Nucky’s brutal, racist realpolitik was just what Narcisse needed to hear, in order to trust Nucky’s intentions. So after Harrow pledges to Nucky that he’ll do anything for the clarity provided by James’s corpse, and once we see that it’s Narcisse in his rifle sights, we know for real where Nucky has come down. And then Nucky says more or less the same to Narcisse, about Chalky, in the offices of the hilariously unnecessary Mayor Bader. But this claim is made under gunpoint, so it’s not totally bankable. took the Acela from Maryland?) Anyway, Chalky gets Nucky to aver that he doesn’t dig taking orders from Narcisse and that he wants the dude gone, too. (On the same night that all of the prior episode’s drama went down? I guess Chalky & Co. At the beginning of this episode, we check Nucky continuing to make Cuban getaway plans with Sally, on the phone, when Chalky and his men show up asking questions with guns. The elder Thompson definitely had to play somebody. But we’ll get back to that.įor a while, during all this setup, the show leaves open the question of whether Nucky is lying to Chalky or to Narcisse. The season’s surprising, and dramatically satisfying, close all of a sudden comes into focus. So in short order, we then see Harrow with his rifle, up in the Onyx’s second-floor shadows. Meanwhile, our Nuck has convinced Narcisse to sit down with Chalky and hammer out their temporary peace, which Chalky thinks he’ll use to attend Maybelle’s wedding (hanging out in Maryland causes one to miss some plot points). In anticipation of winning, finally, the custody battle over little Tommy, Harrow sends both the kid and the Sagorskys on a train ride, to meet up with the Midwest Harrow clan (including the brother-in-law, whom Harrow hilariously promises will be “90 minutes early” to the station to meet Julia & Co.). But by the time Harrow locates Nucky to ask for the favor of resolving the James Darmody body question, Nucky is in need of a sharpshooter. So Harrow (who is unfairly batted around on the stand over his disability) gets the idea to ask Nucky where James’s body is actually buried. To run through the architecture of narrative support beams real quick-like: At Gillian’s trial, she yells out something to the effect that there’s no James Darmody body left to prove or disprove anyone’s claim that it was his look-alike who died in her bathtub. (The show succeeded in avoiding this critique, I think.) (It was pretty clear, to borrow a line from Oscar, that Harrow’s character had “run out of road.” The only question was how - or whether - the writers could make up a conclusion that would allow the show’s diehard Richard fans to feel that the end wasn’t just some random throwing-up-of-hands. ![]() ![]() And the filmmaking that brought his narrative to a resting place was some of Boardwalk’s best ever. But the big ticket narrative item - Richard’s Death - made total sense. Narcisse (on the Onyx club floor, from the second-floor hideway) are both labyrinthine and just slightly credulity-stretching. (And let’s stop reading now, if we haven’t watched the episode.) The plot mechanics of how he was conscripted, by Nucky, to murder Dr. (See: Gillian, Harrow, Van Alden/Mueller.)Īnd so, yes, let’s now talk about Richard Harrow. And, even if this sucks a bit of “oh wow,” resolution-style drama from the fourth season’s finale, I think the choice is a good one for this show - which has often, in a headlong rush to slam-bang climaxes, pushed beloved characters onto obvious dead-end paths. (In any case, this reality would mirror the uneasy coexistence between Nucky, Rothstein, Masseria, and other players on the other side of the racial divide.) Narcisse didn’t have it out to the mortal limit. Makes sense! At several points along the way, this season, I had the feeling that the most interesting outcome for the show would be if Chalky and Dr. After killing off James Darmody in season two and depending on the self-contained arc of antagonist Gyp Rosetti to power season three, it seems the show wanted to set up some plotlines that could pay off over multiple years.
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