Boardwalk Empire opens its fifth and final season with a flashback to 1884, wherein a young Nucky is shown swimming, poorly, in an attempt to earn some of the coins that the Commodore tosses into the ocean. He competes, poorly, with several of his peers. It’s a case of the show going back before it goes forward, and I fear it’s also a case of the show thinking itself deeper and cleverer than it actually is.
When the heavy-handed flashback has ended, the scene flashes forward to Havana, Cuba (as opposed to the other Havana, most likely; see also Coney Island, Brooklyn, and Bronx, New York), and the year is now 1931. We have missed a rather lot in the intervening years since season four ended—not least being, Nucky is now holed up in Cuba with Patricia Arquette. Chalky is now in prison for reasons unknown, part of a black chain gang.
Last season’s finale felt very much like the end of something, certainly owing to the death of Richard Harrow, but it also felt like a gentle reset on the show. Eli was sent to Chicago with Van Alden; Margaret fell into Arnold Rothstein’s orbit; Chalky withdrew to Havre de Grace, and seemingly out of the mob game entirely; Gillian went to jail. By jumping ahead to after the Depression, you can’t help but feel a little robbed of witnessing the direct fallout of these developments. The premiere leans heavily on Nucky, who is by far the show’s least interesting character, someone around whom the things we actually care about happens, but who himself seems to have very little impact on those events.
The worst offense of the time jump is that it results in a whole lot of place setting and piece moving, directly after a finale that was in large part place setting and piece moving. Abandoning a perfectly good premise in order to set up another one is fine, but man, it can be a drag. We spend much of this premiere playing catch-up, or else struggling to figure just what the hell, exactly, is going on. With only so many episodes remaining, there really is an unjustifiable amount of time spent on unnecessary flashbacks to Nucky’s youth. We learn nothing about him we didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed, and the rest plays as a ham-handed attempt to generate empathy for a character that, frankly, deserves none.
In the present it’s more of the same, as Nucky wheels and deals in Cuba. Patricia Arquette continues to delight as Sally Wheat, and Steve Buscemi is typically droll as Nucky, but the various characters introduced in Cuba don’t make much of an impression, at least not in this first episode. Again, you can’t help but miss the characters we already know. There’s an admirable bit of symmetry here, as Nucky endeavors to be ahead of the curve once more, this time setting up a legal alcohol distribution operation, just in time for the end of Prohibition. The series will end as it began, and that’s very nice. But toward the end of the fourth season, the series was reinventing itself—doesn’t that seem like a better deal?
As for the other characters, we spend the most time with Margaret, who finds herself embroiled in…well, in something or other, after her boss shoots himself in the head in front of the entire office, after giving a peculiar speech about Mickey Mouse. Chalky silently plots his escape from the chain gang, either masterminding a rebellion, or simply taking advantage of a fortuitous uprising; which is not clear, though the implication is strongly toward the latter. We even drop in on Lucky Luciano, who conspires with Bugsy Siegel to assassinate Joe Masseria before initiating himself by blood into what appears to be the mafia proper—Lucky, like a young Nucky before him, will do a favor to get ahead. It’s the most intriguing of the episode’s developments, both because of our previous investment in Lucky, and because of the near-certainty that whatever path he’s on right now, it’s due to collide with Nucky’s before long.
Mostly, the premiere raises more questions than answers, and the questions are rarely good ones. What is the point of the flashbacks? Why is Margaret still on this show? Why is Chalky the only person who seems to have aged since 1923? But there are interesting questions as well. And it may be that worrying too much about an uneventful premiere is a moot point—after all, the previous seasons have uniformly gotten off to slow and often strange starts, only to have everything come together by season’s end. There is no reason not to keep giving the show the benefit of the doubt. But there’s no question that the season we’ve gotten here is very different from the season that was suggested in the previous episode, and there’s definitely a disappointment of expectations as a result.
This is very much an average, run-of-the-mill episode of Boardwalk Empire, in other words. The production is top-notch as always, and in fact, Cuba in the 1930s allows for a different visual palette than the show normally goes for, and it’s frequently a striking one. But narratively, there’s too much time spent on flashbacks that are notably mainly for a particularly bad Dabney Coleman impression, and too little time spent on characters like Chalky, Lucky, and Margaret, the latter two of whom feel shoe-horned into this episode. That’s to say nothing of the characters who are entirely absent—as with previous seasons, it seems we’ll be dropping in and out of plotlines in alternate weeks, if not entirely at random. Maybe it will all come together in the end. History suggests that it will. But taken on its own terms, this premiere episode is too scattered to be of substance, and suggests more of its own missed opportunities than it does any particular promise of the future.
Michael Wampler is a graduate of The College of New Jersey, where he completed both B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature. He currently lives and works in Princeton, NJ while he shops around his debut novel and slowly picks away at his second. Favorite shows include Weeds, Lost, Hannibal and Mad Men (among many more). When not watching or writing about television, he enjoys reading, going for runs, and building his record collection.