Boardwalk Empire Review: “Eldorado” (Series Finale)

Television is a tricky medium, especially in its current form. A series evolves over time, takes detours, scenic routes, tantalizing tangents, flights of fancy with supporting characters that, for even a moment, hold more interest and more promise than the stars of the show. Things change in a television series. But in the era of the prestige drama, audiences have come to expect more thematic consistency, more resolution, more of a sense that a series is a complete story, a long novel or film, rather than a collection of loosely related short stories. (We can perhaps blame Lost for this, and we can certainly blame Breaking Bad.) For much of its run, Boardwalk Empire was the latter type of show. Its many disparate elements were unified by a vague association with criminality, and, at least at first, with Atlantic City, but the characters and stories grew further apart with each season.

This final season, and especially this last episode, attempts to rewrite that history of the series, turning it into a long story of one man's descent into evil, and the destruction he wreaks on all those around him. With its final season, Boardwalk Empire states emphatically that its central character and primary concern is, always was, Nucky Thompson. You'll have to forgive me the lateness of this review, as well as its length—I'm happy to say that, whatever else it may have done, Boardwalk has proved a thought-provoking and challenging show, delivers the kind of finale that one needs to sit with for a time. It's a series that merits consideration.

“Eldorado” is an episode of endings, of reckonings. It moves slowly and with purpose, in no rush to reach any particular conclusion. We know already that the end has arrived, and so there is no need to move toward it any more quickly. The episode eschews the opening credits, but the scene that begins the episode evokes them anyway, as a stripped-down Nucky wades ever further into the tide that, for five seasons now, we've watched him stare down and turn his back on. It's eerie and moody, and casts an appropriate sense of foreboding over the remainder of “Eldorado”, a feeling that is exacerbated by Nucky's absence from much of the episode.

But the absence of Nucky is not a rare thing. We began the series with his story, yes, but it was equally the story of Jimmy Darmody, and became more his story with each episode. When “To the Lost” (also directed by Tim Van Patten) dispatched him, the story did not re-focus on Nucky, but instead exploded outward, encompassing Chicago, New York, Washington, Florida, and Cuba over the next two seasons. Nucky has been at the center of all this, but as many critics have noted, chief among them HitFix's Alan Sepinwall, he's been a void at the center, an unreadable blank slate, something off which the other characters can react.

To state, then, here at the end, that Boardwalk has been all along the story of Nucky and the Darmody family is revisionist at best. It feels somewhat like the finale to a show that Terence Winter has not been creating all along. The languorous pace of this episode, with its staccato bursts of emotion or of violence, seems to support this. The show concludes the stories of Luciano and Capone more out of a sense of narrative obligation than any particular interest—it's the tying of historical loose ends, underscoring themes that are tangential at best to Nucky's story. Certainly, both Capone and Luciano leave behind more of a legacy than Nucky manages to, but does that justify all the time spent with them on this show, to have their conclusions here feel more like addenda or afterthoughts than actual, vital parts of the story?

Perhaps it's that Boardwalk expanded so rapidly that it bit off more than it could chew. Nowhere does this feel more the case than with Valentin Narcisse, who is unceremoniously murdered this episode in a brief scene, literally unfinished business for Luciano to take care of. Is the character a victim of the truncated season? After such a prominent introduction in season four, Narcisse is an asterisk, underused even in Chalky's storyline earlier this season.

“Eldorado” is an interesting inversion of the show's history, in that the scenes featuring Nucky are for once the most interesting things about the episode, and the most emotionally affecting. His first appearance (save the opening scene) is roughly halfway through the episode, in a gorgeous apartment in the titular Eldorado building. He meets with Margaret, and they continue to settle the score between each other. The symbolism of this couple slow dancing in an apartment they will never own, and being interrupted by a younger, happier couple, might be on the nose, but Tim Van Patten shoots the scene with such a keen eye, the nighttime color palette painting everything in mournful hues, that it's hard to give the script too much grief. For a moment it even seems that Margaret would consider reuniting with her estranged husband after all; she notes it's thirteen stops closer to downtown, and when Nucky asks what she means, her response is perfect: “I'm not sure. But I said it.” They have reached a frank honesty with each other now, a level of comfort that only years of separation could bring them.

Theirs is a relationship that was not always well served by the show, especially as Kelly Macdonald's screen time has dwindled in the last two seasons, but her acting has never faltered, and where Margaret was once a drag on the show, she's now a complete delight. Her scenes with Joe Kennedy are playful, and deliver on the hinted promise of feminist progress that the show has teased with the character, on and off, for years now.

In fact, if the first half of the episode is a series of scenes wrapping up various loose ends, the second half is a tour with Nucky, as he makes peace with what little family is left to him. Nucky and Eli have said goodbye many times, but this last goodbye is no less powerful for that. Nucky hands him a sack of cash and a razor, and it's the nicest thing he's ever done for him, one feels. There is both quite a bit of resolution, and none at all, with both Margaret and Eli; we do not know exactly what becomes of either of them, except that Nucky has in some small way absolved them of their association with him. He sets them free, acknowledges his own role in their misery, and plans to leave.

It seems almost altruistic of him, but then he visits Gillian, and he finds, somehow, a way to abandon her once more. She is another problem to solve, nothing some money won't fix. “The past is past,” he says, as though the weight of his guilt is now too much to bear. “What do you expect of me?” He knows that he cannot undo the damage he has done to Gillian and her family, and when he offers her her own room, and a trust fund, he can't even look her in the eye. The biggest success of this final season is the way the pulls the entire series into a not-too-tight knot. Intellectually, it may seem strange, off-balance, to reframe the series to hinge upon Nucky's betrayal of Gillian Darmody. But in the moment, and especially in the final moments of “Eldorado,” it makes perfect emotional sense.

The show may have expanded outward and outward, to the point where Gillian's continue presence was more confusing than rewarding, but season five represents a concerted effort to resituate the show's emotional center, and, ultimately, I would argue that it works. This is owing in no small part to the flashbacks, which in “Eldorado” add up at last to two things: first, the fervent desperation with which Nucky tried to remake himself, to “get ahead”; and second, the horrible act of evil that forever doomed him, and that in fact, through the miracle of Tim Van Patten's direction, Terence Winter and Howard Korder's script, and Tim Streeto and Perri Frank's editing, dooms him simultaneously in both his past and his present.

Let's make no bones about it—the final scenes of Boardwalk Empire are a tour de force, beautifully shot, expertly written, drawing upon the show's history with an inevitable sadness (or perhaps a sad inevitability). The moment the flashbacks arrive at the Neptune's Bounty parade, we as the audience know what is to come, feel the pressing, impending dread. The cross-cutting between this scene and Nucky's retrieval of Joe Harper is a masterful choice, beginning to connect these scenes temporally and emotionally well before the big reveal. It's when this cross-cutting began that I finally admitted to myself that Joe Harper is, in fact, Tommy Darmody, and I've been wrong this whole time. That this fact was so obvious in retrospect deflates the reveal slightly, and I wonder if the show might have been more straightforward about Tommy's identity to begin with.

But when I dismissed the idea that Tommy and Joe were one in the same, I did it on the grounds that it's not the sort of thing this show typically does. And while the show does not normally present these things as big twists, the show does trade in questions of identity and pseudonyms and assumed disguises. Nelson Van Alden spent more time as George Mueller than he did as himself. Just this season, Nucky offers a false name, in the very same episode where Tommy offers us his. The reveal of Tommy Darmody isn't a shocking twist; it's a narrative inevitability. Same goes for the bullet he puts under Nucky's eye.

In several interviews since the finale aired, Winter has stated the importance of presenting the Neptune's Bounty parade, even though all of the facts of it are already known to the audience. As creator, he's well aware of the dramatic import he's placing on this particular moment in the characters' histories. The cross-cutting continues throughout the remainder of the episode. At the exact moment that the Commodore dresses down Deputy Sheriff Johnson, Nucky walks down the boardwalk in his old age, eyeing strange men in dark suits, wondering which will kill him. As he promises a young Gillian, “I'll always look after you,” her grandson pulls a gun on the man who murdered her son. As Nucky lays dead on the boardwalk, he grabs a nickel in the ocean. It all happens simultaneously, is the complete story of Nucky's life. The sequence is stunning, beautiful and poetic. Tim Van Patten is a treasure, and the momentum of these final scenes as they push forward is arresting.

In the end, Boardwalk Empire ended the way that it always lived: something of a sprawling mess, but a beautiful, complex, worthwhile mess. I don't know that the show ever really became more than the sum of its parts, but it had a great many parts over its five years, and though they sometimes digressed, and sometimes never went anywhere at all, they were consistently engaging in the moment. Boardwalk achieved a level of detail, of mise en scene, of authenticity, that is not often found. For an hour each Sunday, we were in the 1920s, no questions asked. The historical characters came to life in the way that only characters in stories can, and the fictional characters became living, breathing people. It was a peculiar show, not ever as popular as it might have been, but it was complex, rewarding television, with an impressively, impossibly deep bench of masterful actors, and production design and direction unrivaled by almost anything else on television. That's not a bad legacy at all.

Stray Observations:

– A note on the score: This episode gets a 9 out of 10. Below I've broken down my scores for the season into the usual categories.

– Capone's conversation with his son is expectedly heartbreaking, even without the callback to “Blue Bell Boy”. Stephen Graham plays this character loud and boisterous, sure, but he never loses sight of the fact that there is a human being here.

– Nucky has a “vision of the future” in one of the oddest scenes this series has ever presented. The girl singing on the primitive television is certainly another symbol of the impending future, but man, is it weird, especially with the over-saturated, bright lighting of the boardwalk set.

– “The old way of doing things, it's over.” Lucky's proclamation to the newly formed Commission is summative not just of his journey, but of the series' arc in general. In Nucky's flashbacks, the Commodore makes his own proclamation: “Through me and from me, that's all there is.” That's all over by 1931.

– Boardwalk Empire is actually a pilot that I didn't care for—I found it boring and drawn out, clichéd Scorcese without any of the verve that made his films pop. It wasn't until the second season that I returned and fell in love, and obviously, by “To the Lost” I was hooked. This was such a smart, cerebral show—the equivalent, to me, of picking up a Fitzgerald novel, with the costumes and the direction playing the role of that writer's lyrical prose. “Lyricism” is, to me, the best way to sum up Boardwalk's artistic style and intent. There have been on this show so many indelible images, ones that will stick with me for a long time, and Boardwalk delivered on that promise right up until the very end. I'm going to miss it. Thanks for taking the time to watch this last season along with me.