Boardwalk Empire Review: \"Friendless Child\" (5×07)

Boardwalk Empire is exceedingly good at doing finale episodes, and its track record with penultimate episodes is equally great. Season two’s one-two punch of “Under God’s Power She Flourishes” and “To the Lost” is looking primed to go down as the best pair of episodes in the series’ history, and in fact, with its focus on Gillian as its emotional center, this week’s episode is most reminiscent of the former.

As with all of Boardwalk’s season ending installments, “Friendless Child” continues and accelerates the season’s story, giving context to earlier events. Here, that means imbuing the flashbacks with narrative urgency and emotional relevance. Last week’s introduction of a young Gillian Darmody, the titular friendless child of this episode, suggested a major role for the character in the show’s endgame, which this week’s episode certainly confirms.

The script, from Riccardo DiLoreto, Cristine Chambers, Howard Korder (the last of whom has been putting a lion’s share of work in the writer’s room this season), cleverly plays with our knowledge of how young Gillian will eventually end up, and what events will bring her there. That makes the revelation that Nucky had initially strived to help Gillian, at the behest of his wife Mabel, all the more of a gut punch. The direction, as well, by Allen Coulter, makes the most of this dramatic irony. The way that Nucky is shot head on during his conversation with Gillian makes us complicit in what he’s doing, even if he doesn’t yet realize how bad it’s going to get.

The same is true of the episode’s gorgeous, stunning closing sequence. After a particularly difficult evening (more on that in a moment), Nucky sits down to read the letter that Gillian sent him, as Gretchen Mol reads it in voiceover, while a harrowing, haunting montage of her time in the mental institution plays out in Nucky’s mind. Gillian’s words repeat and loop back on themselves, over and over, until they are basically unintelligible, a helpless cacophony ringing between Nucky’s ears.

After all, Nucky and Gillian are more similar than we might have first suspected. Nucky, too, was that friendless child, and in fact still is to this day. (“Tell me a guy you ain’t screwed over,” Luciano taunts Nucky.) They were both helpless street urchins, though Nucky by choice, and both crossed paths with the Commodore and lost their souls in the process. Tonight’s episode clearly demonstrates a vicious cycle, one that’s gone on for longer than anyone would care to admit: from Leander to the Commodore, from Lindsay to Nucky, from Nucky to Gillian, Gillian to Jimmy, on and on. Boardwalk Empire reveals here, at the last, a concern for lost children, and the ways in which parental figures and authority figures can destroy them.

As such, Nucky’s sudden concern for Joe Harper, whom he refuses to allow at the meet with Luciano, and whom afterward he gives a thousand dollars, to go do anything else, is simultaneously a recognition of his own need for absolution, and almost comical in how it is too little, and too late. It’s not so long ago he put a bullet in Jimmy Darmody’s head, and not long before that he sold a defenseless girl into sex slavery. Nucky has failed so many people, and himself, too.

This week, Will Thompson almost becomes another of Nucky’s failures, and, fittingly, Nucky must surrender all he has in order to save his nephew. Will Thompson began (in this current incarnation, anyway) as a grating character, but both he and actor Ben Rosenfield have grown on me, and Will is well deployed here at the eleventh hour. With him as Luciano’s hostage, Nucky and Eli are once again brought together by circumstances, both friendless, with only the other, his hated brother, in his corner. When the intended hostage exchange goes belly-up, the “embrace” between the two, as Nucky insists “I’ll fix it,” is brilliant writing and directing. The entire exchange, a scene the likes of which we’ve seen so often on this show, feels fresh and original still, and the sudden burst into chaos is frenetic, expertly shot and blocked.

By the end of it, Nucky is on his knees, and has given his entire empire over to Luciano without so much as a fight. Micky Doyle and Archie are dead, and Will is still a hostage, pending the assassination of Maranzano. Nucky is a lapdog once more, this time for his junior, and a man that he once had a hand in building up to what he is today. The cycle continues.

“Friendless Child” is great television. It appropriately raises the narrative stakes, as well as the emotional stakes, and sets up a finale that will be concerned less with resolving any questions of plot than it is with resolving questions of character. In the show’s middle seasons, the idea that this is Nucky’s story wavered slightly, as other members of the ensemble took precedence. Here at the end, there can be no question that everything will come down to Nucky Thompson. So much business is settled this week that I’m genuinely curious as to where this journey is taking us, and given the show’s dependence on historical reality, that’s a tremendous feat. That everything boils down to Nucky and Gillian is a somewhat unexpected, yet perfect, flourish—it’s all too appropriate that the show plays with that sense of history now, and it does so to great, great effect.

Stray Observations:

– There are a few other things addressed in this episode, but they all feel like distractions, which is why I’m addressing them down here. The opening sequence, for instance, is super cheesy. We’ve been watching the show for four years. We don’t need to be sold on the severity of mob violence. Especially not when the scene where Benny Siegel gets kidnapped by Nucky so effectively makes the same point—he goes from signing autographs to staring down the business end of a gun barrel in seconds flat. That’s the entire relationship of gangsters to popular culture in one scene, no dumb newsreel voiceover necessary.

– Hat tip to Alan Sepinwall at HitFix: apparently, Benny Siegel’s rousing number “My Girl’s Pussy” is an actual hit of the period. Go figure.

– Capone is almost definitely going down next week, or else why include the brief scene with the feds getting their warrant? That scene exists only to serve as connective tissue between last week’s episode and next week’s, and therefore can’t help but feel extraneous, even as it’s paired in montage with Maranzano’s assassination. Margaret’s sudden intrusion into the episode feels much the same—she has not been (re)integrated into the season as well as Gillian has.

– RIP Mickey Doyle, who, appropriately enough, is shot in the throat.

– Lots of great, thematically summative quotes this week: “Everyone has a reason. Murderers have reasons.”

– “You said you wanted to help. Here is opportunity. I’m done.”

– “All the booze, out.” I especially loved this one.