MiniCap: Boardwalk Empire

Ooh, symbolism

Unto every premium cable series comes that mid-season bridge episode that shuffles along all the various storylines and focuses them on their resolutions. Tonight’s the night for Boardwalk Empire. Rather than follow the timeline, I’ll just bullet point the highlights.

• Nucky’s just not seeing all the anvils around him because he’s too busy coming up with schemes to make more money, this time selling the radio rights to the Dempsey/Carpentier fight to broadcast LIVE! He has a new prosecutor, Esther Randolph, who is straitlaced, tries to bribe Nelson into spying on the prosecutor which does not go the way he plans, and grossly underestimates just how much Eli hates him and what Jimmy will do to gain power.

• Margaret’s traveled to Brooklyn to get reacquainted with the siblings she left behind twelve years ago. The younger the sibling the more excited to see her, so, obvs, her older brother Eamon couldn’t care less if he ever sees Margaret again. Neither is happy to see the other, but Margaret does bond with Eilish, the baby sister she never met. Then she does the one thing that is guaranteed to make her brother happy to see her again: flaunt her wealth and try to buy Eilish’s affection by giving her a book about a girl her horse and a dog. Hmm. I hope she read that first.

The trip is pretty much a disaster so when Margaret gets home and sees that Owen’s the only person there, she sasses and shit-talks him, then tells him to bring her suitcase upstairs so he can “be of service to her” and it’s only slightly less dreary than with Nucky.

• Lucy’s slowly getting back to her old tricks of shrieking and honking demands of the man in her life. Unfortunately for her, that man is Nelson. She demands to know when he’ll be taking the as-of-yet unnamed baby girl back to Rose and when she’ll get paid the $3000 he owes her. He’s like, “Umm, I don’t know where Rose is and won’t have your money, ever, but look at the lovely Victrola I bought you!’ This does not go over well with Lucy, so she heads over to Nucky to tell him that Nelson’s the baby daddy. This is not the good news for Nucky that he thinks it is.

• Speaking of Nelson, he’s downstream on a river of shit. After his near confession last week, and Rose taking a chunk out of his wrist, he’s dealing with three rather demanding women.  Rose won’t speak with him and left their home to visit an aunt, leaving no contact information.  Lucy’s over her pregnancy softness and is just looking for her money so she can get back to Atlantic City and Esther Randolph, the new prosecutor for Nucky’s election fraud, case takes his desk forcing him to work on the smaller sorting desk with Sawicki, and Lucy left a dirty diaper spinning on the Victrola because she’s petty like that. The only bright spot for Nelson is Baby Van Alden, who seems to like the name Abigail.  Nucky offers/blackmails him a way out but Nelson’s conversion last week seems real, which does not bode well for Nucky.

• Jimmy convenes the first meeting of the Young’Uns Gang and learns how uneasily lies the head that wears the crown when everyone has demands but wants him to make decisions they can shoot down. Then Eli suggests something truly awful and Jimmy gets backed into agreeing to it. When he tries to get advice from Gillian, she’s still acting like Lady MacGillian and tells him not to show any weakness. Then she goes out to bone Luciano.

• And Owen shows that he might be the most cunning and brutal person on this show.

This episode was kind of that necessary evil episode where things needed to progress so there wasn’t much flow to the scenes, but there was some forward progress and some meat to the stories but after the last couple of weeks, even with the big final scenes, it seemed slow and unfocused.

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