* Gyp Rosetti, erotic asphyxiator? Sure, why the fuck not. The best thing about this development is how hugely unoriginal it is. The Sopranos went to the “annoying antagonist gangster is a prevert in the sack” well not once but twice! But this being Boardwalk Empire, it took the thing other shows and films have done a million times and just Boardwalk Empired the hell out of it — in-your-face sweaty hairy bare-assed goggle-eyed vein-popping grunting Gyp jerking off and passing out, and later wandering around the climactic overhead shot from Taxi Driver completely naked, his dick covered in blood, the broken belt wrapped around his neck like a mad dog who pulled its leash free of its master’s hand. Let’s throw in the murder of a teenage boy and a waitress’s rather marvelous bare ass in there too, while we’re at it. It’s all about excess, and Gyp Rosetti is the most excessive of all. Let him stagger through a bloodbath in the nude, by all means. Ecce homo.

* Andrew Mellon! Eddie Cantor! Gaston Means! Bugsy Siegel! Boardwalk Empire‘s ambition is starting to outstrip Game of Thrones‘. Hell, they even stuntcast Mellon, paying James Cromwell for two minutes of work — but this is a show that stuntcast a fucking photograph, with Deadwood‘s Molly Parker showing up as a picture of Nucky’s late (and currently completely forgotten) wife in the pilot, and never ever in the flesh. It’s sort of like watching an anthology series, from week to week.

* Which I like, but the sprawl does keep it from focusing on individual characters or relationships the way it ought to. Richard Harrow has appeared in like ten minutes total so far. Chalky White and Dunn Purnsley spent this episode as glorified muscle. How much would you rather follow Richard around, or spend some time with the White family, than watch Nucky make time with Billie Kent or Margaret take up her latest transparent attempt to placate her own conscience with do-gooding? (I know some of you would toss out the Lansky/Luciano stuff too but I’m sorry, you’re just never going to get me to complain about Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.)

* Top TV director Tim Van Patten comes through with those jarring shots of Gillian and Levander staring right into the camera. And those truly wonderful off-center shots of Luciano and Owen waiting for their bosses to finish arguing — their entire lives defined by the small amount of space they’re permitted to occupy relative to the men who call the shots.

* Bugsy’s mostly an easter egg so far, but in showing how unreliable he is for anything other than unfocused mayhem and rampant sociopathy, the show’s setting up a contrast with Gyp — equally wild, but not exactly destined to create Las Vegas the way Siegel would go on to do. Maybe it comes down to the company you keep.

* Hey, it’s Al Capone! Glad to see him again. I’m a mob nerd, yes, but beyond that I find myself enjoying the show’s presentation of him as…well, you know in the commercials for Honey, I Blew Up the Baby where they have shots of the giant toddler wandering around the city like Godzilla? That’s kind of Capone on this show: an overgrown third-grader, sweet in many ways and funny in many other ways but also not at all someone you’d want to entrust with power over life and death.

* Eli’s great…? Am I really saying that? I never thought much of that character before, to be honest, but quiet, humbled, older-and-wiser is a much better look for him than resentful kid brother. Literally a better look for him, in fact: Shea Whigham’s severity is engrossing to behold. So I’m glad to see him as well.

* And I’m glad to see Owen’s girlfriend again too KNOWHATIMSAYIN

* And at least this time they gave us some attractive male nudity too! Alright, it was from a distance and out of focus, but still, beggars can’t be choosers.

* Fuck nuns, fuck Catholicism — not just annoying, but boring from a dramaturgical standpoint. That scene with Margaret and the smarmy doctor trying to get the nun to agree to use the word “vagina” was precisely the sort of self-congratulatory empty-calorie “LOL the past, aren’t you and I glad we’re so far beyond that now” progressivism porn that Mad Men is often accused of but rarely actually indulges in.

* Man, look at the chipped paint and wood rot on the doors and shutters at the thief’s place. Gorgeous. This show’s attention to detail is seamless.

* Wonderful camerawork in that house, too, from the initial scene of Nucky and Owen winding their way through the labyrinth of liquor through all the cat-and-mouse business with the prohies.

* Nucky resents Owen for not being Jimmy. Not being Jimmy didn’t do young Roland Smith any favors, either. Nuck’s not in the protégé market, not anymore.

* I’m not one for plotting the future course of the shows I watch, but I do wonder if the solution to the Gyp Rosetti situation is for Nuck to loose Richard Harrow on him, and if perhaps setting that up was the purpose of their run-in last week.

* How about the way the massacre was treated, huh? Heard from a distance as Eli sits powerless to stop it, then a god’s eye view of the aftermath? And how about those closing shots of the boardwalk, luminously artificial? I maintain my belief that the show is more than just eyecandy, because there’s nothing just about it.

* That said, Chris Allen responded to my recent enthusiasm for the show by writing one of the better rebuttals to such things I’ve come across in a long time, so, equal time. His comment made me think of three things:

* This is Margaret’s least interesting storyline yet, and that’s saying something.

* I think the simplicity of Gyp’s threat is what makes it threatening, or at least that’s how the show is presenting it. There’s nothing to be outfoxed here — just a supremely well-armed lunatic who picked the right location to make trouble.

* I’m curious if the seemingly tangential Capone and Luciano/Lansky/Siegel storylines are going to remain separate now. Game of Thrones opened that door and I wonder if more shows will step through.

Not much to say about this one other than that I continue to find this show enormously pleasurable to watch, on a purely sensual level. It’s like drinking a really really good beer or having a really delightful experience on ambien. Dream sequences, nude scenes, deeply strange actors, nightmare violence, Bugsy Siegel…Even when you’re not convinced the show’s really saying anything, something special still comes across in experiencing how it’s said.

Gyp Rosetti is the best example of this I can think of. The character is absurd, his clichéd gangster brutality offset primarily by wondering just how a person as obviously crazy and impossible to work with as this guy is still breathing given the company he keeps. Moreover, both we and the other characters totally have his number — once you’ve heard Nucky tell him he could find an insult in a bouquet of roses, you’ll never need to think any harder about Rosetti and his motivations ever again.

But it’s not his actions that matter, it’s the work done to get there. I keep coming back to the camera lingering on Bobby Cannavale’s leathery neanderthal face in the car as he stews and broods and simmers and finally explodes. I love the internet comment-thread semantics of his one-man crusade against NOT taking things personally: “Everyone’s a person though, right? So how else can they take it?” Or as he more forcefully puts it later: “WHAT THE FUCK IS LIFE IF IT’S NOT PERSONAL?” I love the bizarre Blue Velvet lighting of his sojourn in Gillian Darmody’s salon, where he looks like a dangerous animal someone let in and everyone’s trying very politely not to notice. There’s a fire there that belies the standard gangsterisms they build up to. The parts are more than the sum of the whole.

One more point: Richard Harrow is to Boardwalk Empire what the Hound is to Game of Thrones, from the facial disfiguration on down. Nucky’s past terror at this point, at least when it comes to his criminal associates (though not when he fears for his paramours, obviously), but it was still absolutely fascinating to watch him realize, in awe, that before him stood the single deadliest human being he’d ever met.

* If you asked me “What does Boardwalk Empire do well?” I’d point to this episode, I think. Nothing groundbreaking or earthshaking, just a succession of moments, images, and performances, recorded in an emotionally fraught fashion.

* The opening minutes in particular were marvelous — restrained, dreamlike, unmoored from narrative binding. We go straight from a context-free sequence of hole-drilling and goldfish-dumping to a gaunt Eli Thompson, looking like he stepped out of one of those really severe Renaissance portraits, opening a prison door on the great gray world, and cut from his pas de deux with the great Paul Sparks’ Mickey Doyle (“How are you still alive?”) to a similarly Beckettian exchange between Rosetti, who’s growing on me, and the poor dude who works at the gas station outside his hotel. I loved that non-flow flow, and the absence of background music — no context clues to go by here, you’re on your own. “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.”

* And this established the template for most of the episode: little one-on-one scenes in which interesting performances bounce off one another. Nucky and his grinning, nubile songbird. Chalky and his buttoned-up future son-in-law, with the reptilian Dunn Purnsley looking on. Margaret and the rude, pipe-smoking doctor. Eli and the genially sociopathic Owen Sleater. Nucky and motherfucking Stephen Root absolutely killing it as a Southern grotesque, transplanted into high-gangster New York as a presence so alien and malevolent and baffling he may has well have been a Great Old One. All these conversations made you feel the futility of conversing in the first place.

* At any stop along the way you could sit back and marvel at the production values, particularly the use of color — the way they captured the gray of the day at the gas station, or the burnt siena walls of the Root character’s empty meeting room, or the joyless white of the recovery room in the hospital when Margaret visits the woman who miscarried.

* Even the violence was effective because it was, at first at least, much lower-key than we’re used to here, and from a different quarter.

* This ep was also a great example of what people talk about when they say Boardwalk Empire sort of misses where its own best stories might lie. How great would a show about Chalky and his family be? Think of how much you could mine from that: city vs. country, wealth vs. self-made men, class and color within the African-American community of the time, the rise of the Prohibition-enabled criminal class and the position of guys like Chalky in that world, the family dynamic, and on and on and on. Or hell, imagine if the season used Eli as its protagonist, and followed his return to this world and his attempt to find a new, much lower place in it. I’d probably prefer that to whatever’s going to go on with Nucky and Margaret at the center, you know? But I’m happy for the tantalizing glimpses, too.