Much was made of the penultimate episode of the sophomore season of “Boardwalk Empire.” A LOT went down last week — much of it… uh, what’s a nice word for incest-related? Familial? Creepy? Skincrawly? I may be making up words now, but you get my point.
Anyway, there were a lot of loose ends heading into the season finale that needed tying up, most notably where the hell you go from one of the main characters on your show going Full Oedipus. I’ll save the spoilers for the next page, but let’s check in with Warming Glow Senior Correspondent Surprised Cat for his analysis.
Well said, Surprised Cat.
I don’t know if I’ve fully processed Nucky killing Jimmy, his protege and former right hand man, but I will say this: from any way you look at it, it is incredibly ballsy. From a storytelling perspective, you’re wiping away one of your two or three main characters — someone the audience liked despite his despicable actions. (For what it’s worth, actor Michael Pitt says he liked the ending.) And it runs the risk of alienating some of the audience who may have felt that some sort of trust had been breached. It’s a different set of circumstances, but think about how angry people got at the ending of “The Killing.” Viewers get invested, and some of them get PISSED when they feel like the rug was pulled out from under them. So the decision to take the story to the place the writers felt made the most sense in the face of that… that takes some marbles.
Alan Sepinwall at Hitfix had a Q&A with series creator Terence Winter about the finale, where Winter discussed the thought process that went into the decision:
Once we started plotting the season out, when we were honest with ourselves, we said, if the idea was to bring Nucky from (Jimmy telling him) “You can’t be half a gangster anymore” to the point where he crosses the line and is engaging in gangster behavior himself, meaning he’s the guy who pulls the trigger, if we’re telling that story honestly, there was no way Jimmy could survive this, and moreso, if Nucky’s going to be a gangster, he’s got to be the one to pull the trigger. Otherwise, he’s still delegating things to people.
We waffled. Once we started to come to that conclusion, there was a good number of months where we really wrestled with it, asking, “Is there any way? Can he kill someone else? Let Jimmy off the hook?” And the honest answer kept coming back to “No, this is it.”
Makes sense to me. As everybody knows, ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks.
