'Boardwalk Empire' Season 5

And So it Ends With An Abrupt Bang

Anything to do with mobsters and organised crime of Twentieth Century America has a certain appeal on the big screen. Whether it was a contemporary portrayal of Al Capone or the labyrinthine story of the Godfather movies, organised crime stories have their cache. Boardwalk Empire cut a great swathe into that terrain the early seasons so the promise has always been that wends its way through the roaring 20s to the '29 market crash and into the 30s.

For some reason, they've decided to wind up the show and so Season 5 has come as a sort of fast-forward-and-flashback sort of series to answer a whole bunch of questions and tie up the loose ends.

Spoiler alert... Now!
Really, don't read on if you hate spoilers.

What's Good About It

The story continues with the same old cast of characters. Sadly, that's about it.

What's Bad About It

Suddenly, these characters aren't much whack as the series rushes to an end. Moots the loose ends get tied up by killing off characters. Some of them are more arbitrary than others, some are more arbitrarily dealt with than others. You think nothing of Sally getting whacked, but you really wonder about the wisdom of Chalky White allowing himself to be killed to give Maitland a chance at singing again. Mickey finally gets it, but it's super off-the-cuff. A new character Arquimedes gets introduced and dies without appealing to us in the same way as his predecessors.

All the flashbacks to when Nucky and Eli were kids, and then Nucky as young man working for the Commodore are expositional and boring. I didn't realise how little I was interested in the Commodore and Nucky as young man. If this stuff was so deeply interesting, this is where the story would have kicked off - in 1884 instead of 1918. The simple truth is, it's just not that interesting, and so it doesn't add anywhere narthex value as the unfolding story itself. Because it takes up so much screen time, you only get half of the normal unfolding story.

So they end up whacking everybody - which is like the second half of 'Goodfellas' by Martin Scorsese who is the executive producer, but it really doesn't do justice to the first 4 seasons. If you told me this was how it was all going to end, I might not have bothered investing my time in this thing. It was really good up until Season 4. This final season is nothing short of disappointing.

What's Interesting About It

I've been thinking about how disappointed I was with the ending, and I think it's because the story comes up against a wall of its own devising. Nucky Thompson is loosely based on Nucky Johnson. The writers gave themselves licence to be very different to history in creating Nucky Thompson as a parallel universe type figure. But they also populated it with historic figures like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Mayer Lanky and Arnold Rothstein. In the early going, it maddest more colourful and interesting. But conceit got down to the business end they couldn't rewrite history. So when it comes to the Thompson clan facing off against Lucky and Mayer, you know the Thompsons can't win and supplant Lucky and Mayer. It's just not how things went.

Boxed in by the writers' own devising, Nucky is suddenly weak and cannot bring himself to have the courage or brains to beat these guys. It is as if he necessarily had to become weak and dumb in the face of reality. It also made for very bad viewing right down to the end where Tommy Darmody - Jimmy's son, and Gillian and Commodore Kaestner's grandson  - shoots Nucky dead. It might be symbolic and a natural playing out of the revenge cycle but it's a really awful and truly stupid choice by the writers. Especially when you consider Nucky Johnson himself survived all of that era and lived to 1968. They killed off Nucky to forcibly end the series. It's a terrible choice.

Parallels With 'Mad Men'

Nucky's story, like Don Draper's story is essentially a picaresque, Both series go into elaborate flashbacks to childhood in order to explain the idiosyncrasies of the character. This device worked a lot better in 'Mad Men' than it does in 'Boardwalk Empire'. Whereas Don is truly mysterious as to how he came to be Don Draper, there is no real mystery as to how Nucky became the man we see. What we don't know in specifics, we can guess.

Whereas 'Mad Men' successfully navigated the 60s for us, 'Boardwalk Empire' abruptly cuts out of its project of the 1920s before the market crash. It's a shame they couldn't work through that dynamic; instead they opted to go forward to a time after the crash and straight into the Great Depression, but it doesn't really give us a sense of the Great Depression that would have been unfolding.  The story oddly narrows down to Nucky's contracting circumstances.

The problem with the flashback sequences is that it robs Nucky of his self-made greatness. What we see instead is a Nucky who is simply a cog in history who in the end cannot supplant the Commodore by deeds or by blood. if nothing else you want Nucky to succeed, but the flashback sequences lower the bar for Nucky's success to such a pointy realise that nothing we've seeing seasons 1 through 4 are of any consequence except for the way he ends up killing Jimmy and that in a roundabout way gets him killed by Jimmy's son. All of which has a certain symmetry but it is so dissatisfying, given the scope of the man built up in the previous seasons.

We learn subtle things about Don Draper in his flashback that flesh out the character. In these flashbacks we learn things about Nucky that we really didn't want to know.

It really is a shame it all ends the way it does.

Al Capone And The Chicago Story

We've seen a great Al Capone already in 'The Untouchables' with Robert DeNiro delivering one of the most manic unhinged performances for Brian DePalma's film. Here's Stephen Graham takes a lot of cues from the earlier DeNiro performance and works him into a just as manic, disturbed, unpredictable and violent entity. It's a bit of a shame that they opted not to retell the Eliot Ness story from Capone's side. Instead the elder that damns him is casually handed to the undercover agent. It's a far cry from the train station shoot out in 'the Untouchables'.

Considering the detail they went into with the succession from John Torrio to Al Capone, it seems amiss to simply abandon the Capone story in this context. It's just another one of those things that just didn't see fulfilment in the series, and it's big shame. Stephen Graham's defiant and crazy Capone with too much front is a fantastic performance to the end.