Plot Summary: With his back to the wall, Nucky (Steve Buscemi) begins to lose his cool and, despite a potentially promising meeting with Maranzano (Giampiero Judica), decides to make a preemptive strike against Luciano (Vincent Piazza) and Lansky (Anatol Yusef) by kidnapping Benny Siegel (Michael Zegen). Siegel turns out to be not quite the bargaining chip Nucky had in mind, however, and Luciano and Lansky retaliate by taking Willie Thompson (Ben Rosenfeld) hostage, resulting in a pivotal confrontation that proves very costly for Nucky. Back in 1897, young Nucky learns a secret about The Commodore and tries to help a young Gillian, who, back in the present day, reaches out to Nucky for help.
In a post-Sopranos world, TV audiences have come to expect fireworks from a season’s penultimate episode, an hour of edge of your seat, shit hits the fan, water cooler fodder setting the stage for closure and ribbon tying in the finale. While “Friendless Child” packed some major moments, they represented duds more so than fireworks for our hero, Nucky, who sees his hard-won empire go out with a whimper, not a bang.
As a result, it’s hard to determine whether the friendless child who gives the episode its name is Gillian, either in her orphaned, delinquent youth or her current wretched state, or Nucky himself. The episode consistently draws parallels between the two – both children of poverty who rose through the ranks of Atlantic City society and find themselves thrust downward once again. As the episode opens, we see Nucky more jittery and unhinged than we’ve ever seen him. Gone is the calm, collected politician of yore – instead, we see the usually composed Nucky raise his voice and drop F bombs during his meeting with Maranzano, threatening to string Luciano up by his balls. It’s a marked departure from the cucumber-cool player we’re used to seeing, a change that indicates Nucky’s all too aware that his empire is slipping through his fingers. Everything must end and a change is coming, which Nucky can no longer deny.
Whereas Nucky has always found a way to outmaneuver his opponents in the past, he has been consistently outplayed as of late and after his kidnapping of Luciano/Lansky associate Benny “Bugsy” Siegel goes awry, the budding crime bosses now have Nucky firmly in checkmate. It’s a shame that Siegel was introduced relatively late in the series’ run because Michael Zegen is captivating on screen, bringing a hilarious sarcastic streak, adolescent bravado, and a dash of psychotic menace to the role. I loved his bawdy playfulness with his married girlfriend and then his taunting of her sobbing, wounded husband as Archie (Paul Calderone) dragged him down the stairs, knife to his earlobe.
While Siegel proves to be a handful during his captivity, alternately threatening his captors and annoying the shit out of them with his loud, incessant rendition of “My Girl’s Pussy” (if only Daughter Maitland could get the rights to that track, she’d have a number one hit on her hands), it’s Luciano and Lansky’s retaliatory kidnapping of Willie Thompson that seals Nucky’s fate. A clearly bedraggled Eli (Shea Whigham), looking as though he hasn’t showered or changed his clothes since that fateful dinner at the Mueller’s (seriously, I’m surprised cartoon stink lines and flies weren’t wafting off his body), goes to meet Willie at his office, in what’s likely meant as a pre-suicide farewell to his son. It’s a heartbreaking scene, typically well-acted by Whigham, who conveys both pride in his son’s success and being “on the right side of the street” and deep sadness at realizing how far he’s fallen in his son’s esteem. Moments after he walks away, declining Willie’s offer of a place to stay and, more humiliating, some money, Eli turns to see Willie grabbed off the street and thrown into a car by Luciano and Lanksy’s men.
Of course, this leads to the inevitable reunion between the two Thompson brothers and Nucky’s ultimate bowing down to the future founders of Murder, Inc. The confrontation between Nucky and Lansky and Luciano is the episode’s biggest moment and likely one of the biggest of the series. When Luciano and Lansky refuse to release Willie even after Siegel is un-gagged and returned, it’s immediately clear that Nucky is no longer the great and powerful Oz, his money, his pull, his respect all eroded so that now he is utterly at the mercy of these two young upstarts. While the scene does have a relatively steep body count for Nucky (alas, poor Archie and Mickey Doyle, who was finally, not unsurprisingly, felled by his inability to shut the fuck up), the real shock comes from seeing Nucky so humbled, admitting that he underestimated Luciano and wearily agreeing to give him everything he’s ever had. As he’s forced to beg for his life on his knees by Lansky (“Now you know how it feels,” a callback to Nucky’s similar treatment of young Lansky back in season one), Nucky’s empire is finally lost. This scene was some of Buscemi’s best work on the series to date, as even in the face of utter defeat, there was a bit of nobility to his resignation and still that trademark Nucky calculation under the surface. After all, he manages to keep his head and secure the safe return of his nephew by offering to take out Maranzano for Luciano (having Eli be one of the faux-IRS agents who murdered Maranzano in his office was a really neat way of working one of Boardwalk’s fictional characters into an actual historical event) and I wouldn’t be surprised if, with the help of Margaret, he manages to get his hands on that million dollar life insurance policy Arnold Rothstein took out on the now deceased Mickey Doyle back in season one.
With Nucky’s defeat coming in the penultimate episode, what’s left for the finale? The answer may lie in that letter from “Nellie Bly” that Nucky finally takes the time to read as he sits pensively in his soon-to-be vacated office. This week’s flashback scenes mostly revolve around young, orphaned Gillian, whom Nucky – mostly through the insistence of his wife – tries to help, rather than return to the orphanage she ran away from. Again, the casting is impressive, as the young actress playing juvenile Gillian perfectly captures her customary blend of scrappiness and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get by and her strict adherence to notions of what’s proper, like inscribing “From the library of Gillian Darmondy” in a stolen book. We also see Nucky’s first glimpse of the Commodore’s pedophiliac proclivities and how he eventually became implicit in his misdoings. We already know that, through coming into contact with the initially well-meaning Nucky, Gillian eventually finds herself delivered to the Commodore and how that impacted the rest of her life. Throughout the run of the series, Nucky and Gillian have had an adversarial relationship, but “Friendless Child” not only highlighted the similarities between the two, but suggests that their stories will dovetail in a meaningful way in the finale, as Gillian’s written appeal to Nucky (I loved Gretchen Mol’s line reading and how her words were repeated and swirled together to paint a picture of her desperation) sparks images for Nucky of the poor, scrappy orphan asking for help and we all know how much Nucky loves a damsel in distress.
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Kimberlee Rossi-Fuchs is a Senior Writer for Pop-Break, regularly covering Game of Thrones, Louie, Futurama, and Boardwalk Empire, as well as other delectable nuggets of TV, film, and music throughout the year. Since graduating with Highest Honors from Rutgers University with a degree in English, Kimberlee currently finds herself in a financially comfortable, yet stifling corporate environment where her witty and insightful literary and pop culture references are largely met with confused silence and requests to, “Get away from me, weirdo.” Still, she’s often thought of as a modern-day Oscar Wilde (by herself) and one day hopes her wit, charm, and intellect (again, self-perceived) will make her a very wealthy, very drunk woman. She’s also the mother of a darling little boy, Charlie Miles (aka Young Chizzy) who she hopes will grow up to not be too embarrassed of all of the baby pics she relentl
tyhands on Twitter and Instagram @Scarletjupiter
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