“Let nature take its course. Help it along if you can.” – Nucky
It seems only fitting that on the same night that my beloved Bears get demolished by the (TVGA revered leader Eric’s) Giants that the divide between the New York and Chicago criminal organizations began to deepen ever so slightly on Boardwalk Empire. When Big Jim Colosimo was whacked in the pilot, Johnny Torrio jumped right into the liquor business, an action that seemed to annoy competitor Arnold Rothstein. But there would seem to be an even nastier rivalry on the horizon with Jimmy now on his way to hook up with Torrio and Al Capone in Chicago because Rothstein wants Jimmy dead for his involvement in the Hammonton liquor heist. The relationship between the New York and Chicago outfits was a trying on in terms of business. It looks like it could turn into an even uglier one when it comes to blood.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Jimmy doesn’t just pack up and move to Chicago for the hell of it. Nope, Nucky kicks him out of town because Agent Van Alden and the feds got his name off of the surviving liquor driver (all while the man lay dying in a dentist’s chair, high on cocaine, and with Van Alden’s hand inside the wound in his stomach) and Nucky just can’t handle any more heat. So Nucky breaks the promise he made to Jimmy’s mother to look after him and sends away.
But the heat looks to be coming anyway, and not just from Van Alden. A great deal of dilemmas are on their way to Atlantic City and sooner or later, Nucky is going to have to deal with all of them.
Dilemma #1: Racial strife
Nucky may act like a gangster, but he’s still an elected official at heart and the next election is fast approaching. As we learned last week, a great deal of his success has come from his appeal to the black voters of Atlantic County. Chalky White, Nucky’s new connoisseur of watering-down his whiskey, is a major reason for this appeal, but when one of Chalky’s young assistants is lynched, Nucky has to give up 50% of the bootlegging operation in order to get Chalky to keep the incident under wraps and thus avoid any kind of race war. But between this murder and the Ku Klux Klan barker on the boardwalk last week, it would seem that a race war is coming anyway.
Dilemma #2: Rothstein
Oh, yeah. Nucky still owes Rothstein almost $100,000. Rothstein may act all calm and collected, but it’s pretty clear he’ll want his money eventually. And that’s just the half of it. It turns out that the briefly surviving liquor driver who died in the dentist’s chair was related to Rothstein. When he finds out that Jimmy was the shooter, Rothstein sends Lucky Luciano down to A.C. to kill him. Of course, by the time he gets down there, Jimmy will be gone, but as we saw in the scene where Luciano has his gonorrhea treated, his temper can explode at any time.
Dilemma #3: The D’Alessios
Tonight we were introduced to some Italian gangsters from Philadelphia who had some sort of arrangement with Mickey Doyle before Doyle was raided and his operation was handed over to Chalky. The D’Alessios bailed Doyle out of jail, but mainly to make sure he pays the money that he owes them. I’m not so sure that the D’Alessios are a direct threat to Nucky’s business (though I wouldn’t be shocked to see them emerge as some sort of competition), but at the very least I don’t think Nucky wants a desperate Mickey in the picture.
Dilemma #4: Lucy
Nucky’s ladyfriend isn’t a dilemma to the same degree as the others, but with the volcano about to burst, the last thing he needs is a distraction. She clearly has some suspicions about his relationship with Margaret Shroeder and she doesn’t seem like the woman to take even the possibility of losing her man lightly.
Dilemma #5: Van Alden himself
If it was up to Van Alden, Jimmy would have been arrested the minute the liquor driver spoke his name. Unfortunately for him, his superior officer won’t let this happen until the U.S. Attorney is spoken to first. Van Alden is very eager to make some progress in the case and showed that he isn’t one to shy away from illegal tactics further his investigation, something we wouldn’t have previously expected from the devout man. The brief scene where he eats almost silently with his wife was very telling: Van Alden really only cares about his work. Everything else is just a dilemma of his own.
Nucky brought all of these dilemmas on himself, though, much like he dragged mud into the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. It’s just going to take more than one of those newfangled vacuum machines to clean all of his messes up.
A few more thoughts on “Broadway Limited”:
* The makeup on the gunshot wound of the liquor driver was appropriate disgusting. Kudos to whoever was responsible for that.
* I don’t really know what was going on during Luciano’s zinc sulfate treatment. More importantly, I don’t want to know.
* Nucky donates $1000 to the premature baby hospital on the boardwalk.
* Paz de la Huerta is, um, ample in many ways. That’s all I’ll say about that.
* “He thought. F–king Aristotle.”
* “We used to talk about books.”
* “500 bottles’ll get you 3000.”
* “What’s ‘motherf–ker’ mean?”
* “Isn’t he Jewish?”
Some stats and info about Boardwalk Empire, “Broadway Limited”
TV SHOW – Boardwalk Empire
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 1 Episode 3
AIRED ON – October 3rd, 2010
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – HBO/Max
GENRE – Drama, Crime Dramas, Period Show
CREATED BY – Terence Winter
CAST – Steve Buscemi,Kelly Macdonald, Michael Shannon, Shea Whigham,Stephen Graham, Vince Piazza, Michael Kenneth Williams, Paul Sparks, Grechen Mol, Michael Stuhlbarg, Anthony Laciura, Jack Huston, Anatol Yusef
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.