* 1. Mad Men 2. Breaking Bad 3. Boardwalk Empire

* Boardwalk “Blackwater”

* I’m consistently entertained by this show, and amazed by that entertainment. I mean it. I haven’t re-read all my reviews so I’m not 100% sure, but I’m almost there: I don’t think I once reached the closing credits this season thinking “Meh,” let alone “Goddammit.” That puts Boardwalk in very rare company indeed. So I’ll go to war for this show, one of the great pleasures of my life over the past few months. I wish a fraction of the ink spilled over that shitty Homeland episode had been spent on this magnificent thing, this pretty hate machine.

* I’m not sure what new thing I can add to all the reasons I’ve cited before as to why I think this show really has become Great TV. Here’s what I said about it this time last year:

I think that when genre material gets sufficiently dark or weird, when its tropes become a form of sinister spectacle rather than just hitting the marks required by convention, that’s a depth all its own — a way to communicate the emotional and philosophical themes more commonly articulated by plot and dialogue, if at all. Boardwalk Empire the balls-to-the-wall engine of gorgeously shot death that perverts and slaughters its characters in periodic fits of nihilism is saying at least as much as some theoretical Boardwalk Empire the meticulously drawn character study, or Boardwalk Empire the rigorously developed allegory for contemporary political issues.

You can quibble over the quality of the execution, and that’s perfectly valid. But to dismiss Boardwalk Empire as phony baloney, as faux-Great TV, to say it’s empty-calorie gangsterism, is to make an argument that aesthetic sensation is inherently empty sensation. Personally, I think watching beautifully backlit bodies jerk from machine-gun fire for half a minute as men whoop and cheer says something without speaking. Same as a distorted guitar. Same as a visit from the Black Lodge. Its superrealism is real to me. There’s a line I wrote down from this episode and now I don’t know who said it, or when, or why, and google doesn’t help, but here: “Where’s the God in this?” As real as it gets.

* Part of the problem, perhaps, is that it’s obvious to everyone watching that this will never be a show that will make its audience complain “When is someone gonna get whacked?” This will never be a show that will frustrate audience expectations — delay their gratification in service of playing a season-long game instead of an episode-by-episode one, sure, but never frustrate them. For God’s sake, Terence Winter wrote “Pine Barrens” and spent the rest of his tenure on The Sopranos trying to convince David Chase to resolve the fate of the Russian. Is there a more perfectly illustrative anecdote than that in the history of television? The trick is to deliver what the audience expects in a way that feels like it fulfills those expectations rather than panders to them. Does Boardwalk pull it off? Watch the Richard sequence from this episode and then you tell me.

* It’s easy to overlook in light of everything else that happened — happened seconds later, even — but I think Gillian’s storyline in this episode was the first time I felt Boardwalk Empire really did right by one of its female characters, really treated her plight, her scheme, her damage with same sense of enormity with which it’s treated those of the men for so long. Her sexual brinksmanship with Gyp Rosetti amazed me.

Having driven away the men who could have protected her and Tommy from the depredations of Gyp and his goons, Gillian realizes, too late, that the Artemis Club truly is no place for a child, or even for her. So she attempts to free herself and her grand/son from captivity with the only weapon she has: her ability to figure out what men want, and deliver. This is likely the most high-stakes gamble she’s ever taken with her sexuality since the bad old days of her childhood relationship with the Commodore. Gyp is a 1) thin-skinned 2) sociopath who gets off on 3) sado-masochistic 4) humiliation and 5) asphyxiation: any one of those ingredients are potentially lethal to a prostitute forced to do business with them, let alone all of them in tandem with nothing less than the life of child in the balance. However monstrous and unsympathetic Gillian’s behavior has been throughout the last two seasons, I felt nothing but tremendous sadness for her as she put her body and dignity on the line, probing Gyp for his sexual secrets, delicately taking one step at a time until at last he put himself where she needed him to be. How devastating for her and us both that her best, the sum total of everything she’d been forced to learn by the men who preyed on her for years and years and made her into a predator in turn, wasn’t good enough. “Someone’s gotta lose.” Ugh, ugh, ugh.

* Her subsequent “conversation” with Nucky, after suddenly appearing, beatific and from out of nowhere, in a hallway full of dead people, was the episode’s most explicitly dreamlike moment, and as I’ve said over and over the show is rarely better than when it’s dragging the structure and imagery of nightmares into the real world. This was Nucky’s earlier hallucinations of a young Jimmy Darmody made real — a sudden and unavoidable encounter with the past in living form. What a nightmare for Gillian, and what a collision with the uncanny for the baffled, then horrified Nucky. Never forget, Enoch.

* Even Margaret’s material worked, at long last. Kelly MacDonald goes a long way toward overlooking how poorly the show has historically done by Margaret. Her rapidfire 180-degree morality turns throughout season one were a mess, and her fixation on religious guilt during season two was more consistent but also more dull, since nothing is death to drama like Roman Catholicism. For a long time it seemed like her newfound interest in women’s reproductive health and freedom was just a new way to atone after the failures of temperance and Jesus.

* But when she stepped out of the communal bathroom after her abortion and encountered the Luciferian presence of Nucky in the hallway, mirroring the miscarriage that brought him to her in the pilot episode, it all clicked for me: For the women of Boardwalk Empire biology is destiny and pregnancy is a life sentence. Margaret loses her baby at her abusive husband’s hands, driving her to Nucky (and driving Nucky to order a murder, for what I believe to be the first time). Years later, her pregnancy with Owen is the final straw for her decision to leave Nucky, and she abandons Nucky and (more importantly?) his money within minutes of reaching down between her legs and finding blood following her abortion. Pregnancy through rape irrevocably altered the lives of Gillian Darmody and her young son. Pregnancy by Jimmy wedded Angela Darmody to a man, a life, and a sexuality she had no business with. The first Mrs. Van Alden was kept in lonely thrall by her husband’s decision not to fund fertility treatments for her, and left him once she discovered he’d impregnated another woman. That woman, Lucy Danziger, viewed her pregnancy as parasitical, sucking away her life and looks and freedom, and ran from it as soon as she could. The inability of women of this time period to control their own lives without being able to control their own bodies is as much of a throughline through all three seasons as anything on the show. You wouldn’t know to look at it that Boardwalk Empire is one of the most feminist and pro-choice shows on television, but there you have it.

* That opening shot. Slo-mo balletic violence! Full Peckinpah! Slowly seguing into normal-speed villain walking up and firing into the camera! Full Scorsese! Margaret closes the door on Nucky at the end! Full Coppola! Nucky puts on a hat and disappears into the crowd! Full Silence of the Lambs! Not a show that’s afraid to wear its influences on its lapel.

* Also not a show that’s afraid to bob and weave a bit in terms of where you expect the weight of the narrative to fall. Who else thought we were headed for a big one-time-only winner-take-all assault? Instead we open with a gang-war montage (Godfather again, but violent like Casino) that takes place over the course of at least a couple weeks. It’s the inverse of how I expected all of season two to lead up to Jimmy, Eli, and the Commodore’s coup against Nucky, which instead happened in the first episode.

* You’d have to dig a couple seasons back into Breaking Bad to find a more delightful cast of heavies, by the way. A brief highlight reel:

** Mickey Doyle’s giddily obnoxious telephone exchange with Arnold Rothstein: “Am I disturbing you?” “Yes.” “Oh. Alright.”

** The sweat pouring down the face of the big undercover cop as he beats Luciano up.

** Meyer Lansky’s face as he contemplates Luciano’s screw-up on their way up to see Rothstein. Yikes. A glimpse of the coldness you expect from the guy who’ll dream up the Commission. (Which, you might have noticed, Nucky Thompson proposed a few episodes back.)

** Rothstein’s “heh, what a goon” smile as Masseria curses at Meyer and Charlie.

** Capone’s street-fighter stance vs. Chalky’s prizefighter stance.

** Michael Stuhlbarg’s inexpressive doll eyes and flat affect as he demands 99% of the distillery as payment for helping Nucky not die.

** Gaston Means leaning into the frame to deliver two whispered words in the ears of a great man and thus change the landscape of American criminality.

* Then there’s the late, lamented Gyp Rosetti. I loved his suddenly gentlemanly affectation as he instructs his goons to please show Miss Darmody in. I loved the obliviously rotten job he did of playing along with Gillian’s affection for children when asked how old his daughters are: “Sixteen and fourteen, I think.” I loved the veiled threat as he repeated Tommy’s age back to Gillian: “Six. Got his whole life ahead of him.” I loved how hungry he was to reveal his masochism, given the slightest prompt, but how he cagily first cloaked it in sadism. This was all in the space of a single conversation, by the way, during which he also split the double Ts in “settled” the way my Brooklynite grandfather used to do. Need I even mention his final scene, the unhinged way in which he launches into his Nucky impression, then launches his face at his goons as he completes it by bugging his eyes out? A magnificent character, a go-for-broke performance, funny on purpose in a way Homeland doesn’t have the brains or stones to be, pretty much ever. Bobby Cannavale, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, this? I’ve had entire mornings like this on a weekly basis for months now. I get it. I get it.

* Finally, Richard. Richard Harrow. This is tricky territory, because whatever else it was, however successful it was, Richard’s rampage was fanservice. I mean, let’s be honest about it. Winter’s described it as such in interviews, not using the term but echoing the intent. As such it could be one of those maybe-slightly-too-cornpone moments — the drunk embittered veteran dad letting Tommy sleep in his late son’s room; Nucky lighting a cigarette and throwing his carnation on the ground — writ show-ruiningly large. And talk about referencing the crime-movie pantheon: This is Taxi Driver given a Jason Bourne makeover. Also a potential disaster.

It worked as well as anything I’ve ever seen on television. The choreography, the staging and layout and pacing, Huston’s performance and how he used his character’s clipped way of moving and his incongruously tweedy get-up and his unseeing eye to turn himself into a totally unique and convincing action hero, all that was great, yes. But what made it was the ending, and the confrontation with that marvelously well-cast creep with the flaring nostrils and the schoolmarmish way of saying “Put it…down” and the totally believable nihilism of “You think I give a FUCK?” When Tommy ran to Richard and hugged him as we watched through the blood-spattered glass, I started to sob. Big tearless spasms wracking my entire body. I sobbed for a little boy’s chance to feel safe and loved again — I have a father’s weakness, now, for children made to suffer. And I sobbed for a man who’s spent years killing people, because he believes people have no connection to each other, finally connecting. Not because I look for the heart of gold inside every mass murderer, but because Richard’s nihilism is something that haunts me every fucking day I get up in the morning, and I want to believe that damaged people aren’t forever trapped in their damage. Hashing this out in the context of an unstoppable killing machine in a Phantom of the Opera mask orchestrating a gangland massacre to protect the child he loves isn’t bullshit, it’s a way to make the event as big as the emotion. That’s why I love Boardwalk Empire. It’s as big as you feel.

* “Everything connects, Charlie, whether you know it or not.”

* I’ll tell you all what: I could get used to this show totally leveling up every time it reaches a season’s penultimate episode, that’s for sure. Last year’s nightmarish, flashback-haunted “Under God’s Power, She Flourishes” displayed the show’s most confident and stylish filmmaking since Martin Scorsese’s pilot and, with its revelations about Jimmy, Gillian, and Angela’s past and its final Oedipal confrontation, essentially unveiled, for the first time, what the show was really about, how it saw itself, how it worked best. I don’t think anything quite so dramatic and revelatory went on here, but what we got was in its own way almost as impressive: thread after thread after thread being firmly pulled in the same direction from opposite corners of the room and woven together with furious determination. Just a relentlessly suspenseful and enjoyable episode. When it ended, I laughed and clapped with delight.

* What a great decision to make Nucky’s relationship with his afterthought of an assistant, Eddie, the center of the episode. For starters, well, who doesn’t like Eddie? He’s virtually never been used for anything but mild and effective comic relief, sort of like a Muppet, so no one in the audience is gonna go “Yeah, ice that guy.” Shrewd.

* On a deeper level, maybe we needed to see the only person left who genuinely loves and trusts Nucky come under threat, and see Nucky rise to the occasion and risk everything because it turns out he loves and trusts him back, to keep us invested in Nucky’s plight. If you were uncharitable you could see this as a cheat on the show’s part, a way to make sure we all see that Nucky’s not a villain but an antihero, that he still has a heart of gold deep down in there despite his monstrousness. But it felt truer than that in the moment. Or at least I was willing to cut it some slack.

* Finally, seeing and hearing Eddie, who normally operates at a consistent level of befuddlement, give way to absolute fight-or-flight panic sold the threat like few other things could have, particularly given the number of assassination attempts Nucky has already survived. There were a lot of standout details in that initial attack on Nucky’s suite at the Ritz, from the dead phone to the shootout staged almost entirely through a hole in the door, but Eddie’s desperate cry of “Noocky!” to warn his boss about the gunman behind him will stick with me most of all.

* And how’s this for an increase in scale: Gyp Rosetti conquered Atlantic City. That took my breath away, when I realized that’s what the show was doing. This wasn’t just a hit squad, it was the vanguard of an invading army. They stormed the palace, killed the royal guard, assumed control. When Gyp’s sidekick started talking about meeting with the ward bosses and letting them know it was business as usual it really brought it all home for me. This was one of the clearest demonstrations yet of the show’s belief that crime, like war, is politics by another name.

* Looks like we’re headed for Richard Harrow’s Taxi Driver moment. A few thoughts about that:

** It would seem like my theory about Richard being Nucky’s endgame against Gyp is both wrong and right. There likely won’t be any collusion between the two of them, but Richard will still fulfill that basic role by killing his way through Gyp’s headquarters.

** “Everything connects” indeed: That scene from early in the season when Nucky learns with awe just how deadly Richard is was done to establish this eventuality. And Richard’s relationships with Tommy and with his girlfriend and her father were done to give him motivation. And Gillian’s murder of a false Jimmy was done to sever whatever loyalty he may once have felt to her.

** Does Gillian not realize what kind of person Richard is? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way: Does she not know what he did in the war, or what he did in Jimmy’s employ? Judging from her recent dialogue she appears to think of him in the same condescending terms you’d expect from her about someone who was “feeble-minded” — a gentle, damaged freak she takes pity on but no longer has any use for. Do you all think this is a viewpoint she could reasonably have come to?

** Jack Huston is very, very good in this role. The mask hides that, maybe, and the CGI makeup effects, and the monotone voice. But man, even though he only has one eye and half a mouth to work with, when that switch in Richard goes off, boy oh boy can you see it. It’s terrifying.

** And exciting, let’s be honest. As high-minded as I make myself be about art-violence, it’s thrilling and cathartic to see a practiced killing machine let loose. That overhead shot of Richard assembling his arsenal? I mean, come on, that’s the sort of thing you cheer about. At least I do. I don’t respect myself in the morning, if that helps.

* Lucky getting busted for heroin: another “everything connects” moment? This removes him from the playing field as a potential protector for Gillian, his partner in the brothel. It badly weakens Rothstein and Lansky. Given the expense of his and Lansky’s secret deal with Masseria it throws Masseria’s organization into disarray as well.

* Why not make the undercover cop a fake mute with a gnarly throat scar? Why not stage the buy on a rooftop flapping with laundry?

* Very, very happy to see Nucky interact with my beloved Dunn Purnsley, however briefly. I loved Purnsley’s grin after he and Chalky dispatched the Rosetti thugs who were about to search their truck for Nucky, like, “See? I told you we were loyal, asshole.”

* Laugh out loud line from Chalky: “All due respect, General Custer: This ain’t no spot for a last stand.” All the material involving Chalky hiding Nucky and Eddie was gold. Creatively staged in an interesting set, with easy-to-understand parameters for success and failure, and a crackerjack setpiece in the form of Rosetti’s Italians facing off against Chalky’s African-Americans, all of them bristling with firearms.

* Am I the only one with visions of posters for Boardwalk Empire Season Four featuring a picture of Nucky and Chalky standing back to back or face to face with a tagline like “TWO KINGS”? If things go well for them this Sunday, Chalky becomes the single most important person in Nucky’s organization (if he wasn’t already), and a fixture of the boardwalk, AC’s public face. He could easily be the new opposite pole around which the story revolves. That’d be great, wouldn’t it?

* The ending? Pure fanservice. Fuck it, I’m game. So game that I’m willing to forgive the martial drums and, you know, the very notion of Eli and Purnsley showing up with the calvary in the form of Al goddamn Capone, America’s kindliest young gangster. After all, the beauty of this set-up is that the show is harnessing historical inevitability as a tool in its storytelling arsenal as unequivocally as it ever has. A fight between Al Capone and “Gyp Rosetti” can only end one way. Hahaha!

* A fight between “Richard Harrow” and “Gyp Rosetti,” on the other hand… 🙁

* What’s Capone’s game here? We’ve established that Torrio’s in semi-retirement, content to leave the operation of the Chicago outfit in Capone’s hands, up to and including picking fights with rival gangs. We’ve established that Remus is down for the count and the Midwest needs a reliable supplier, and Nucky’s man Mickey Doyle is running Mellon’s operation. We know he milked Van Alden for information about Dean O’Banion’s operation. We know that Capone — showCapone, anyway — hates bullies.

* Bravo. Onward to victory.

* A dream comes true. Echoing your opening credits in your opening scene is a surefire signal that something momentous is going to happen in the episode, that’s for sure. And while we’re on the subject of how this show brings the dream world into the real world, that shot of Neptune running into the sea was disproportionately unnerving to me. Typhoon! Typhoon!

* The smiling old woman with the rotten teeth was a big moment, too. I don’t know…I just feel like this show has gotten really, really confident in its ability to wordlessly, plotlessly communicate itself.

* Gaston Means is fucking phenomenal. That’s mostly Stephen Root at work, of course: the snake-oil accent, the purred one-liners (“I hope you don’t choose a surgeon on the same basis”), the way he smizes after advising Jess Smith to take his money and “consign it to the fires of hell,” the obviousness of how unused to being caught off guard he is with Smith surprises him in the middle of his home invasion, his IDGAF grin after Smith takes care of the job for him. But it’s also how Means is being presented as a character: Here’s a guy who in the case of Smith alone is playing trusted advisor to at least three people that we know of, all of whom are at literally mortal odds by the end of the gambit. Here’s a guy who’ll double-book a hired gun to people on opposite ends of a conflict, only to serve as his own triggerman. He couldn’t be further removed from the immigrant-gangster milieu of the New York/New Jersey/Chicago Jewish/Irish/Italian criminals, yet he demonstrates that a true genius for graft knows no ethnicity. I hope the show gives him room to breathe — its track record for this sort of character puts him at about 2:1 odds against.

* Speaking of: Please let a negro nightclub be Chalky’s ticket to increased screen time and plot prominence.

* Also speaking of: I liked Owen. Hailing as he did from the auld sod, how could I, Sean Thomas Patrick Collins, not like Owen? But…did he ever really get off the ground as a character? Better: Did he ever really reveal his character? It was never clear to me whether he was ever truly down for the Cause or simply a gangster who went where the market for his talents provided. It was never clear to me if he was the compunctionless killer who choked a man to death in a men’s room and remorseless liar who proposed to poor Katie knowing full well he’d be skipping out on her, or the romantic who apparently sincerely planned a life on the lam with Margaret and her two-point-five kids. This made it difficult to know how to feel about pretty much everything he said and did in this episode.

* Crystal clear how to feel about our final glimpse of him, though: jesus, that was grim, grim business — high-Godfather mafia-movie violence at its most dramatic and unpleasant. Margaret’s dragged-out screaming and sobbing and flailing in response was all but unbearable. Certainly that character’s finest moment in a long, long time.

* Regarding Means and Owen, and also Lansky & Luciano’s betrayal of Nucky & Owen to their former rival Masseria: Their respective storylines in this episode embody something Terence Winter said in interviews after the conclusion of season two: that among other things, the show turns out to be a show about the difference between people who are able to make a go of high-level high-stakes criminality versus those that aren’t. This, I suppose, is how he squared the circle of having people named Al Capone interact with people named “Jimmy Darmody” — since we know what the show can and can’t do with those two sets of people, they might as well make it a theme.

* Richard’s galpal looks a little bit like Gillian Darmody, doesn’t she?

* The shovel to the protruding head murder is one of the most appalling I can remember seeing on television. If Owen-in-a-box is The Godfather, Gyp’s execution of his underling’s hapless fisherman cousin is Casino. Makes me wonder if my “Richard is the endgame” theory is incorrect and Gyp’s heretofore acquiescent underling will be his boss’s undoing.

Last week’s thoughts today, again!

* “The man is on the phone. The gypsy.” Nightmare phrasing right there. This show is actually quite good at tipping reality juuust over into nightmare. In fact, now that I write that out, isn’t that what Nucky’s impairment following his concussion is all about? Giving his speech and thought process the non-sequitur, molasses-slow quality of the show’s dream sequences? I thought it was tremendously effective, placing him in a dimension just slightly alternate to reality like that.

* Actually, while we’re on the subject, isn’t that the point of Gyp Rosetti at this point as well? Gyp’s reality is obviously all too real to him — from what we’ve seen last week and this week he’s barely holding it together — but that surreal, unpredictable intensity makes him a nightmare figure to everyone else. The guy strode on to the beach to look on his works while wearing a tri-corner hat, for pete’s sake. If Nucky saw that he wouldn’t know if he was awake, asleep, or hallucinating.

* “I’ll wear that fucking dago’s guts like a necktie.” I wonder if it’s Margaret’s failure to get with the handsome liberal doctor that’s pushing her toward escaping her marriage to a murderous monster by running away with…the murderous monster’s chief enforcer. Maybe it’s just those smilin’ Irish eyes of his.

* Tommy’s an artist, just like his mother.

* Everyone at the Legion hall loves Richard. Whatever’s broken inside him, they don’t see it.

* I still think he’s Nucky’s endgame against Gyp, somehow.

* Enormously depressing, watching all the real-life gangsters wash their hands of Nucky. Depressing even though I know the basic contours of Joe Masseria’s career and thus could predict how this particular segment of it would shake out. Now, I suppose, we learn how well the show can manage building up real-world people into characters knowing full well they can only take them off the board at the appointed time.