nucky which will probably work because, again, he’s Eli.

Margaret’s spiraling out of control with guilt over Emily’s illness, going the full Catholic and believing that Emily is paying for Margaret’s sins. She tries to atone for them by giving the church the ill-gotten money and jewelry hoping that God will look down on her favorably, never quite understanding that a lot of really bad things happen for no good reason.

And Jimmy has it all crashing around him. Charlie and Meyer want him to get into heroin once they sell off George Remus’s booze but they can’t sell it in Atlantic City because Nucky undersold them. So Capone, Luciano and Lansky agree to take some and sell it in “their towns” which still leaves Jimmy SOL since AC is his town, and Jimmy can’t quite go to Manny with the booze or the money because of the botched murder attempt so he sends Mickey in his place which goes over even worse.

Jimmy tries to negotiate terms to end the strike after “Billy clubs” and “throw the strikers off a pier” were nixed as options, but gets rebuffed when Chalky decides that “negotiations” means “my way or the highway,” and just when it looks like it can’t possibly get any worse for the Darmody family, it does. It gets sadly and horribly worse.

Full recap will be up in a few days. Until then, you can catch up on last week’s recap here.

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