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How do you know what you are? That’s the question that the asylum’s doctor levels at Gillian Darmody, who claims to recognize the insanity that overtook her, and to have now overcome it. It ironically is the most rational we have seen her in quite some time. But the doctor doesn’t believe her. There must be something inside her, and they will find it and get it out. How do you know what you are? It’s a question that’s come up again and again throughout this season, and really, throughout the series. Is Nucky a gangster or isn’t he? He was supposed to have proven it by murdering Jimmy, but he’s in just as much doubt now as ever. Chalky is convinced that he’s unfit as a husband and father, a criminal to the bone—but surely he’s better than that? Van Alden has been living under an assumed name for years, long enough perhaps to have forgotten his true self. How do you know what you are?

Throughout “King of Norway,” it becomes increasingly obvious (if it wasn’t already perfectly plain) that Terence Winter and company are setting up a very long story in this final season. A smaller episode order and an impending finale are of no concern. On almost any other show, this downright luxurious pace would be a concern; but “King of Norway” proceeds with such confidence, such conviction in its own storytelling, that it’s basically impossible to do anything but look on, mesmerized, and wonder just how the hell this is all going to come together.

The plot may be running itself in circles now, creating new tangles and heretofore unseen complications, but unlike other shows (and, perhaps, unlike earlier seasons of this show), these are not stalling tactics, are not unlikely or even outright impossible complications that exist purely to extend narrative and mark time. Each and every complication is borne of character, borne of a decision made years ago, that only now is rearing its head and revealing its consequences.

This week Chalky returns to Atlantic City, and not a moment too soon. He stops to see Nucky first, but he has just one goal: to find and kill Narcisse. Michael Kenneth Williams remains one of the show’s greatest assets (though really, every actor on the bench is an asset), delivering his lines with a flat, hopeless affect that still does not hide the bloodlust boiling just below the surface. Nucky senses it, too. He offers Chalky money, “between friends,” and wonders why Chalky won’t return to his family. But Chalky knows better than Nucky, knows there is no going back to family after what he’s wrought. And yet, when he does arrive at Narcisse’s at episode’s end, he finds himself face to face not with the man himself, but with Daughter Maitland. Family, of whatever kind, is not so easily abandoned.

Obviously, the gangster life has done a number on all of the family units in this show, and not just Chalky’s. Nelson Van Alden’s family is a farce, invented to better hide himself as George Mueller, but even now, after living more or less comfortably in this invented skin for the better part of a decade, it’s past indiscretions that come forth to tear everything down. Sigrid’s revelation that she and Eli, “we fuck,” as she so elegantly states it, is crushing, especially since June is pregnant with yet another Thompson child. Sigrid’s quiet tension looms over the dinner table until finally she explodes, but her revelation coincides with another, even more dangerous one, as the feds from a couple weeks back have tracked down Eli and Van Alden, and they know exactly who they are. Now, the two have become complicit in the scheme to take down Capone for tax evasion, and we’ve seen more than enough of Capone to know that there’s more blood on the horizon.

As for Nucky himself, he meets with Maranzano, warning him that Luciano is not to be trusted. Torrio, of course, knows this already, and soon bullets are flying at Nucky once more. For a man who’s spent his whole life trying “to get himself ahead,” to ingratiate himself to the right parties, he’s found himself a target an awful lot. The guard is changing, and so far Nucky has survived the slaughter of the men he ingratiated himself to, but not for long. This is a process that began years ago, with Jimmy Darmody. When the Commodore fell, he was merely the first. Luciano sees the opportunity to kill all of these old men, and take everything for himself. Nucky’s been on the outside long enough; he sees the plan, but now he’s out for blood. He’s already gotten himself ahead, as far as he’s concerned, and now he’s determined to stay put.

What “King of Norway” is, chiefly, is a tightening of the noose. Perhaps it comes too late in the season; and yes, too little actually happens in this episode, which feels mostly like a pivot upon which the season will ultimately turn, making Sally Wheat’s death last week simply the last overture of the preamble. It might seem that it’s pace slowly, but there are some major revelations that happen in this episode, major enough to send a clear signal: the time for playing out is over. All that’s left now is reckoning, and, perhaps, understanding, even a slightly better sense of who these people are. It’s the type of novelistic storytelling that Boardwalk excels at, and to have the conclusion in sight empowers that storytelling all the more.

Stray Observations

– The actor playing Nucky as a young adult does a literally pitch perfect impression of Steve Buscemi. The dead-on voice and mannerisms, and even the similar eyes and sunken cheeks, all contribute to an eerie verisimilitude.

– The flash of recognition Nucky has with young Joe Harper is the kind of small link that makes the flashbacks feel, if not worthwhile, at least intentioned. They jump forward in time this week, and in doing so, restore the momentum that had flagged a bit last week.

– Speaking of the flashbacks, surely they are building to a reveal involving Gillian, no?

– Sigrid Mueller is a treasure.

– Of the speculation that Joe Harper is in fact Tommy Darmody, I say: highly unlikely. It’s not the sort of game the show tends to play.

This week’s episode of Sons of Anarchy is, for a while, business as usual. Jax’s murder of the reverend comes back to haunt him, Juice finally agrees it’s time to skip town, and Gemma realizes she’s accidentally framed Nero.

But then, with twenty or so minutes to go, things escalate, and fast. When the club meets up with those meth heads, two cops get shot, and one survives, perhaps to tell the tale. When Jarry goes to confront the club at Scoops, the Chinese lob a handful of bombs through the window; and while the Sons and Nero are distracted by that, Lin’s men murder all the women at Diosa.

At this point in the series, the momentum of the narrative depends on the rate at which everything twists out of control and into chaos. Each episode must introduce a new complication, or else the show merely treads water. So far, the writing has made good on that, making clear that the center here cannot hold, and throwing everything into disarray with wild abandon. The writing on the wall has never been clearer. Escalation is an effective storytelling technique only when the escalation doesn’t have to stop. Sons, finally, is in a place where stalling is no longer necessary. The continued success of the narrative here, then, is entirely dependent on future episodes continuing the pattern. For now, though, the Sons’ final ride has been one heck of a rollercoaster.

The characters, as well, are finally falling victim themselves to the havoc they’ve wrought. Gemma descends ever more deeply into madness. Even in admitting that Jax is responsible for beating that girl’s father up, she won’t reveal her own complicity in that. She truly believes she can manipulate everyone around her and get away with it. Meanwhile she’s having regular conversations with Tara’s ghost. Gemma’s delusion is so total, and her madness so vividly and explicitly portrayed, that she has yet to realize she’s the villain of the piece.

Jax, also, is seemingly ignorant of the evil within him. When a mission to track down the reverend’s son goes awry, he rescues the reverend’s widow from drowning. It’s a real “save the cat” moment, one that ordinarily might fall flat, but here serves to highlight how Jax is as deluded as his mother. He believes he can be a good man, still; but just as the narrative explodes all around his character, Jax is faced with the death of sixteen women, and the blame lies directly at his feet.

Zach Handlen of the The A.V. Club writes this week that the show is setting up Jax for the same old redemption story, that by having Lin’s men murder Diosa, the writers’ have moved the morality markers, so to speak, and given Jax a legitimate reason to go on a resumed vengeance quest. And while yes it’s true that Jax has not crossed that particular line, I think for once the show is still asking Jax, and therefore asking us, to consider his own complicity in this. The hammer will fall harder upon Gemma, if there is any justice at all, since it is her lie that has set this whole war in motion; but I think show and character both are well aware of Jax’s role in this. As I’ve noted before, he long ago made the decision that sealed Tara’s fate, and his own. Now, I could end up being wrong about this, and if this turns out to be a legitimate attempt to paint Jax as an essentially “good” antihero, that will re-color my whole perception of this season. For now, though, I’m buying what Kurt Sutter is selling; this is the reckoning for six seasons of increasingly immorality.

By episode’s end, there is a legitimate question as to how the Sons will escape this situation. It’s been a while since that’s been the case. This kind of breakneck pace might not be sustainable for a full thirteen episodes, but so far, it is indeed holding up. While some of the moments this episode are quite predictable (Tig’s fling with Venus, for one, as well as every plot twist leading up to the explosion), others are genuinely shocking, especially the final twist of the knife at the end of the episode.

The other major development this week is not so major at all, as Juice’s decision is another of those forgone conclusions. Theo Rossi’s acting is still only intermittently effective, and he isn’t quite as good as Katey Sagal at selling the whole act of soliloquizing. But then, the writing doesn’t provide as strong of a reason for his soliloquizing, either. It’s not exactly a weak link in the episode, but this scene could just as easily have been put at the end of last week’s episode, too.

Overall? This final season has been a pleasant surprise. All-out tragedy is a mode that suits Sons well, if it can keep things going at this rate.

Stray Observations:

– “This is a bad place, isn’t it, Wayne?” Althea Jarry asks. Sister, you don’t know the half of it.

– Speaking of “sister,” Gemma’s taunting of Jarry over her name is so typically Sons, but somehow pretty funny.

– Jarry also appears to be getting chummy with Chibbs. That’ll be an interesting development to keep an eye on.

– Theo Rossi is suddenly naked all the time on this show (not that I’m complaining about it). Sons has always had a fairly equal-opportunity nudity policy, and seems like Rossi is filling the FX man-ass requirement until a Jax sex scene makes narrative sense again.

– Venus Van Dam returns this week, and more Venus is never, ever a bad thing. Walton Goggins does so much with what could easily have been a one-note joke in poor taste. Even the running joke of Jax wondering if he should be “worried” about Tig plays as funny, rather than offensive. We know these characters extremely well by this point, and the joking, the innuendos, are all rough edges we know to expect; but they also treat Venus like a person, as does the show itself.

This week’s episode is aptly titled, as the show continues to take stock of its characters and where they stand in the wake of the carnage that closed out season three. The episode is very much painting a portrait of broken people, and now we are watching them attempt to piece themselves back together, with varying degrees of success.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the scene on the balcony where Cyrus confronts Mellie, who refuses to attend the State of the Union address. She’s been photographed in her bathrobe, eating potato chips, at her son’s grave, and now the media is speculating that she may not have it all together. (The media has obviously not been as privy to Mellie’s antics as we have all this time.) Now, Mellie has frequently been villainized on this show, and she’s a character that tends to be written in the broadest strokes. As with the reveal of her rape last season, Jerry’s death is fairly transparently functioning as a device to generate sympathy for her.

It’s down to Bellamy Young, then, to ensure that there is at least some depth to this over the top, clichéd display of grief. Fortunately for the show and for us, she delivers. She approaches the material seriously, and when she plays out the maniacal laughter, the hysterical munching of chips, she plays it as though Mellie herself is putting on an act. There’s an additional layer to the performance that, in some ways, suggests that Mellie’s demeanor has always been an act, and that she’s always just been one screw loose from becoming completely unhinged. We get that at the end of the episode, when she collapses in the portrait room, with all the First Ladies surrounding her (fortunately, this time there are no zoom cuts to the portraits themselves). This meltdown is, perhaps, overwrought, and the scoring certainly doesn’t help; it’s a disappointing capper to what’s otherwise the best story of the night.

Second best is good old Cyrus Beene, who is, in his own way, equally wracked with grief. His actions led directly to his husband’s murder. He cannot turn back from that now, and he knows it. So he casually blackmails Olivia. He spends the night with a sex worker. He tries to convince Mellie that his grief is equal to hers. Jeff Perry doesn’t slouch this week, either, even when the writing surrounding him is a little lazy (of course Portia de Rossi is blackmailing him!). In a show full of broken, soulless people, Cyrus is perhaps the most soulless, or at least he has done the most damage to his soul in the name of his country and his ambition.

So, when the two of them stand on the balcony and compare notes on their grief, it’s an excellent and much needed reflection upon the carnage that ensued last season. Last week brought us up to speed with the plot; this scene, and several others this week, bring us up to speed emotionally, and it’s this that is much more important for the show to work. Scandal is drama writ large, Greek mythology by way of the Washington beltway. These are bad, powerful people, and their actions have wrought chaos and gotten people they love killed.

The question is even raised by David Rosen, who states, correctly, “Olive Pope just gets whatever she wants, and sometimes you’re just collateral damage.” The white hats are long gone, even after the show she made of putting them back on last season. So it’s interesting that this outburst occurs in an episode where “Fitz and Olivia” rears its head again in a massive way. Sure, she just helps him deliver an impassioned speech; but her idea is to use his child’s death as a catalyst for that passion, to essentially turn Jerry into a political talking point. It’s Olivia’s idea that sends Mellie into hysterics later that evening. And of course, Fitz is still obsessed with her: “Can Ms. Pope and I have the room?” is laden with sexual tension. He’s not just asking a favor.

So that’s what’s happening with character work this week. But, in the opposite of what’s usually the case with Scandal, the plot it hangs on is uninspired, dull, and occasionally just outright bad. The couple that the White House is trotting out for gun control, a former POW and a paralyzed woman who saved a group of kids at a school shooting, is a living cartoon. I’m still cringing this morning from how thinly and poorly the characters were written, and how terribly the actors over-performed each cloying, obvious line. The episode requires everything to ride on Olivia’s success in getting these two idiots to attend the State of the Union, but it is impossible to care about something so stupid. Any narrative tension at all deflates the instant these characters appear on screen. And they end up not mattering at all, since it’s Olivia’s addition to the speech that ultimately saves the day. In addition to being a horrible, dumb distraction from the episode, they’re also an entirely unnecessary one. Boo.

This, then, is a good Scandal episode, buried within a terrible Scandal episode. Too much relies on the gun control couple for me to truly say that I enjoyed it as a whole, but there are strong moments nestled within here, such as another brief encounter between Olivia and Huck, or Abby’s scenes in the White House. But you still have Jake, who is seemingly still in competition with Fitz to see who can be more grossly protective; and in these scenes, the writers seem to be in competition with each other to see who can make Olivia more grossly submissive. Shondaland’s idea of romance has always been just slightly off, and the love triangle here accentuates that a lot. Jake himself is also tied to the biggest piece of dead weight this show has, B-613, and from this week, it seems we haven’t laid that or Harrison’s death to rest just yet.

We’re not quite there yet with this season. But we’re getting there, and the scenes in this episode that do work are more than worth the time. My hope is that season will get a good serial storyline going, one that hopefully involves minimal B-613, and then we’ll be able to begin the scheming, double-crossing antics that give the show the energy it desperately needs right now.

Stray Observations:

– Putting Abby in the White House has been a great narrative move, and the character pairs well with both Cyrus and Mellie. I hope we keep her in this role for a while.

– Is Quinn dressing like Huck on purpose or what? Their weird thing continues to be a weird thing, but as it functions tonight, as a conduit for more Huck-Olivia heart to hearts, it works pretty well.

– “Singing the Army song what the hell are you doing?” is perhaps Huck’s best line to date.

“How much?” is a question asked regularly by this show. . How much is enough? How much of yourself will you give up? How much that you love will you sacrifice, and to what end? So far, Boardwalk Empire’s answer to this question is two-fold: eventually you will lose everything, and your loss will be in vain. This week’s episode paints a bleaker picture than usual. In his youth, Nucky is released from work by the Commodore at summer’s end; unable to bear the thought of returning to school, and to his life, Nucky ends up sneaking back into the mansion with little Eli, showing him the Commodore’s various wonders, including a fully functioning toilet. Nucky is caught, of course, by Sheriff Lindsey, but, in the first suggestion of a talent we’ll watch him exercise later in life, he parlays this into a new “job” as deputy sheriff.

The story of Nucky’s youth feels particularly Dickensian this week, telling of a downtrodden, poor young man, who makes a promise to himself and to his brother to one day pull himself out of poverty, to make something out of himself. (You might even say “to leave something behind,” if you were feeling particularly cheeky.) But the flashbacks this week intrude in a way that they did not last week. They don’t feel like they are particularly informative; in fact, they feel obvious, on the nose. Once again, they are providing information we already knew about Nucky. There are some great beats that arise from the flashbacks this week—for instance, juxtaposing young Nucky’s protectiveness over Eli to the brief, clipped conversation on the phone in the present—but nothing that justifies the great amount of time spent on them this week.

Sluggish pacing has always been an issue with this show, and even this truncated season is no exception. Here, at the end of episode four, the death of Sally Wheat finally indicates that the season might be done drawing its breath, and is now at long last ready to begin the sprint to the finish. But that’s just one portion of what’s become a sprawling story. “Cuanto” does push Van Alden to a similar point, as the truth of his identity is now out, the hammer poised to fall at any moment. But with other characters entirely absent, one wonders when the show is going to begin telling stories with them, and not merely playing catch-up with the viewer.

With all of that said, there is very much to enjoy this episode, but much of it is atmospheric, or performative, rather than narrative. Everything with Capone draws a giant line under character traits we’ve already become well acquainted with. Al Capone is a bona fide psychopath, and its his lack of control that will eventually give Luciano the upper hand. The show has great fun with these scenes, though, as does Stephen Graham. The newsreel clip especially is a neat way of briefly recapping Capone’s historical rise to fame.

Margaret Schroeder is more entertaining and interesting in this episode than she has been in a long time. She waltzes back into Nucky’s life with one hell of a complication, especially as Nucky endeavors to go legit. Their relationship was never simple, but now has taken on a new level of criminality. They spend much of the episode just talking over a boozy lunch, and it is magnetic. This new arrangement between them is a shot in the arm for a relationship that had grown stagnant in terms of its importance to the show. Kelly Macdonald plays Margaret’s ambivalence really well, and with verve and a sense of fun to boot. Her chemistry with Steve Buscemi is palpable, as well. Margaret and Nucky sit there, feeling each other out, testing how far they can push back, wondering how far apart they’ve really grown.

The pieces are slowly—slowly—moving into place. While that happens, the show remains often captivating and occasionally fascinating. But the sluggish crawl of the season arc is too much for “Cuanto” to bear, especially with respect to the flashbacks, and we end up with an episode that feels longer or bloated than it should. The moments of excitement or genuine tension are swallowed up by the tedium elsewhere. “Cuanto” is almost certainly a turning point, though, and where we go from here will ultimately determine Boardwalk’s legacy.

Stray Observations

– The scene where Capone interrogates Van Alden is an example of that genuine tension. With the show coming to an end, there is no reason at all that Capone wouldn’t splatter Van Alden across the wall, and the show plays that uncertainty for all that it’s worth.

– The chain of lackeys handling Capone’s Empire State Building statue is hilarious. The statue itself was marked for its violent end the moment it appeared on screen.

Scandal’s fourth season premiere is something of re-pilot, and it functions that way for the bulk of its running time. When we first meet Olivia again, she’s living it up on a private island “a hundred miles off the coast of Zanzibar,” with Jake. She’s completely off the grid and pretending to be happy. The entire sequence is completely over the top, the light so bright, the island so idyllic, and it all serves to underscore just how much Olivia is lying to herself. Even when she’s actually living her fantasy of freedom, it’s still a fake, constructed thing.

The rest of the episode is an exercise in getting Olivia Pope back in the game. She returns to Washington upon receiving news, from Quinn, of Harrison’s death. Her desire to plan a funeral for him leads to her re-recruiting the old team one by one. Quinn is still at the office, being awful and spending her time tracking down Olivia. Huck is working as a tech repairman, and going by the name Randy; he’s in worse shape even than when we last saw him, as a result of what he sees as Olivia’s abandonment of him. And Abby is the new White House Press Secretary.

Honestly, I completely forgot that Columbus Short was being written off the show, and even in an episode devoted to Harrison’s funeral, I can’t say that I miss the character at all. He never came to life the way the other characters did. The end of the last season was the first real attempt to give him a storyline, but even that fizzled out into anticlimax as a result of the actor’s off-screen complications. All the overwrought emotion of sending him off, then, doesn’t have quite the impact that the script wants it to, despite the actors’ best efforts.

More successful is the show’s use of the classic case-of-the-week structure as a device to bring Olivia back into the fold. Season three took many, many steps away from the idea of “white-hatted gladiators,” so now is as good a time as any for both Olivia and the show to emphatically restate their purpose. The case itself is typical Scandal: Olivia gets a call from a senator, who is afraid she has accidentally killed another senator. Instead, it turns out the man attempted to rape her congressional aide. That’s all it takes; the firebrand Olivia we know and love is back, even is she is flying solo for the time being.

Olivia is on her own in more ways than one. The team has scattered, yes, but there’s also the question of Fitz, still racked with grief over his son’s death, and busy trying to salvage his presidency at the same time. Plus he has to deal with Mellie, who is in even worse shape than he, drunk all the time, even more drunk and prone to cruel soliloquy than usual. Bellamy Young sells both the comedic and dramatic aspects of the performance, as always, and when the two have a frank conversation about the past several months, it’s Young who shines.

The Grants, and especially the stuff with Olivia and Fitz, can be the most tiring part of any given Scandal episode, so it’s nice to see the Grants with some of the best material for once. Jake is still tiresome, a cipher, and he’s the one to resurrect the godforsaken love triangle, as well, taking Olivia’s obsession with returning to work as a secret signal of her pining for Fitz, because of course. Jake is also a reminder of the show’s obsession with B-613, as is David Rosen, and frankly, the less said about evil secret organizations at this point, the better.

So basically, the premiere boils down to Olivia returning after a prolonged absence. She can’t function without her world, and it can’t function without her, either. The episode, then, becomes an exercise in playing around with everyone’s newfound roles, but also setting up the new status quo, which of course is just the old status quo. The more things change, the more they stay the same, or something.

Scandal is as its best when it’s at fever pitch, firing on all cylinders. Quiet reflection is not its strong suit, but that’s kind of what this episode aims at for much of the time. Still, after the tumultuous run of the second half of season three, a solid palate-cleanser was in order. With everyone back in place, and Olivia where she belongs, expect season four to take off properly in no time at all.

Stray Observation

– Perd Hapley makes another appearance on Scandal! I feel bad for the actor, but through no fault of his own, it takes me out of the moment every single time.

– Olivia’s relationship to Huck has always provided a nice emotional throughline for the series, and this week is no exception.

– Portia de Rossi debuts as the RNC chairwoman, and as a rival for Cyrus. She doesn’t do much beyond be generically bitchy this evening, but then, neither does Cyrus. Again, once a wrinkle or seven gets thrown in here, everyone and everything is bound to become much more exciting.

I was both excited and concerned coming into the sixth season premiere of The Good Wife. Excited because they were coming off their best season yet and concerned because they were coming off their best season yet. It would be an understatement to say that season 5 was a game changer. We saw who was essentially the male lead of the show killed off, the firm that we’ve been rooting for the entire series become the enemy, and every character change drastically in one way or another. Alicia said it best in the season finale: “it’s been a weird year.” However, all those excitements and concerns were put to rest when a different, but still phenomenal series premiered last night.

In “The Line” we are thrown into a case that has an interesting character at its emotional center. From the beginning of the series, Cary has been the relatively straight character. Not to say he is a boring character, it just seems that the writers never saw an opportunity to use the character in any capacity outside the legal side of the show. However, this episode tests Cary’s resilience outside the courtroom. Turns out life isn’t so pretty on the other side of the law. We’re quickly learning that Cary may not be as strong as we originally thought. There was a degradation of his put together facade when he was faced with an arena that he isn’t used to or fearful of.

The most satisfying part of this episode is that Cary’s arrest, which happens before the opening credits, seems like such a gimmick. The Good Wife is a show that is based in such realism, so when something somewhat outside the norm occurs you know that something is up. It’s the same way I felt with Will’s death. It came off as jumping the shark, but it turned out to be just another step in what is an education of Alicia Florrick. Cary’s arrest came as a test for Alicia to see if she could handle the firm and decisions on her own. It’s also going to further complicate Diane’s transition into Florrick/Agos. With a name partner incarcerated and firm funds being tied up with his bail, it may be difficult to convince clients to come into the firm ($38 million worth, as Diane has said 57 times).

Cary’s arrest has an interesting tie to the rest of the series. Lemond Bishop has been an interesting character in that he makes nearly everyone he interacts with question their morals. The characters on The Good Wife are educated, successful, and wealthy people, who believe what they are doing is being done for the greater good. However, when you mix a man who has a corrupt business but also brings you revenue beyond your imagination, they’re morality is questioned. Are they bad people? Everyone down to Kalinda, whose morality seems so self centered even questions what she’s doing.

A side story line (which brought us a very… adult moment involving panties, or lack thereof) involved Eli’s attempt to get Alicia to run for state’s attorney. Her answer? Not in hell. However, Eli continues and discovers that she can in fact win. Let’s keep an eye out.

This episode is a wonderful reminder that this is a show about adults by adults for adults. The writers don’t attempt to baby their audience. They cut the bullsh!t and give us story. That’s why The Good Wife is such a successful network television series. This episode doesn’t really give us any clues about the rest of the season, usually the Kings are careful to bury those deep within the episodes, but it’s clear that The Good Wife is back at it.

Nothing much happens this week on Sons of Anarchy, and yet, I can’t help but feel like this is the best episode of the season so far. As things plummet further into darkness, the show gains a surety of narrative that it hasn’t had in a long time. Now that there is no question as to Jax’s villainy and Gemma’s madness, we are back in full-on Hamlet mode. Jax is going to start a war and likely (figuratively) burn Charming to the ground, only to realize that his mother is the monster he’s been seeking. And what’s worse he’ll do it all for Gemma’s sake to begin with.

We are fully in on Jax being a terrible monster, now, and the show makes that statement in a very powerful way, none more so than a neat piece of editing in the middle of the show. Gemma ensures Abel that Jax is a good man, then we cut to Jax immediately after he’s committed yet another cold-blooded murder. Charlie Hunnam answers the phone and says, “Hey, Mom, what’s up?” in this wonderfully flippant way, like he’s a cocky high school kid playing at gangsters. He’s perfectly nonchalant, in a way that suggests not only the extent to which he is cavalier about his actions, but also that he considers it behavior his mother would approve of, and even be proud of. When he answers the phone he’s practically giddy—he’s solving problems the way Gemma told him how. This week’s closing scene it the show’s most toxic portrayal yet of their relationship, but it feels surprisingly vital.

Even thought he show is just spinning its wheels, this week—Jax continues to enact his revenge, which boils down to “kill them all,” and Juice tries one last time with Chibs before splitting town. The main conflicts are yet to come. But this episode is still a powerhouse, featuring some strong acting, some legitimately good writing, and a tone that embraces the pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy of the plot. In a way these three episodes have been a very long first act, one likely to conclude last week, but since it’s the first act of the last season in the cycle, everything is allowed to feel vital again. Any wheel-spinning here is a legitimate attempt to build tension, and not a desperate grasping of straws for fodder for future seasons.

It helps, of course, that the attempts to build tension are also successful. The machinations of Jax’s plan concerning the Niners are exciting to watch unfold, and sufficiently dastardly. Yes, we’ve seen this all before, and need no further convincing of the extent of Jax’s villainy. But the show is no longer trying to convince us. There is a gleefulness to Charlie Hunnam’s performance tonight; he makes Jax like a Richard III or a Macbeth, rather than the brooding anti-hero he’s been for too long now.

Katey Sagal accomplishes the same with Gemma this week. Sagal deserves a lot of credit, because it is her performance above all else that keeps this show afloat. She is digging into Gemma’s arc this year with even more verve and aplomb than usual, and it shows. Gemma has now taken to addressing Tara’s ghost, which on its face is ludicrous, but is so dementedly Shakespearean, and so entrancingly performed by Sagal, that these soliloquies become fascinating illustrations of Gemma’s madness. This kind of stuff is what Sons should be doing more of.

Juice has his best scenes so far as well. The character is torn between Gemma and Unser, two parental figures in his life, while he loses the third, Chibs, in a heartbreaking scene. Tommy Flanagan hasn’t had as much to do as many others on this show, but he’s always great to watch, and he’s made Chibs such a fully realized character that his cold abandonment of Juice here stings.

Would it be nice if we’d reached this point a long time ago? Absolutely. And from the previews, it looks like the hammer won’t even begin to fall until next week. The sense that, to an extent, we’re marking time, is unavoidable, and it does linger in this episode still.  But even though this episode retreads so many of the same old Sons twists and motifs, it embraces the usual baggage with such energy that it’s hard not to be pretty happy with it anyway. It’s taken us a while to get to this point, but now that we’re here, the final act proves to have been worth sticking around for after all.

Stray Observations:

-Althea Jarry is most reminiscent of Ally Walker’s June Stahl, right down to the corrupt act she pulls to curry favor with Jax and the club. It’s ambiguous at this point how much is an act, but Annabeth Gish is great fun in the role, and Jarry’s flirtatious scene with Chibs was a highlight of the episode.

– This week in SAMCRO: my DVR cut off the beginning of the episode slightly, and so I was launched immediately into the shooting of the lesbian pornographic masterpiece, Skankenstein. And you know what? That’s hilarious. Point, Sons.

More than it does anything else, this week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire confirms the show’s storytelling method, remaining entrenched in the series slow (we might instead say “steady”), novelistic approach to telling its story through the accumulation of character-driven scenes, rather than necessarily through developments of the plot. There are plot developments as well, of course—Luciano and Siegel’s murder of several of Doctor Narcisse’s girls this week guarantees a reckoning in the episodes to come, for starters. But, as is always the case with early season episodes, much of what goes on here is place-setting, standing up dominoes that we’ll later have much more fun knocking down.

You know this already about Boardwalk Empire, and either you’ve bought in or, if you haven’t, you’ve likely stopped watching altogether. So while I wish the show could be a little faster paced, a little lighter on its feet, writing to that effect is fruitless. Instead, the show from week to week rises and falls on the strength of the scenes it chooses to focus on. This week, the focus is on a few key scenes, with some additional characters scattered about for the sake of moving the season along.

This week, the focus is on Chalky White, and this is good news indeed for the viewer. Chalky and his newfound companion, Milton, break into a house and take the widow and daughter who live there hostage. Milton spied a safe in the home before, and is determined now for its contents. The girl, Fern, and her mother prove pluckier than expected, however, and they stall Milton all day long with lies about where the safe is located, when the man of the house will arrive home, and so forth. The scene is an extended vignette, a sort of pseudo-bottle episode tucked away inside “What Jesus Said,” and it is magnificent, unsettling and exquisitely tense, feeling for all the world like a lost Flannery O’Connor story.

It’s no great shakes at this point to state how astoundingly talented Michael Kenneth Williams is, but it bears repeating here anyway. Chalky is a silent observer for much of this episode, answering very few questions, and even those cryptically—does his daughter know who he is, Fern asks. Chalky says, “She knew what I was.” But neither Chalky nor Williams needs say anything to be effective. The actor imbues even silent stares, of which this episode has several, with great import. The tension builds and builds, and of course we know, instinctively perhaps, that Chalky will kill Milton. He will act to save this family from being murdered—that will be the bridge too far for him. But when it happens he receives as thanks only a gun leveled at him, and orders to leave the house. Chalky’s experience has been such that he believes himself deserving of little more.

This is a brilliant scene, and a great breakdown of Chalky’s character at this point, filling in many of the blanks of the premiere, as well as of the gap between seasons. He is still reeling from Maybelle’s death, and it is the event that has led him to lose everything else, as well. He and Nucky are mirrors of each other as ever, but, as we’ve learned time and again, Nucky will always have one advantage Chalky can never have.

It’s that advantage that allows Nucky to spend the episode gallivanting with Joe Kennedy, despite having committed as many crimes as Chalky and then some. Kennedy is a cracked mirror held up against Nucky (or, more truthfully, Nucky is the one with the cracks). He has a large, happy family; he claims never to have committed a crime in his life; he does not drink. He is exactly the sort of man Nucky pictures himself as, and in seeing him, he is the sort of man who makes Nucky realize that he himself, is not that sort of man. Kennedy prods and pokes, asking Nucky “What are you?” when Nucky attempts to distinguish himself from gangsters. He can’t. He tells white lies about his family, his relationships with wife and brother and nephew and children. And Kennedy sees through them, rejects Nucky’s deal, and pours him a single glass of booze.

When pressed, Nucky says that the reason for all this, for everything he’s done, is this: “I want to leave something behind.” Which, YAWN. This trite sentiment has become such a cliché of the prestige TV drama as to be annoying and practically comedic. Here it is stripped even of any nuance or additional detail. Kennedy is equally unimpressed, and perhaps the emptiness of such a platitude is an intentional commentary on Nucky’s own emptiness? But if this is the case, the show had better make with another, better reason, and soon.

As for the flashbacks to young Nucky, they depict his introduction to the seedier side of the Commodore’s business, witnessing first a man who claims to be in love with one of the Commodore’s girls, and then, later, the aftermath of that same man’s murder of that same girl. It’s a hard lesson for a ten-year old. He’s also enamored with a young girl named Mabel Jeffries. The flashbacks continue to become more interesting, especially in the ways the intercut with the present day story (the connection between the Commodore’s girls and the dancer in Nucky’s club is not lost on the camera or the editor).

The rest of the developments I’ll deal with below in some stray observations. What we have here in this episode chiefly is direction, even if that direction could use some additional nuance. The justification for setting the season in 1931 become ever more obvious as time goes on, and the show begins to move pieces into interesting places, and to set up viable, vital conflicts and character combinations. It could be faster paced, and I especially wish that the balance of characters per episode was a little more even. We’re still very much in the part of the season that will seem more valuable in retrospect—but when even the slow build toward chaos is this beautiful, and this riveting, it’s hard not to be swept away just one more time.

Stray Observations:

– Margaret greets Nucky from the darkness in the corner of his living room, which is an extremely cartoonish moment that detracts from the lovely acting that both Kelly Macdonald and Steve Buscemi do in this reunion. There is such a sense of history, grudging respect, and yes, lingering love, between the two, and these are all conveyed nearly entirely wordlessly. If only Margaret weren’t lit like a comic book supervillain.

– The world surely joins me in demanding a Mickey Doyle spinoff series.

– Narcisse’s return is almost entirely expository, just as Luciano and Siegel’s massacre on his house at the end is simply a trigger for future stories. There’s the promise of more interesting developments as a result, of course, but it rather bugs to still be doing this kind of seed planting in the third episode of eight.