I watched Boardwalk Empire on HBOGo again this week, and it was pretty cool. Gotta love that interactive sidebar thing… Oh, the episode? Yeah, that was fine I guess. Did anything really happen? I don’t remember. Nucky got to shoot up a grandfather clock with a machine gun; that was pretty cool. All the rest, though? Like much of this season, it seemed like a lot of set-up. This show is really starting to leave me cold on a regular basis; I hate it when people complain about shows being boring, but…. this show is kinda boring.
I like bullets, so let’s do the list thing:
* The trip to Ireland was a fun diversion. After some internal jockeying for power in the IRA, Nucky makes a deal with the organization to swap Thompson submachine guns for Irish whiskey. I’m not exactly sure how he’s going to get all these bottles back to the States though.
* The feud between Manny of the Philadelphia mob and Jimmy is going to get ugly really quickly (or so I hope). Jimmy decides to have Manny taken out so he doesn’t have to pay back his debt. Manny, because he’s a badass, takes a shotgun blast to the shoulder before burying a meat cleaver in his would-be assassin’s head. Conveniently, there’s a book of matches from an Atlantic City restaurant in the assassin’s pocket, so Manny knows who is out to get him. He’s a brutal, nasty guy and I’m sure he’s not going to let this action by Jimmy go unpunished.
* Little Emily seems to have contracted polio, and may be paralyzed because of it.
* No Van Alden this week, though we do see Ms. Randolph, his boss, put the screws on Eli’s less-than-smart deputy in an attempt to get more dirt to use against Nucky.
* One of Chalky’s agents has started spreading labor discontent among the black chefs at the Ritz. It was fun watching ten guys stand up to the dweeby little boss at the end.
This review is short and for that I apologize but really, I just didn’t think that there was much there this week. There wasn’t even a visually lavish scene in the episode that I could sink my teeth into; I guess the closest one would be the room in which Jimmy and Richard listened to the boxing match, but even that lacked a certain visual punch that usually draws me into this show. I do hope some things really start moving soon; there are only three episodes left, and I’m expecting something big and exciting by the end of the season. I hope I’m not disappointed.
