We’ve talked about teen Nucky, but damn if teen Eli didn’t look exactly right in the scene under the pier. The darkness no doubt helped, but something about the way the light caught his face made him look (to me) exactly like a young Shea Whigham.
Like teen Nucky, teen Eli perfectly mimicked Eli’s mannerisms, and again it felt more like an impression than acting to me. But again, it worked for me.
Well, we did get a brief shining moment of the badass Van Alden one last time before his head exploded.
First Richard, then we find out Rothstein is dead. And now Chalky and Van Alden! They’ve off’d my favorite three characters on-screen and one off-screen. Only two episodes left, I think it’s going to be a bloodbath from here to the finish!
I’m kinda perplexed because on the one hand they are showing us a deliberately ahistorical version of Nucky Johnson ( “Thompson” in the show ) so as to maintain suspense. But then they are setting it within a loosely historical version of the 1920’s and 1930’s racketeering wars. Which means the way they are setting it up I have a pretty good idea how everything would have to logically end. Which sort of defeats the purpose of deviating so strongly from the historical Johnson.
I’m hoping I’m wrong, but with only two episodes left they kinda look like they are painting themselves into a corner dramatically. Ah, well - it’s been a solid show and well worth the time investment either way.
So, a mortally-wounded Nucky is listening to the radio and hears the announcement that prohibition has been repealed. He reaches for a drink but dies before he can take it.
That’s my prediction.
Given that Nucky Johnson died in 1968 at the age of 85, I was hoping Nucky Thompson wouldn’t be killed. Still, the ending was appropriate to the series.
I KNEW that kid was actually Tommy!! He looked so much like him, and he kept hinting about his past.
I like how ultimately it wasn’t the gangster lifestyle that did Nucky in, but was directly a result of his first (and maybe worst, certainly longest-lasting) wrong-doing by giving Gillian to the Commodore.
I’m half thrilled it was Tommy who killed Nucky, and half saddened. Richard tried so hard to get Tommy away from it all, and lost his life in the process, that for Tommy to end up right back in it is so heartbreaking. (And makes me wonder what happened to Julia.) On the other hand, Nucky was the cause of so much pain and death for the Darmody’s over the years that it’s so fitting for his death to come at the hands of the last member of that family.
The whole series paid the price of the truncation of its final season by the network. The ending felt rushed and contrived, the revelation of Tommy’s identity being a damp squib in its total expectedness. Nucky was made to look a half-wit in his complete bungling of the hostage exchange previously with Luciano, simply to advance the plotline. This was not the astute Thompson of previous seasons, this was a cardboard replica in thrall to the constraints imposed on the screenwriters, losing his empire completely unbelievably in the blink of an eye.
All in all a disappointing season although it did have a couple of outstanding episodes.
I liked the finale but agree the Tommy reveal was a damn squib. I liked Margaret’s lines the best. Overall though I didn’t feel this season provided much. I would have been as happy really with the previous season being its last.
I just finished the series last week. While I’m OK with Nucky getting killed; I thought they way they handled it sucked big time. Richard had, for all intents and purposes, been successful in getting the kid out of the life. For God’s sake, Tommy was having trouble remembering his grandmother in season 4, and she lived a lot longer than Jimmy. After I saw that, I too wondered what happened to Julia. It makes for a better story that Tommy was better off not knowing what a shit family he came from. All in all the final season was a lot like Deadwood. There were so many leaps we had to make by them skipping 8 years.