So I'm watching this show and I'm figuring it out and all and getting to know the characters and feel out their motivations ... and then a whole bunch of people get shot or arrested and I realized I had no idea what the hell was going on.
So I typed "Boardwalk Empire recap" into Google and read the Vanity Fair recap (yes, Conde Nast is in the business of reporting on what happens on a TV show -- do you think that's maybe why magazines are dying?) and now it all makes more sense.
According to the VF recap ...
The gangsters meet. An old mafioso speaks too floridly, showing that he is a man of the past who will not last long. Another gangster has too much of the old country in him; he will be gunned down while listening to opera and his is the blood that will make a cinematic pool on the clean white tiles. We are thus informed that a man too in love with the old culture has no place in the high-speed world of crime in 1920!
Did you get that while watching it? I didn't even consider it, everyone in old-timey clothes looks old to me, even the guy who played the young Arnold Rothstein looked old. Is that because productions typically cast younger looking actors in general? Because actors are obsessed with staying young looking to improve their chances of being cast? Because of all the injectables under their facial skin? I dunno.
Also lost on me was ... (again, Vanity Fair)
... we meet Boardwalk Empire’s Disgusting Fellow No. 2, Mickey Doyle, over at the morgue, which serves as a front for a distillery. But first Scorsese gives us an overhead shot of a naked woman’s cadaver, its full bush perhaps a rejoinder to our own waxed era. The purpose of his having broken out the big cinematic guns here, with the overhead shot, we are soon given to learn, is to inform us that the fellow running the place, the aforementioned Mickey, is a pervert. It seems he sets aside the more attractive corpses for his own use. This man seemingly has no place among even the low-lifes who will be populating this crime story. And by the end of the episode, wouldn’t you know it, Hans the abusive husband is killed, and Mickey the pervert undertaker is busted by the Feds.
The only part of that I saw was the giant shrubbery. I didn't get that he was doing cadavers.
Disgusting fellow No. 1 of course was the guy beating his wife. Not that he's MORE disgusting, it's just that we encounter him first. And of course the wife's pregnant which adds bonus disgusting points.
More after the jump.
What did you think of the incubator baby store on the boardwalk? Again, from VF ...
Nucky stands alone, on the boardwalk, before a miniature hospital-slash-freak show, where undersize newborns are seemingly simultaneously cared for and treated as freak-show entertainment objects. This is the first scene that seemed truly inspired to me; the first scene that didn’t come from the gangster-film playbook (...)
What? Well, that really existed. From DesignCrave.com:
Another quirky attraction was the “Infant Incubator Exhibit” across from the Million Dollar Pier. In the early 20th century, incubators for premature babies were a technological novelty–but hospitals needed funds to purchase them, and that required public support for the idea. To raise interest, incubators were displayed to the public with the tiny preemies still inside. “Baby Hatcheries” were found at state fairs,amusement parks like Coney Island, and of course Atlantic City. Admission was charged to view the tiny human babies in incubators as they were cared for by nurses.
Yeah, but where's the HIPAA compliance? Of course my first thought is that Republicans would love it if people funded their healthcare by putting themselves on display for the amusement of passers by, but I digress.
For me, the whole episode hung on the performance of Michael Pitt who played back from World War I Jimmy character who has seen things and done things. Eaten rats and dogs. Killed people. Can kill again, just ask him to. Talks to the feds about joining up, or so you would think.
But when I watched the scene with him and Nucky where he gives Nucky his cut of the ill-gotten gains I was so confused about the crime in the woods that I had no idea what they were talking about until afterward.
And that's a problem. Because the not knowing left me without information that lent power to the dialogue. And left me in the dark.
When we got to the scene with Dabney Coleman (left) I didn't even realize it was Dabney Coleman, did you?
So the VF recap came in really handy, despite my misgivings about huge media conglomerates getting in on my action.
(And it's not my action per se, I don't do recaps. I figure if you're gonna take the time to find some guy writing about a TV show online you probably saw it already, right?)
What the episode comes down to is, like VF says, Nucky meets a girl, a pregnant girl whose German baker's assistant husband beats her, even when she's preggers, and Nucky has that guy killed and begins to ingratitate himself.
And other stuff happens, too.
The sets are gorgeous. I can't tell you if they are or if the costumes are accurate depictions but the stuff looks flawless to me. I wonder if they're shooting during warm weather, what with all those layers of clothing.
I can't decide if I'm gonna watch the next one, it more than likely will depend on how much new TV I get around to watching during the week.
Does that mean this HBO series fails to dazzle? Kinda. But just for me. And that's okay. Not everything turns out to be your favorite show.
For those of you who will be back next week, watch the preview of next week's episode below.
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