By Matt Schoenman
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This week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire really took off. All of the characters who I hated on in last week’s review showed me up, and proved that they deserve to be main characters in this tale of crime, corruption, and decadence.
Firstly, and most importantly, is the obvious metaphorical nature of the story of Anna Anderson, a girl with amnesia who claimed to be Anastasia (hence the episode’s title). It ties in with Margaret Schroeder, who for once was not a complete bore. In fact, she surprised me more than any other character this week. Her boss gives her a dress to take to Lucy (Nucky’s mistress). She brings it to Nucky’s birthday party, where the corrupt politician spots her and approaches her for a dance. Why does this make her like the alleged Russian princess? Because she’s a working class girl who got to be a member of the higher class for a moment. It is later revealed that Anna Anderson was a fraud; Margaret’s realization that she can never be Nucky’s princess, and the subsequent theft of a dress from her workplace, is a mirror of that. Pure genius. She especially warmed my heart when she defended women’s suffrage rationally and intelligently to Nucky’s fellow politicians – being the first woman on the show to successfully do so.
What else happened? Well, how about we chat about Chalky White. Last week I didn’t know anything about him; he was a very minor character in my eyes. Now I feel like I know more about him than anyone else on the show. He was the first character to give us a real look into his past via a serious interrogation/torture scene. The story goes like this: After one of Chalky’s men gets hanged, Nucky and Elias suspect the Klan of having something to do with it. So they take the grand dragon into custody, where Chalky sits down and tells him the story of how his father, a carpenter, was killed by a bunch of white supremacists. He then takes his dad’s tools and uses them to yank off one of the man’s fingers. How meaningful. Well, you aren’t going to get anything out of him Chalky, because it was actually the creepy Polish guy Doyle and his cohorts who did it.
And what’s up with Lucky Luciano and Gillian (Jimmy’s mother)? I understand that Gillian is a strong woman, which is what’s drawing Lucky to her, but this is just a strange relationship. Lucky came to Atlantic City to kill Jimmy, and just ends up chasing around his MILF. It all climaxes (or doesn’t, in Luciano’s flacid case) with the sexy mom grabbing him by the balls, and the pair exchange an awkward look.
And now for my favorite, Al Capone. Now that Jimmy is in Chicago, Al gets a lot more screen time. He plays dangerous jokes that no one, except himself, thinks are funny, and goes around talking to people like he’s the man in charge (It’s okay though because he’s from Brooklyn). Specifically, he plans on taking the Irish territory of the city for his boss Johnny Torrio. Jimmy tells him to take it easy when they negotiate with Irish boss Sheridan, but he disregards all advice, because Capone takes what he wants, when he wants it. As a result of the encounter, Sheridan’s goon cuts up Pearl’s face (the prostitute who is Jimmy’s love interest in Chicago) in a very graphic way. It made me cringe. She was such a cute whore, too. Now she’s got some character, though; she’s a hooker with a heart of gold and a nasty scar across her face.
