The second season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire ended with a bang. Well, a couple bangs, actually — one of them from Nucky Thompson’s gun, and the other, uh, icky. Both of them registered about a 40 on the Richter Scale, so there are a bunch of open questions going into the third season. Some of the questions are character-related (SPOILER – What kind of fallout will there be from Nucky killing his protege and right-hand man?), while others deal more with the direction of the show in general (How do they plan on replacing such a major part of the story?) The trailer for Season 3 gives us a hint as to what some of those answers may be, mainly by using Jimmy’s advice to Nucky from way back in the pilot episode (“You can’t be half a gangster”) as the tagline. Nucky gon’ get his hands dirty, y’all. Or dirtier, rather. Seeing as I support just about anything that involves Steve Buscemi shooting people, I am A-OK with all of this.
NOTE: Back when I wrote up my reaction to the season finale, I made the observation that this whole “half a gangster” thing had already been covered in-depth by Mobb Deep in their song “Shook Ones Part II,” which features the line “ain’t no such things as halfway crooks.” Since HBO has apparently decide to make this concept the lynchpin of Season 3, I have gone to the trouble of stripping the audio from their trailer and replacing it with the instrumental version of the song. No need to thank me, just doing my part.
