Sunday night was the series finale episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Kish and I have watched the show with pleasure since its inception, and we were very sorry to see it end. (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the last episode, you may not want to read this.)
Part of the attraction of this terrific series was its lush recreation of bygone and forgotten places, whether it is Atlantic City in the late 1800s, America in the early days of Prohibition after World War I, or New York City during the grim days of the Depression. The sense of period accuracy was total, down to the starched collars and spats. Part of the attraction, too, was the many tremendous performances the show routinely delivered, from Michael Kenneth Williams’ simmering Chalky White, to Jack Huston’s partially masked, tortured Richard Harrow, to Kelly McDonald’s deeply conflicted Margaret Thompson, to Vincent Piazza’s Lucky Luciano, who probably changed more over the more than a decade covered by the show’s story arc than any other character.
It all revolved, however, around Nucky Thompson, as brilliantly portrayed by Steve Buscemi. The last season, in particular, drilled down to the core of this fabulous character who is loosely based on a real Atlantic City politician. Through the splices of scenes from his childhood as a straight-laced, polite boy trying to help his sick sister and protect his mother from his abusive father, to his early adulthood as a deputy sheriff trying to lift his family up and making choices that would set his future path, to the fully grown man who was a mixture of master political manipulator, far-sighted visionary, and ruthless criminal, we got to know Nucky as well as you can get to know any TV character. When Nucky saw the early TV broadcast in the last episode, you just knew that he was looking at it with wonder — but also with an eye toward how he might profit from it in the days to come.
What a complex character Nucky Thompson was! Consider his relationship with his faithful manservant, Eddie Kessler, who he risked his life to save. Or his mentoring of Jimmy Darmody, only to turn and kill him in cold blood when Darmody became a rival. Or his refusal to give up on the ne’er-do-well brother who betrayed him, even to the point of giving Eli a bag of cash (and shaving utensils) so he could clean himself up and reconcile with his wife. Through it all, Nucky showed a deep understanding of the meaningful people in his life and their motivations, anticipating and defeating their moves against him.
And that’s why I don’t buy the last scene of the show. I refuse to believe that the Nucky Thompson we came to know could so completely lose touch with the son of Jimmy Darmody and the grandson of Gillian Darmody that he wouldn’t even recognize him and therefore could be shot and killed by him. Given the significance of the two Darmodys to his life, I think the Boardwalk Empire Nucky would have always kept an eye on the Darmody boy, recognizing him as a potential threat and dealing with it by helping him and co-opting him. Nucky’s shocking death was a powerful way to end the show, but I just don’t think it was true to the character that I came to know.
Mimas is weird in other ways, too. It’s the smallest round moon ever discovered. It has an apparent impact crater so large that it looks like it should have shattered the moon into tiny pieces. And Mimas accountably wobbles, too. In fact, it wobbles so dramatically that scientists are stumped about how the pronounced wobble could possibly be caused. The competing theories range from some large stone under the surface of the impact crater, to a core that is unaccountable shaped like a rugby ball, to an underground ocean that is sloshing back and forth even though Mimas is so cold that it’s hard to see how liquid water can exist. And so, the scientists argue.
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