“I think there’s no one else in the all the world; there’s only you and me.” (Gillian)
Okay, I’m not going to beat a dead horse for long, other reviewers have done this already. But please do allow me this short rant: Boardwalk Empire has never been more blatantly Oedipal than this. In one episode, Jimmy Darmody went from shellshocked criminal to tragic victim of his surroundings. And to think it was as easy as letting his sleep with his mother and kill his father.
If you say you didn’t see it coming, you’re pretty much blind. Sure, it’s HBO – if Boardwalk Empire were a network show, Angela’d been dead ages ago. But, even with HBO’s budgets, a role can be so piss-poor that not even money can save it. So Angela bit the duts in what would otherwise have been just another Boardwalk Empire episode.
After having given it some thought, I’m absolutely stunned at the fact this episode was just as disjointed as I thought it was going to be. It’s obvious: in an episode with Nucky in Belfast and Margaret’s girl coming down with polio, worlds couldn’t be further apart. What did surprise me, however, was how they adequately used Margaret’s story to play this out as a familiar theme: that just when she needs Nucky the most, he’s nowhere to be found.