Here’s tonight’s recap:
When last we left Boardwalk Empire, it was a proverbial bloodbath. Ho boy! We saw the ambitious Gyp Rosetti stabbed to death by his assistant while taking a leak. (A lot of people were relieved.) Margaret Thompson loses it after her lover Owen’s head, with whom she was planning to run away, is delivered to her in a box, putting the final nail in the coffin of her and Nucky’s marriage. She heads off to New York for an abortion.
Meanwhile, I’m sure viewers all heaved a sigh of relief when Tommy’s protector Richard Harrow stole him away from his crazy grandmother Gillian and dropped him off at girlfriend Julia’s house before he disappeared, leaving behind his hopes for a normal life. Or did he? We see him kill three different people, but we don’t know why.
Nucky? Well, he was in the middle of a full-out gang war, after trying unsuccessfully to build an alliance with New York against Rosetti. Oh, and back in Chicago, former Treasury agent Nelson Van Alden, who’s just trying to keep his insane Norwegian wife off his back, was arrested while selling her homemade hooch. Al Capone and his brothers are trying to expand their control of Cicero. (And gets a little… angry when a reporter misspells his name.)
This season opens in 1924, with Nucky trying to keep a low profile while running the Onyx Club on the boardwalk with Chalky. It’s never that simple with Nucky: He’s trying to make peace with Joe Masseria and the Arnold Rothstein gang over the war with Rosetti.
* Chalky’s partner Dunn Purnsley ends up killing Dicky after Dicky’s wife throws herself at him. Dicky shows up, points a gun at the guy’s head and makes a few racial slurs. Naturally, Dunn had to stab him to death with a broken bottle!
* The creepily sociopathic and incestuous madam Gillian is trying to regain custody of Tommy. Only (oops!) now she’s a drug addict and trying desperately to sell the brothel mansion to Ron Livingston, who you may remember as the famous Berger from Sex and the City (who broke up with Carrie on a Post-It note). I have a feeling his breakups on BE are going to be a bit bloodier.
* There’s a very strange new federal agent by the name of Warren Knox in town.
* They’d better bring Margaret back. They’re lacking a moral balance without her.
Margaret, for moral balance? She may be the most corrupt member of the group. Every word she utters and every move she makes is calculated. Talk about the dictionary definition of guile.