Gyp seems to be learning…and then he cuts off a guy’s head with a shovel. Yep.
Don’t be duped by the final 10 minutes of “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” — we get two major surprises, sure, but that’s all the episode adds up to in the end.
Despite the fact that this is the third to last episode of the season, it still feels like very little is happening, final moments aside. In fact, “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” has more in common with episode eight, “The Pony,” than with the kind of mounting grandeur I would expect from a show so close to the end of its season.
That being said, “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” is certainly not a bad hour of Boardwalk Empire. Even though the majority of the episode is just more exposition about the pieces of Nucky Thompson and Gyp Rossetti’s war falling into place, there are some really good character moments throughout, particularly with Gyp and of course between Owen Sleater and Margaret Thompson.
Let me put the worst out first: I’m getting a little tired of Nucky’s week-in, week-out changes. As I’ve discussed I this space many times, several episodes in season three have focused on an aspect of Nucky that doesn’t seem to present in the preceding or following weeks.
Remember last week when Nucky had a debilitating concussion which made for a pretty great episode focusing on the clash between his drive to solve his problems, his inability to solve those problems and his guilt over Billie Kent’s death?
Well, by episode 10 it’s as if that never happened. In fact, one of the worst moments is when the criminally underused Chalky White stops by and asks Nucky if he remembers the last time they were together, when Nucky had a concussion and was screwing stuff up.
That line alone is incredibly silly, and instead of feeling sincere it feels like a way for the writers to knowingly make up for the fact that they haven’t been entirely consistent on a week to week basis with Nucky.
As far as I can tell from the continuity, this couldn’t have been more than a few days after the events of “The Milkmaid’s Lot,” so shouldn’t Nucky still be at least a little woozy? I’m not saying that Nucky has been ill-managed as a character — on the whole he is written very consistently, and Steve Buscemi’s acting is always great.
Nucky’s mood swings, however, almost feel like a “monster of the week” from The X-Files or a macguffin from an episode of Star Trek. You never know what it’s going to be from one episode to the next, but it will fit the themes of the episode.
On “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama,” as the title might suggest, Nucky is pretty much back in full mastermind mode, plotting a course for Gyp and Joe Masseria’s destruction. He plays almost every card right, from having Eli Thompson go to Chicago to get support from Johnny Torrio to having Mickey Doyle go to Pennsylvania to start up Andrew Mellon’s distillery and effectively take over the territory of recently arrested George Remus.
Nucky’s decision to send just Owen and Agent Sawicki to kill big boss Masseria also seems like a good idea at the time. It’s just Nucky employing Owen like a surgical tool, and as we’ve seen from season two’s infamous IRA bathroom assassination, Owen is very comfortable in this kind of situation.
This time, however, Owen’s skills don’t pay off, but the character development between him and Margaret is the best aspect of the episode. I’ll be honest — it was shocking to see Owen die like that, but I don’t think “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” really gave the character quite the send-off he deserved.
Starting out as a nobody in season two, Owen quickly became one of Boardwalk Empire’s more engaging characters, likely because he wasn’t nearly as screwed up as everyone else on the show. In recent episodes, Owen has become very important to the plot as he’s fallen in love with Margaret, leading to the pair’s decision on the previous episode to run away from Nucky.
My problem with his curtain call on “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” is that the entire scenario is about how it affects Margaret, with Owen becoming more of a tool to contort the female lead’s sorrows. I would have wanted the writers to give Owen something more to do in his last episode — I don’t think giving him more screen time would have made the ending any less ironic.
That being said, how the series of events affect both Margaret and Owen is still quite interesting. Owen and Margaret have a tender moment early in the episode, the sincerity of which is called into question by a previous scene where Owen promises to speak to his lover Kelly about getting married.
It adds a nice tension to Owen and Margaret’s conversation about escaping together, one which is cut off before we see the end.
As the episode goes on, we don’t see a lot of Owen — we don’t even get to see him botch his assassination attempt on Masseria. Aside from a spare clip of Owen entering Masseria’s bathhouse, we, like Margaret, don’t see Owen again until Nucky opens a crate with the Irishman’s beaten body inside.
It’s a crucial moment, as Margaret’s tearful, violent reaction seems to show Nucky that she and Owen were more than just friends. Things only get more ironic when we finally get to see the end of Owen and Margaret’s last conversation, where we find out that Margaret is pregnant with his child, and we seem to get conformation that Owen was being sincere with her all along.
Margaret has said in the past that she has no interest in being pregnant again, and has also spent this entire season trying to bring contraceptives to housewives. Honestly, if the entire hospital plotline — which ends on this episode — existed just so that it would be ironic when Margaret got pregnant again than it really was even more of a waste of time than I thought initially.
Anyways, Owen’s death may have been unglamorous and kind of weak all around, but at least the revelation adds some meat to Margaret’s storyline.
(Side note: Actress Kelly Macdonald is pregnant in real life, so I guess we should have seen this development coming, lest she spent the entirety of season four hanging a coat in front of her midsection)
Up in Tabor Heights, we get a totally different character study in the form of Gyp. We all know Gyp is a psychopath, which is why every scene where someone talks back to him is so tense — we are just waiting for Gyp to violently kill them.
On “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama,” it seems as though Gyp may be learning, as Joe Masseria predicted last week. Throughout the episode he stops himself from killing his right hand man Tonino’s cousin several times, despite the cousin saying exactly the kind of things that would normally get him beaten to death with a lead pipe.
By the end of the episode, we witness what may well be the first sign of Gyp’s second downfall. Finally brought over the edge, Gyp has buried Tonino’s cousin in the sand up to his neck, ready to see the man drowned at high tide.
Tonino begs and begs for Gyp not to let his cousin drown, so Gyp takes a shovel more or less beheads the man. This is where things could go very wrong for Gyp — despite the massive army he’s assembled, Gyp seems to want to turn every ally against him.
The rest of the episode is nothing special. For some reason, a very large portion of “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” is devoted to showing us how Gaston Means — a character we don’t know very well — goes about assassinating Jess Smith, another character (and real historical figure) that we don’t know much about.
It’s all pretty boring, and ends with the cliché of one man shooting himself in the head instead of the other guy he already has at gunpoint.
Nelson Van Alden has a scene with Al Capone, but it’s just a blatant set-up for next week’s installment, so I’ll wait on talking about it.
Furthermore, I won’t even bother going very deep into Richard Harrow’s continuing love story, although he does have one awesome moment where Julia’s father calls him freak, so Richard takes off his mask and asks the man if he would pay to see “this” (the face hole).
All in all, “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” is a relatively boring episode at a time in the season where we need excitement. Owen dies unexpectedly and Margaret is pregnant, but really, that’s all the episode has to offer.
Tidbits:
–I just want to say again how pointless the Gaston Means scenes felt — Nucky didn’t even appear worried about that aspect of his life anymore, so why should I be worried, or even care? It’s as if the stuck that whole plotline in there just because in real life Jess Smith died in a suspicious suicide.
–Three more died this week: Owen, Tonino’s cousin, and Jess Smith, so…
–This season’s body count, so far: 33
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