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Boardwalk Empire Season 4 finale recap: ‘Farewell Daddy Blues’

Give it to Terrence Winter. Even when he takes a season of Boardwalk Empire to help us truly loathe some of his characters and have us yearning for them to get theirs, he reminds us that even the violence we now expect to solve our TV problems is far from a neat clean thing. Agent Tolliver (Brian Geraghty) found that out in brutal fashion at the hands of inferiority-complex-addled Bureau of Investigation informer Eli Thompson (Shea Whigham) on last night’s Season 4 finale. Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams) came face-to-face with the cold reality of the collateral damage of such […]

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Boardwalk Empire recap Season 4, Episode 11: ‘Havre De Grace’

Earlier this season, we explored inescapable theme in HBO’s epic period series Boardwalk Empire that everything, above board or below, appears to be a grift. In 1920s America, it was the national ethos, but it presents the thorny problem, Who do you trust when you an trust no one? For AC boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and his African-American lieutenant Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams), this has become a particularly pressing question. For Chalky, his bullish attempt to dispatch erudite, malevolent nemesis Dr. Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright), saw the tables turned as Narcisse lined up with New York mafia boss Joe […]

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Boardwalk Empire recap Season 4 episode 10 ‘White Horse Pike’

Nothing uglies up the broad tapestry of American history quite like our human rights record as pertains to ethnic minorities, even if the viler machinations of institutional racism remain dark little secrets. For a series that does naught to bleach the gross inequities of American commerce, politics and graft-riddled excesses of the 1920s, Boardwalk Empire just ventured even deeper into this still-more-draconian aspect of American realpolitik. It did so with a hinted reveal, that Chalky White’s (Michael Kenneth Williams) season-long nemesis Dr. Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright) may be more than just a bullying thug, but even worse because he undertakes his […]

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Commentary

Boardwalk Empire recap Season 4 Episode 9: ‘Marriage and Hunting’

Van Alden (Michael Shannon) began Terence Winter’s epic HBO series Boardwalk Empire as the anti-anti-hero, a stoic, pure-of-heart crusader who didn’t even entertain sexual thoughts in context of his joyless marriage. He was the intrepid T-man out to bring down the illicit empire of Atlantic City kingpin Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), the lily-white cop archetype and then some, up to the point of the fire-eyed evangelical fury in which he strangled his unbeliever (Jewish) partner – and in Shannon’s deft hands he was a seriously scary heel. Credit Winter that he has taken his time to craft Van Alden’s arduous, […]

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Boardwalk Empire Season 4 Episode 8 recap: ‘The Old Ship of Zion’

Dunn Purnsley (Erik LaRay Harvey) came to Atlantic City seeking whatever main chance the city’s rough underworld might afford him. It initially ran him afoul of the boss of the city’s African-American ward, Chalky White (Michael K. Williams). Chalky, like all men of dubious trade, saw value in Dunn’s skills and the zeal with which he employed them, but the cloud looming over all seekers of the main chance, as Chalky finally discovered on last night’s Boardwalk Empire, is that they are by nature narcissists and serving themselves will trump all commitment to anything greater, which means their course of […]

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Commentary

Boardwalk Empire Season 4 episode 7 recap: ‘William Wilson’

Running underneath the surface of Terence Winter’s sprawling HBO series Boardwalk Empire for three and a half seasons has been a distinctly Marxian, heretical and all-too-true appraisal of 1920s America, boiling down to this: everything is a grift. It’s not just booze and its absurd illegality, nor the politics fueled by racketeers’ receipts, nor the graft that stretches all the way to the presidency – even the “proper” job Margaret (Kelly Macdonald) has found after bolting Atlantic City crime boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) conscripts her into chicanery. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this milieu yielded the 1929 Crash because […]

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Boardwalk Empire Season 4 Episode 6 recap: ‘The North Star’

Sex can be two strangely opposite things: an act of furious life-affirmation and ultimate trust, on one hand, and, on another, a weapon wielded in acts of betrayal and weakness. Our two favorite Atlantic City gangsters Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and Chalky White (Michael K. Williams) staked out both ends of the spectrum in last night’s Boardwalk Empire on HBO. Kelly Macdonald returned, making her first appearance last night as Nucky’s estranged wife Margaret. She agrees to an awkward meeting at Penn Station while Nucky waits for a train to Tampa. She is hesitant to share much about her life […]

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Boardwalk Empire recap: Season 4 episode 5 “Erlkönig”

In the world run thoroughly by corrupt agents that is 1920s America and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, there is little distinguishing between “good guys” and “bad guys,” which leaves us generally rooting for those among bad who go about their badness with some semblance of common sense and at least some universalist notion of honor. This generally puts them at odds with worse of the bad – the Machiavels, the draconians, the narcissists – and makes the worse act even more the heel, which only shores up our predisposition. Last night’s episode put some stark, ugly and, in a couple cases, […]

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Boardwalk Empire recap: ‘All In’

It could be seen as ominous last night on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire when Eddie (Anthony Laciura) repaired with new business associate/friend Ralph Capone (Domenick Lombardozzi) to a beerhall populated with fellow German expatriates and spilled a little too proudly of his elevated status within his organization. The organization, of course, is the Atlantic City-based bootlegging empire of Nucky Thompson. After taking a dose of lead in the war with mafia don Joe Masseria, Eddie picked up a limp but also a promotion from Nucky’s Man Friday to administrative capo, hence his making the drop of a payoff to the Capone […]

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Drama

Boardwalk Empire recap: “Acres of Diamonds”

Upon his introduction last week in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Jeffrey Wright’s erudite, scheming and not-a-little-Satan-y Trinidadian Harlem strongman Dr. Narcisse dropped a few sulfurous hints of something ugly and untoward about his racial attitudes. With last night’s episode, we began to see his Machiavellian character and motivation coalesce, even wrapped in the finest suits and Biblical citations. Ep. 39: Inside the Episode After a depraved incident involving his Caucasian wrangler of talent for his entertainment racket, now dead, his wife, now dead, and chief enforcer of newly legit AC nightclub operator Chalky White, Dunn (Eric LaRay Harvey), still alive, Narcisse […]