No one has ever been so glad to see Al Capone.
I’ll be honest and admit that up until “Two Imposters” — episode 11 of Boardwalk Empire’s third season — the show’s glacial pace was starting to lose me.
Many other viewers have probably noticed this, but following episode five, “You’d Be Surprised,” in which an assassination attempt is made on gangster Gyp Rossetti’s life, Boardwalk Empire entered some kind of stasis, in which every plot point played out as if it were a snail meandering to and fro.
For a few weeks, I wasn’t sure if we’d ever actually see Nucky Thompson begin his gang war with Gyp.
This isn’t to say that the show has been bad, however. The individual episodes of Boardwalk Empire have all been pretty good, exploring many themes while pushing the overarching narrative little by little towards its critical mass.
With “Two Imposters,” we finally get the penultimate moments of this titanic clash, but watching Boardwalk Empire suddenly recapture the frantic plot movements that made the previous season such a blast only makes me wish that the last few episodes had been infused with such a sense of immediacy.
As is to be expected, the episode focuses primarily on Nucky’s last-ditch efforts to thwart Gyp. At this point, Nucky has pretty much lost everything — as we find out at the outset of “Two Imposters,” Nucky has figured out that Margaret was in love with Owen, and she and the children have left.
All Nucky has remaining is his own will to survive, his trusty German manservant Eddie and the hope that he can still rely on his brother Eli Thompson and on his longtime friend Chalky White.
Once again, the writers do an excellent job of exploring this aspect of Nucky within the confines of the episode, even if it doesn’t relate very well to the season as a whole.
Nucky’s lust for survival is the most consistent piece of personality analyzed here, and as we see in the opening moments, Nucky has no reservations murdering three of Gyp’s invaders.
(Side note: “Two Imposters” is packed with great cinematography, especially in the first 15 minutes.)
Staying alive but losing his office to Gyp, Nucky soon finds himself on the run in his own town, trying to find a safe haven to regroup and get some help for Eddie, who has been wounded.
All throughout the series we’ve seen Nucky treat Eddie like a fool, which is why it’s so interesting to see the gangster’s reaction to his manservant being on the verge of death. While this type of plot development is relatively clichéd, it’s not played as either overly sentimental or cold-hearted, which makes for an interesting dynamic.
Nucky finds himself in a similar situation when he seeks asylum with Chalky White in the heart of the Atlantic City black community. Whereas Nucky must now survive without leaning on Eddie for support, he must consequently reach out to Chalky, a man who he usually considers his subordinate, for aid.
The best moment of the episode occurs in the long scene when Chalky brings his daughter’s medical student boyfriend to save Eddie. Just as the painful surgery begins in Chalky’s kitchen, Gyp arrives outside the house and offers $25,000 dollars to any man who gives up Nucky, while also extending the olive branch to Chalky.
It’s an incredibly tense scene, and Chalky’s decision to play things cool and side with Nucky shows us just who Nucky’s true friends are. There’s even a scene where the two characters discuss the bittersweet nature of their friendship in the face of their own mortality.
It’s all very dramatic and entertaining, but for my money, Boardwalk Empire has not actually earned this relationship between Nucky and Chalky over the course of season three. The way “Two Imposters” plays out, you might believe that Nucky and Chalky are two “heroes” set against the world, about to do battle.
Well, this is certainly true on the surface level, but really, how many times have we seen Chalky this season? He’s been on four episodes total: in one episode he starred in his own vignette and in three others he had a single scene with a few lines.
Given the series as a whole, I absolutely understand Nucky and Chalky’s relationship, but within this season the dichotomy between these men has not evolved at all. The pair’s quiet moment eating donuts and coffee while preparing for the end is structured as though it is some kind of turning point in their relationship, and yet, it feels more like a solidification of something the viewers never questioned.
Chalky’s desire to open a club in place of Babette’s and Nucky’s denial of that dream was supposed to add some sense of incongruity between the characters, but with everything going on, Chalky asking for the club on last week’s episode came off more as an ill-timed annoyance than a problem in his relationship with Nucky.
In that way, there was little evolution in the scene where the pair is sharing snack or in the scene just prior when it seems as though Chalky might sell Nucky out to a few of Gyp’s men guarding the boarders of the city. The scenes are all well crafted and do come with their own sense of danger (it was great to see Nucky, Chalky and Dunn Purnsley take out some gangsters) but they come off more as necessary story beats than well-executed character progressions.
The episode ends on a great cliffhanger, as Eli returns from Chicago with Al Capone and a small army of murderers, ready to discuss which people need to die. If Boardwalk Empire was simply a gangster serial, this moment would have felt exactly as badass as it was intended, but because the show has always stretched to be more than that, the scene suffers (slightly) from the same kind of problem that Nucky’s relation with Chalky has suffered.
All this being said, Gyp’s manhunt and the 11th hour arrival of Al’s cavalry still makes for seriously great television. I have to reiterate — if there had even been a few scenes in the last few episodes with the same giddy excitement found during “Two Imposters” then the season-long climb to next week’s finale could have been that much sweeter.
I usually talk about the disconnect in Nucky’s actions from one week to the next, but Gyp follows a similar pattern this week as well. After episode nine, when Gyp had marshaled his forces in Tabor Heights, he seemed more or less prepared to take down Nucky right then and there.
In fact, Gyp’s subplot last week about loyalty with his men — which ended with him killing a minion’s cousin — completely broke the flow of the tides of war set forth in episode nine but not acted upon until episode 11.
The war is going to happen anyways, so why would Gyp wait to descend on Atlantic City until after Nucky had tried to assassinate Joe Masseria? The only real reason is that the writers need to pad out 12 episodes and not 11, so Owen Sleater was given an entire program simply to die.
Gyp’s handling in the last few weeks has been getting better, but his character simply hasn’t been as interesting as he was in the first half of the season.
Consistency issues aside, “Two Imposters” still has a lot of great little moments that seem to finally be giving us a reason for many characters’ seemingly unrelated actions.
The best example of this is in Richard Harrow, whose foray into the hazards of love has lent Boardwalk Empire some of its least enticing moments in the last few weeks. On “Two Imposters,” Richard returns from his night carousing on the beach to find Gillian Darmody snooping through his things, specifically his photos.
One of these photos is the one that Richard, Julia and Tommy all took on the boardwalk together. Gillian tells Richard that he’ll likely be disappointed with life. It’s classic, icy-bitch Gillian, and she only gets angrier when Gyp decides her whore house should be his base of operations.
Gillian orders Tommy to his room and Richard attempts to take the boy to Julia’s house, away from the gangsters and debauchery. In response to his noble actions, Gillian has Richard forcibly removed, leading Richard to plan a bloody escape for Tommy.
We see the ex-army sniper unpacking all his guns, ready to bust back into the whore mansion and kill anyone in his path in order to save the boy.
Aside from once again pointing out Richard’s obvious social deficits, this simple twist of fate has finally tied Richard’s story back into the main plot — even as Nucky prepares for war, Richard has his own plans for Gyp’s men.
Suffice it to say, the season finale of Boardwalk Empire promises to be a complete bloodbath. “Two Imposters” is the kind of episode that I only wish the show had been able to pump out regularly over the second half of its season.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about the violence and death on this episode — although that’s good too — but the plotting and action don’t seem nearly as disjointed as before, and every moment of the episode propelled the story forward.
Finally, we’ve gotten back around to the Boardwalk Empire gold standard. With any luck, the season finale will be even better.
Tidbits:
–The episode’s title is a bit of mystery to me – obviously it’s a direct reference to the cops who Lucky Luciano sells his heroin to, but that wasn’t really a central plot point to the episode. Usually, titles such as this have a double meaning, but I couldn’t figure out who the other imposters were, even in a metaphorical sense.
–Where’s Nelson Van Alden? WHERE????
–Ok, so six people die in the opening scene — three of Nucky’s and three of Gyp’s men. Later, three more of Gyp’s men die. So all told, that’s nine fresh bodies, which means…
–This season’s body count, so far: 42
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