#Commodore boardwalk empire series

In a series of further nods to “The Godfather, Part II,” Nucky sets the senator up with a prostitute, and then afterward he tosses that arrangement in his face, implying he will expose the senator if heĭoesn’t play ball. “I want everything set up and ready theĭay the vote comes down,” Nucky says, “so I can be there first.” Between conga lines and drinking El Presidente cocktails, which made me very, very thirsty (The Times hasĪ recipe), he’s working on Senator Wendell Lloyd, pushing him to annul the Volstead Act. Redstone).īack in Cuba, Nucky is no longer the boy who’s too slow to catch the gold coins thrown at his head. But that sly Margaret is soon flipping through the files, searchingįor the folder for Arnold Rothstein (alias, A. Margaret is later called into the office of the big boss, who wants the key to Bennett’s filing cabinet. But midspeech, Bennett pulls out a pistol and blows hisīrains out. Bennett, gives her and all her co-workers a pep talk. In New York City, Margaret (Kelly Macdonald), whose hair has grown since last season, sports a Marcel wave and is still working for the same stockbrokerĬrooks who, this being the Depression, are about to get their comeuppance. I have no idea what they’re talking about. Some garbled questions about how telephones work.

The friend pulls a gun on Chalky and asks him Chalky and one of his prison pals high-tail it into the woods. And Chalky manages to shoot off theįace of one of the guards – the jerk that keeps calling him Stripy. JustĪs we’re getting used to Chalky’s new nickname, a fight erupts between the prisoners and the guards. He has a short gray beard, which can’t hide the actor Michael Kenneth Williams’s signature frown. “Got myself caught,” is Chalky’s only explanation of what landed him here. His new nickname is Stripy – for the prison uniform he wears. flashbacks and the Cuba scenes gives way to a depressing gray palette whenever we follow Chalky’s story. We don’t know, yet, is how that comes about. The Commodore runs his Corner Hotel on the boardwalk, and soon Nucky – one of the struggling “pier boys” - will be working for him. Nucky is too slow to catch any gold, though.īut that will soon change. The coins are being thrown by – who else? – a top-hatted Commodore (played by a younger Dabney Coleman lookalike, John Ellison Conlee). There’s a voice-over of a woman – Gretchen Mol, is that you? – reading from a children’s poem: “Be honest and true, boys!/Whatever you do, boys,/Let this be your motto through life.”

In a nod to another very talented Terence, the episode begins with a Terrence Malick-like shot from under the ocean, lithe bodies of boys diving and swimming after gold coins that are being tossed at But they do have a fictional version of a young Nucky, the well-cast, sweet, but intense The show’s creator, Terence Winter, and the episode’s writer, Howard Korder (whose first big success was the 1988 play “Boys’ Life”),ĭon’t have the luxury of actual time passing that the director of “Boyhood,” Richard Linklater, had. The dirty, violent here and now, Nucky remembers his past.Ĭall it boyhood, the Atlantic City version. We witness a machete killing (the second in the series, by my count), a severed ear, a pickaxe to the chest, a bloody-dagger Mafia initiation.īut eclipsing all that change and gore is a glowing, golden flashback – à la “The Godfather, Part II” – which takes us back to 1884, to Nucky’s origin story. And a new boss is about to take out an oldīoss, Joe Masseria (Ivo Nandi). Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) has gotten hitched, or so it seems at first. Chalky is on a chain gang, though we don’t know what for. Sally Wheet - played by Patricia Arquette (fresh off the screen from her turn in “Boyhood”) ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Recap: Casualties of WarĪ lot has transpired in the past seven years.‘Boardwalk Empire’ Finale Recap: Golden Memories.

Commodore boardwalk empire