Wow! What a great beginning to this new season. Apparently, this premier takes place about one year after last season’s finale.
There are some new characters this season. My favorite is a lady named Meg Steedle. She played Cleopatra and apparently, she is Nucky’s new love interest. She is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and IMO, she just stole the show last night. Wow! That is all I can say about the song and dance routine she did. Wow! Wow! Wow!
Here is an article about Meg Steedle you may enjoy.
http://www.nylonmag.com/?section=article&parid=8489
If Nucky doesn’t thoroughly hate Margaret by this point, I think he should. If he is able, he should probably arrange to have her murdered because of what she did to him. What a stupid (long string of anti-religous and misogynistic curse words)! She almost bankrupted him by giving away his major resource to some church.
There is another character who looks familiar to me. I think Nucky called him “Rosetti” and he was the guy who beat someone to death with a tire iron in the opening scene to this episode. I think his name is Bobby Canavale and he played a fireman named Roberto Caffey on 3rd Watch. He’s a good actor. He comes across as a totally different character in this show. I liked him and expect him to cause a whole lot of mayhem this season.
I also liked the way that former Federal Agent (Van Alden) saddled up (sidled up?) to that notorious gangster O’Banyon. I exepect to see him go to work for O’Banyon and to create a whole lot of mayhem working for him.
All in all, this is looking like a great season - even better than the first two seasons put together.
I thought they laid it on way too thick with Rosetti for his first episode. For now, he’s just looking like a psychotically angry, Sonny Corleone-type cliche. I’m hoping they’re able to add a few more layers to that character.
Other than that, a very strong season opener. I especially liked the Van Alden storyline, which is unusual, because he’s always been something of a weak link for me in past seasons.
While I think it’s likely his dealings with O’Banyon aren’t finished, I wondered if he even knew who he was. He might’ve thought it was just a shopkeeper being extorted by thugs.
And did Van Alden realize that the guy leaving the flower shop was Al Capone?
BTW, Nucky is certainly cool to Margaret now but I wonder what the immediate aftermath was of her signing over all that land to the Catholic Church. It was worth a fortune.
And it was hilarious to see all of those rich people going nuts over Nucky’s party favors.
I loved that Richard Harrow avenged his friend Jimmy’s death. In fact, even though Manny was one of Nucky’s henchmen, it seems that Harrow might gain some respect from Thompson. The scene was telegraphed somewhat by Manny getting his “new hat” I am just wondering if Harrow was tipped off by Nucky or maybe Nicky Doyle , since Manny was getting greedy wanting his own distillary.
I’m not sure if he knew it was Capone, but his instincts about them being very bad mofo’s saved it from a bloodbath in a flower shop. Van Alden may get into the security business very soon.
Well, he certainly won’t stay in the door-to-door selling iron business. That is for sure!
I strongly doubt we will be seeing any kinder, softer side to Nucky this season. It seems to me they are trying to build up his “thug” side. In this epi, someone called him a “gangster” or a “thug” (I forget which) and also, remember his line about, “But first, put a bullet in his brain”?
I think one of the most common criticizms of Nucky in past seasons was that he just came across as far too much of a wimp to be a true gangster. I think they are trying to make him appear very thug-like this season. IMO, that is a good thing. This series could always use more mayhem. I really want to see Margaret get what is coming to her this season and I want to see it spelled out in blood. She deserves that.
P.S. I can’t believe there have been only 5 replies to this thread. This show is one of the most popular and best done shows on HBO. I would have thought there would have been many, many people with something to say about the season premiere.
I see that as the main theme of the show. Season one Nucky was a corrupt machine politician who wasn’t above ordering the occasional murder. But he generally tried to keep things orderly and solve problems with “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” type corruption instead of just blowing away anyone that got in his way. And at least in part, he ran things for the general benefit of the various factions that supported him. He wasn’t (purely) about making himself rich.
With prohibition, borderline psychopaths like Capone and Jimmy have taken over, who are willing to just murder their way to the top. And Nucky has to become more and more brutal to survive.
This complaint never made any sense to me, because Nucky wasn’t supposed to be some kind of crime boss at the beginning of the show. He was a politician. Sure, he was corrupt and all that, but he maintained a relatively civilized manner publically and (in some cases) privately, because that’s what his position called for.
It seems like a lot of people wanted him to be Tony Soprano right off the bat, icing his enemies without a second thought. It always made far more sense to me that Nucky would try to get the job done through money and more gentle means of persuasion, rather than knocking off guys and left and right. Of course, now that he’s getting deeper into the muck, it makes more sense that he’s evolving into a gangster type.
Both you and Simplicio make very reasonable points.
Personally, I’m glad he is becoming more of a thug because, IMO (and I don’t think it will be shared by very many of you), I enjoy the show a lot more when mayhem and murder prevail.
How else can you deal with people like Al Capone and this “Rosetti” creep? I know it’s true that in the end, Capone was jailed for tax evasion and no one ever had to bump him off. But still, it would have made for much better TV had he been murdered with much violence and mayhem.
I love mayhem when it happens in this show.
Some of the very best moments were about murder. Remember how sniper Richard Darrow shot some guy after Jimmy fingered him?
And there were so many other wonderful moments. Like when Chalky (sorry I can’t remember the actor’s name) got his revenge on the people who killed his friends and relatives. And remember that wonderful scene when Jimmy had a huge knife hidden in his pants leg and used it to kill a whole bunch of people who were going to kill him? For me, those were just some of the most enjoyable scenes in this show.
If I recall correctly, things started to get really interesting about this time with regards to gangsters and booze and the Feds.
Nucky has had a free ride so far, but now he has to step up his game to stay in play - and he is becoming a smarter/eviler thug, but still trying to keep things “normal” in his territory.
Nice plan to stay out of the fray and have one distributor - Nucky sees the writing on the wall and doesn’t want to deal with the nutcases out there - but I don’t think this plan is going to be as simple as all that.
So yeah, they have set up the season (and upcoming seasons) quite nicely.
Love all the costumes and set designs and bits and pieces of history thrown in - unlike other shows about this era, Boardwalk Empire really believes in the total immersion theory of getting to know the era, the culture, the mood and the politics - by osmosis we are learning more about the background and that makes the violence all the more real and shocking, rather than just have some nameless guy get shot.
Great series, and hope more people start watching and catching up with past episodes. The nice thing about this show is you don’t know what is going to be happening next - a gentle loving touch of gifting a new hat for the New Year, or a bullet through the head…
Just remember that just like Capone, Rothstein and Luciano, Nucky “Thompson” ( Johnson in RL ) is at least based on a real person. We know pretty much what happened to him and roughly when :). Though there is a great deal of leeway to fictionalize his character, they do presumably want to maintain at least a very loose historicity about him.
In an earlier post I wondered if the proper expression was “saddle up” or “sidle up”. I have heard them both used but couldn’t remember which was correct to describe getting close to someone but in a non-obvious way.
The one example I seem to remember most comes from the film, “Donnie Brasco” where Al Pacino is angry with Johnny Depp and accuses him of “sidling up” to another character.
Well, I looked it up in the dictionary and here is a sample sentence:
In one episode he puttered around a swamp inside an artificial hippo, so he could sidle up close to the real wildlife.
Here is the complete entry:
sidle
Use Sidle in a sentence Origin
si·dle
[sahyd-l] Show IPA verb, si·dled, si·dling, noun
verb (used without object)
to move sideways or obliquely.
to edge along furtively.
noun
3. a sidling movement.
Origin: 1690–1700; back formation from sideling (earlier spelling sidling misconstrued as present participle of a verb ending in -le)
The show is definitely maintaining the high standards it set itself in the first two seasons. It was sad to see the last of William Forsythe, I love watching him perform. I knew he wouldn’t last long this season though with Nemesis in the shape of Richard on his track. I wonder if Nucky is included in Richard’s plans for revenge. That would prove an altogether trickier target.
I was really surprised to see that Van Alden and the nanny are actually married, or at least in some kind of a relationship, with a new baby and everything. I figured at the end of last season that they were just going to present themselves as a married couple for propriety’s sake.
Yeah, the nanny (who does have a name, right?) was holding the new boy, and Abigail (Van Alden and Lucy’s daughter) was in the crib. I think I read somewhere that eighteen months passed between last year’s finale and this episode.
I hope that Rose Van Alden is enjoying her life away from her ex-husband. Now there’s a woman who really needed to let her freak flag fly, judging by how turned on she got when Van Alden staged that impromptu raid at the restaurant they were having dinner at last season.