Producer Terence Winter was a writer for The Sopranos, but he notably did not agree with creator David Chase about closure and unanswered questions. That was Boardwalk Empire‘s philosophy from the beginning. Its greatest stories were at the margins–Richard Harrow’s, Chalky White’s–and whenever possible, it wrote out their epitaphs on the wall in bullet holes. Like HBO’s Rome, this was a docufiction hybrid, with an emphasis on the little people and also-rans who would turn out to be history’s redshirts. It spread its major deaths across the final three episodes, but with a few exceptions–Margaret, the institutionalized Gillian–if you had made your predictions on the principle that any non-historical figure would leave feet-first, you would not have done too badly. “You showed me,” Nucky says.īoardwalk Empire‘s ending was all about finality. In “Eldorado,” at last, the magic fails him Tommy tears up Nucky’s second payoff in his face. He would eventually kill and get bloodied, but his preferred weapon was his Magic Bankroll, which he would produce to peel off bills and make problems go away. Which is where we met him at the beginning of the series–trying to be corrupt but not brutishly criminal, to be a bootlegger but work like a legitimate businessman. He makes his choice, and spends the rest of his life trying to reconcile the two. He wants to be the Honest and True Boy, but the only way not to disappear is to become the Commodore’s boy. His own dad a miserable drunk, Nucky has two fathers, Horatio Alger and the Commodore, and they don’t like each other. From the beginning of this season’s flashbacks, the Commodore made clear that he thought Nucky’s Alger-driven morality was not just wrong, but despicable: “You think you deserve something for trying hard,” he tells him, contemptuously, like it’s the worst human insult imaginable.Īs we have all season, we know where this flashback is going to lead: with Nucky procuring Gillian into “service” to his pederast mentor. The folks standing tallest at the end of the series–the real-life characters who would get written into history–are the violent, like Luciano and Lansky, or the conniving, like Joe Kennedy. In Nucky’s world, being honest and true may not always get you killed, but it doesn’t get you glory.
If Boardwalk Empire has had a consistent theme, it’s been to systematically, repeatedly undermine this righteous, golden lie.
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And the spirit of Alger’s Ragged Dick runs through the series other references to the sanctimonious fables kids were raised on in Nucky’s day, like the children’s magazine, Golden Days for Boys and Girls, in the final season premiere: In season three, Gyp Rosetti finds the book while poking around Nucky’s office last season, Nucky gives a copy to nephew Will (another surrogate-son figure). In the first season, Nucky compares young, hungry Jimmy to Ragged Dick in a flashback earlier this season, an older man does the same to young Nucky. But they were powerful, and they stuck, in ragged Nucky’s mind above all. Even at the time, Alger’s stories were controversial they were mocked by social critics and parodied by satirists.
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