I didn’t receive an advance screener of the season two finale of Boardwalk Empire, “To the Lost.” That means I saw everything—including that scene—just as you did, and then sat down to write this. This doesn’t leave me much time to compose and reflect on a thoughtful review, but in a way I’m glad. Had I seen the episode ahead of time, I would feel obligated to look at it with some perspective, with my thoughts collected, and with enough composure to say definitively how I feel about its choices and what they mean for the direction of the show.
Instead, with the gunsmoke still clearing from my flat-screen TV, I don’t have to. I can just say with you: Holy crap almighty, they actually did that.
OK, I’ll venture an initial thought, which I reserve the right to change: it feels like Boardwalk Empire just aired an excellent series finale. It just happened to do it, very likely, several seasons before the show will actually have to conclude. Jimmy Darmody is dead. It was a move that was breathtakingly well-executed, that made sense narratively—for reasons I’ll get into in a bit—and was as tragically wasteful as a young man’s death in a war. (Which, as Jimmy notes, in a way it was.) It showed that Boardwalk Empire, like Nucky, has the stones to hold that lump of cold metal and do what it believes needs to be done, and I have to respect that.
But structurally, I have to wonder: what does the show become now? I don’t care who gets to walk on the beach in the opening titles: for all practical purposes, Michael Pitt, not Steve Buscemi, has been the star of Boardwalk Empire to date. As an actor, Pitt has been magnetic, giving blood and passion to the show’s meticulous history. And as a character, Jimmy has had the compelling story and history—the Lost Generation killing machine, warped and wounded by his experience Over There, the kid who acted while others spouted platitudes, the future (or so we thought he was) of Atlantic City and organized crime. He seemed naturally like the character through whom Boardwalk Empire was going to tell the sordid story of the ’20s (with Nucky connecting the story to the era’s political corruption). Instead, that was, in an astonishing blindside, done. And waiting until we had two seasons invested in him to do it, you could say Boardwalk Empire out–Game of Thronesed Game of Thrones.
With Jimmy gone, a number of the series’ elements are suddenly cut loose. Richard Harrow is still a great creation, but how does hit fit into the new order? Al Capone is still out there and has a lot of history to make, but what, is he going to buddy up with Nelson Van Alden, now playing house in Cicero? Gillian’s twisted history with him seemed to suggest a long, messy family future, but instead turns out to be one last piece of backstory for a life gone bad. (And she’s presumably left with Jimmy’s now-orphaned son.) And Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano are still slowly, slowly, prefiguring the modern drug trade that history says they will pioneer, but I’m definitely worried that taking Jimmy out of their orbit threatens to turn their story (even with a great performance by Michael Stuhlbarg) into more of a historical re-enactment.
But none of this is to say that, in terms of sheer character and story, killing Jimmy was the wrong thing to do. From where I sit, collecting my jaw from the floor, it feels right now like the most logical thing for the show to do. Considering what unfolded this season, all the shit that went down between them, for Nucky and Jimmy to partner up again and get back to old times would have felt like a contrivance. I have to admit it: as the first half of the finale went by and everything seemed to be smoothly falling in that direction (as in the Godfather montage in which marriage and “suicide” took care of Nucky’s trial), I was ready to be disappointed. It would be too convenient to put them back together. Whatever their history, Jimmy betrayed Nucky utterly: he didn’t just try to have him killed, he joined forces with the men who wanted to erase Nucky’s legacy like a sand castle. Having criticized enough series for feinting at big drama, then pulling back—the recent season-ender of Sons of Anarchy jumps to mind—I can’t blame Boardwalk for looking cold and hard at what the logic of its story demanded.
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