Boardwalk Empire‘s third season ended on such a completely different note from both last season’s finale and most of the season; namely, it was intensely satisfying, and almost made one forget the many mistakes and narrative pitfalls that plagued most the episodes leading up to this one.  There was plenty that was set up well for another season, but “Margate Sands” could have worked just fine, in many ways, as a series finale (luckily though, it doesn’t have to).  In the end Nucky comes out on top — he always does — but at what price?  It was a question that has cast an ever-darkening shadow over him and those in his life since the first season, and never has he seemed at such a crossroads as now.  Was it all worth it?  Hit the jump for why it was worth it — for us at least — sticking around for this final hour.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.  The chief complaint about this odd season of Boardwalk Empire has been its wandering.  The journey has been uncertain both for the series and the characters within.  There have been some absolutely fantastic small moments throughout, but on the whole, the series has had trouble defining itself this year.  Making the choice it did to end the second season — putting Nucky in the position of going Full Gangster — has been difficult on viewers who appreciated the parts of the show that were more than a shoot-em-up.  But “Two Impostors” handled the balance exceptionally well, culling down other stories to focus back on Nucky. Whether or not it’s too late remains to be seen.  Hit the jump for why, with all due respect Mr. Custer, this ain’t no time for a last stand.

Boardwalk Empire, I thought we were good. I thought we were getting somewhere. Sure, maybe you made some mistakes in the past, and maybe I didn’t always appreciate you for what you were trying to do. Maybe I didn’t give you enough time to sort yourself out. But then you go and you do something like this and I just … I just don’t know that I can do this anymore. It hurts me, Boardwalk, it really does. More than you know. I mean, we’ve been through some real stuff, you and I. But this? I saw it coming, I’ll admit. But I didn’t know it would go down like it did. (Sigh). Hit the jump for less of my break-up letter and more of the nitty gritty of this very full-of-feels and all over the place episode.

What a terrifically weird episode of Boardwalk Empire.  I really just kind of want to leave the review there, but I’ll press on.  “The Milkmaid’s Lot” could have been called, less eloquently, “Urrybody Gone Crazy,” but it worked.  It set up a great turn for the last few episodes of the season, and meanwhile, did a lot of character building and world-exploration.  This season of Boardwalk was more or less advertised as being about Nucky as a man apart.  Many times throughout these episodes we’ve heard Nucky (or seen, through dream sequences) Nucky’s alienation, from his brother Eli, Margaret, his associates and his political cronies, and we’re finally seeing where it leads.  For more on the Fall of Nucky, hit the jump.

“Sunday Best” is likely to be a polarizing episode of Boardwalk Empire — if you liked the characters that were focused on so closely, you’ll love it.  Otherwise, it probably felt like a largely useless hour of television. No extreme violence or politics or excessively complicated plotting, just family and lots of emotion.  Many of you have commented this season that the series has felt adrift because of That Big Decision that ended last season, really rerouting the course of the series.  Since then, Boardwalk has struggled mightily to find itself again, and give us a clear picture of where things are headed.  Though “Sunday Best” was languid in its pace, it did outline a turn for the rest of the season that portends well.  For more on this and why, if women can’t be politicians, does England have a Queen?  Hit the jump.

I think a fitting subheading to this week’s Boardwalk Empire episode would be “You’d Be Surprised … at just how wrong things can go for everyone.”  Could anyone have been more disappointed with their lot by the end of things?  Nucky seems to be having the worst of it (well, arguable Gyp had a pretty rough night, but more on that in a bit), and the walls seem to be closing in on him from all directions — his home life is a mess, his mistress doesn’t behave quite how he wants her to, his crime syndicate is falling apart at the seems, and on the fringes of the story, Nucky’s powerful political friends are facing federal investigation.  It’s just the kind of world where a man can’t even complain about a faulty iron without getting bashed over the head, dang it.  For more on that and how my secret is tape worms, hit the jump.

It is with unabashed joy I welcome Boardwalk Empire back into form this week with a fantastic episode from top hat to bare bottom.  But it wasn’t just Owen’s bare bottom and the introduction of Mr. Poofles that made the hour great, though it did set the stage.  The pieces on the chessboard are moving into place, slowly, and in the meantime we’re getting a lot of great, small stories.  One of the greatest has been the transformation of Eli — a reinvention, really.  Eli went from being a bloated and self-important brute who wasn’t smart enough for the crowed he desperately wanted to run (or at the very least run with), and it got him locked up and shunned because of it.  He returns humbled, not just with his in family, including Nucky, but with his peers.  But him going up against Micky Doyle was not out of ego or hubris but of genuine concern for the operation, and in the end he’s proved correct.  That waiting and doing the right thing, even though he had to go up against his “boss,” may be the beginnings of his repaired relationship with Nucky, which both of them sorely need.  The treachery was deep, but as Gillian reminded us in the past, “if you don’t have family, you have nothing.”  Hit the jump for more on that, and why going to jail is the last gift I will ever give you.

After I made a big case for the virtues of Boardwalk Empire‘s languid pace and subtle payoffs, this week nearly had me snoozing.  Plenty was set up, though —  “Bone For Tuna” was all about Nucky’s alienation, the stage for which was set with the opening dream sequence that melded together his feelings for Billie and his feelings about Jimmy.  Gillian artfully tells a tale out of school to Gyp Rosetti regarding Nucky’s alienation (what kind of revenge might she have planned for him?), that “his own brother wanted him killed.”  Rosetti replies with a comment about what a person has left once they no longer have their flesh and blood.  “Nothing,” Gillian replies knowingly. “You have nothing.”  For more on Nucky’s fall from grace, hit the jump.

For reasons unknown there seems to be a difficult balance between a show that’s too slow versus the kind that roars by so fast that the myriad plot points are lost as we try to lay catch up while collecting our jaws off of the floor. In the first camp you have series like Mad Men, Treme and Boardwalk Empire, which all take a great deal of time in character study, something that can make viewers impatient, especially if there are ambivalent feelings about the characters in question.

When someone asks a Mad Men fan what the show is about, there’s usually silence. What is it about? What even happens? Compared to Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy, nothing really happens … yet so much happens in ways that are difficult to describe. I once heard Mad Men described simply as a postcard from the 1960s, which seems accurate but too simple. Similarly, Boardwalk is about Prohibition and bootlegging in Atlantic City, sure, but it’s about so much more than that. While Nucky’s story is always tied into that theme, many of the side-narratives are not. Some of them are successful in keeping us interested and, occasionally, some are not. But “slow” doesn’t have to mean boring. For more on that and why you should never trust a man you can buy off in five minutes of meeting him, hit the jump.

It doesn’t feel like a year since we last visited Atlantic City, but then again, that could just be because Season Two’s shocking finale left some viewers — myself definitely included — in deep and almost unforgiving mourning.  But now it’s 1923, and with that new year comes the chance at a fresh start for Nucky (Steve Buscemi), his cronies, and us.  Boardwalk Empire is a complicated show, both emotionally and when it comes to keeping up to date on who is double-crossing who, why, and how, and Season Three doesn’t take a breath before throwing us right back into the series’ world. As the promos have teased us, “you can’t be half a gangster,” and Nucky seems to be taking the advice of another morally gray character, Mike Ehrmantraut from AMC’s Breaking Bad, who preaches “no half measures.”  For more on that and why Carrie Duncan should spread her legs and leave the spreading her wings to her husband, hit the jump.

The second episode of the best new series on television didn’t have all that much action or violence, but plenty still happened in the wake of Jimmy Darmody’s (Michael Pitt) scheme to steal Nucky Thompson’s (Steve Buscemi) shipment of liquor to Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg) as well as the murder of Big Jim Colosimo in Chicago. This episode specifically functions as a small move in the big game of chess that is the story of Boardwalk Empire. In the big picture, the episode is one big setup for an impending storm in the crime world. That’s not to say this episode is uneventful, but it’s certainly the beginning of something bigger. Hit the jump for details.