Billie Kent (presumably) meets her demise in an explosive episode. (Get it? I’m terrible.)
Every war has a catalyst, some catastrophic moment when the house of cards comes crumbling down. After weeks of sowing the seeds, Boardwalk Empire has finally reached that big moment – and what a grand statement it is.
What is this catalyst? Well, as the title of season three’s episode eight alludes, the impetus for destruction is…a pony.
The obvious pony is the one Margaret plans to buy for her daughter’s birthday – an entirely minor plot point. But the real pony we are talking about is Billie Kent: As we find out, she’s been “The Pony” on Boardwalk Empire throughout the third season, with episode eight presumably being her swansong.
For those who don’t know a lot about 1920’s vaudeville culture (everyone?), the “pony” is not the lead in a play, but a girl in the chorus who draws attention to herself through shenanigans.
Billie has been that kind of distraction for Nucky during season three. She is Nucky’s getaway, a distraction from Margaret, the woman he loved before (and after last week, clearly still does). Billie is perpetually playing her gangster sugar daddy’s second fiddle, no matter what she does or how bad Nucky and Margaret’s relationship gets.
During an audition for a film role – something she has never been a part of – we get an explanation of the “pony” from Billie herself, just before she surprises the movie director with her talent. Films are the future and this could be her chance to become the next big star.
Later, while celebrating her possible future, Nucky arrives unannounced at her apartment, turning a fun night of drinking with friends into a physical battle between Nucky and one of Billie’s male actor friends. It’s an incredible scene that spins wildly from comedy to tension to sexual release all in the space of a few minutes.
It’s one of Nucky and Billie’s last scene’s together (again: presumably) and it defines their push and pull relationship. We already know that Nucky is a man that has to have things the way he wants them and his descent into full-time gangsterism has only made his emotions harder to control.
Billie, on the other hand, is riding high on her victory and wants to have it all. She wants Nucky to be her one and only gangster – yes, Billie Kent wants the lead.
Tragically, this pony was never destined for center-stage – Nucky’s criminal underworld is all too real and Billie has purposefully tied herself into his dangerous web.
Ironically, it is Nucky himself who tells Billie that her film career isn’t poised to last.
All this leads to Billie’s violent death by explosion from a bomb made by Gyp Rossetti and intended for Nucky, Arnold Rothstein and Lucky Luciano, the three of whom were sidetracked just outside of Babatte’s by an old acquaintance of Nucky’s.
It’s a spectacular explosion, right on Boardwalk Empire’s main boardwalk set. Contained within the episode, the build-up to this moment transforms Billie from an annoying plot contrivance into a more tragic, relatable player.
Fantastic as the moment is, it highlights some of the show’s lingering problems, as well.
Most notably, the bombing shines a light on how far Gyp has fallen from center stage since episode five. As a viewer, I’ve lost my sense of him a true threat after his cosmic spanking at the hands of Nucky and Arnold. Even though I know he’s starting a war, he still doesn’t seem as intimidating as when he was holed up in Tabor Heights.
Just think – in the episode where Gyp murders Billie and destroys Babette’s (where many a Boardwalk Empire scene has taken place), our principle antagonist has only one small scene in which Gillian Darmody gives him the information he needs to set the bomb.
From this perspective, it sucks a bit of the drama out of the catastrophe that ends the episode. Gyp is at his best when he’s constantly about to fly off the handle – he doesn’t calculate his plans, like Arnold or Nucky, he just does what he thinks he needs to do.
Without Gyp’s presence in the build-up to the explosion, the whole experience feels very one-sided and packs a significantly lighter punch to the gut.
Furthermore, the way in which Billie’s death is constructed puts the blame the squarely in Nucky’s hands, which in turn reminds the audience that we haven’t had a mention of Nucky’s intense guilt since episode three. Now that Gillian is stirring up memories of Jimmy’s death with her fake dead Jimmy (Roger McAllister, who she murdered last week), this seems like the perfect storm for Nucky to completely fall apart. Yet, it still leaves us wondering why we haven’t had a taste of this guilt since episode three.
Instead, “The Pony” gives us a heaping spoonful of the Nucky that calculates his victories. Most of Nucky’s scenes find him conspiring with Gaston Means and Esther Randolph over bringing down Harry Daugherty and then putting said plan into action by approaching real-life Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon with a proposition to take down Daugherty.
It’s an integral part of Nucky’s character that he always has control of the reigns, even by the slimmest margin. We see the frustrations that these situations cause him play out in his big scene at Billie’s apartment, at which point he believes his plan with Andrew have failed.
Meanwhile, I’m still left wondering why the writers even bothered having an episode about Nucky’s guilt over killing Jimmy when we weren’t going to see it affecting Nucky’s performance in the subsequent episodes. All we’ve really seen is the expansion of Nucky’s ruthless side.
As has been the case with season three, however, the episode still accomplishes a hell of a lot within the boundaries of its hour-long runtime.
In fact, some of the best developments on the episode occur in Chicago, which has become a bit of a fantasy island completely detached from the main plotline about Nucky and Gyp’s war.
“The Pony” brings us back to the stories of Al Capone and Nelson Van Alden, whose lives begin to interweave yet again.
In Al’s world, Johnny Torrio returns from his times overseas and has become a bit of a zen master – he totally trusts Al now, and when Al realizes this, the smile on his face is of the purest joy.
For Nelson, his time as an upstanding, moral fugitive has come to an end as he is pulled into the criminal world by Al’s enemy Dean O’Banion and, more importantly, by his young wife.
After disposing of the man that Nelson and his wife killed a few episodes back, Dean now has Nelson working in his service, overseeing a kitchen distillery. Moreover, Dean brings Nelson into the fold as unwilling muscle during a comical meeting with Al and Johnny.
It all bubbles over in what could arguably be the greatest scene of the episode – and certainly Nelson’s greatest moment this season.
Nelson, still trying to retain his job as a steam-powered iron salesman despite being a tool of Dean O’Banion, is drawn into a scenario where he must practice his selling skills in front of the whole office. Nelson’s co-workers and tormentors start screwing with him and Nelson keeps it together as long as he can before completely losing it, burning one man’s face with the steamer and then promptly destroying and terrifying the whole office.
This scene alone proves Michael Shannon deserves award recognition – Nelson’s deranged, ticking smile at the realization of his own power is so perfectly nuanced as to be hilarious and disturbing all at once.
After two weeks of slow-simmering foundation building, Boardwalk Empire is finally firing into the homestretch. With just four episodes left, there’s no telling what kind of terror awaits our heroes (and beloved villains).
What we do know is that no one ever gets away scot-free on Boardwalk Empire, especially not during wartime.
Tidbits:
–Gillian Darmody is truly evil. And now it’s clear that she is just as much an enemy of Nucky as Gyp Rossetti – I can’t wait to see how this pans out.
–Margaret was in this episode, but it was nothing new. She bought a pony, yes, but the important thing (I guess) is that she is still having sex with Owen Sleater and now she wants a diaphragm so she have more sex with Owen (and also help some women from her clinic, apparently). I have serious doubts that any of this will play into the main plot, but we’ll see.
–Billie Kent could still be alive, although I doubt it, so we’ll add her to the list this week. As far as other casualties in the Babette’s bombing, I suspect the number may be revealed next week, so we’ll have to wait until then to make any final calls on the number dead. We may never know, suffice it to say there was a “large bombing,” so…
–This season’s body count, so far: 30
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