* 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.

Last week’s Boardwalk Empire today! Sorry for the delay — I had a house full of hurricane refugees and time was short.

* Nice to know that you can have half a face and no ability to modulate the pitch of your voice and you can still say something like “Jimmy deserved better than this” and make it crystal clear what you really mean.

* Hey, Hymie Weiss is being played by Meadow Soprano’s fiancé Finn!

* Poor Van Alden, with that whiskey still pumping away amid his kids. That guy is like this weird swiffer cloth, attracting venality and corruption to him wherever he goes.

* Lotta laugh lines in this one:

Nucky’s man Friday: I am so sorry for your loss.
Nucky: Don’t be an idiot.

Nucky: That’s all you’re gonna give me?
Means: Rather more than you came in with.

And of course Esther’s line about running naked through the pages of the United States Criminal Code for fun.

* My notes for this ep, which all my notes for this show are starting to resemble, are basically a series of OMGs. “Jeeeeeesus that club Mellon’s in.” “Sheesh, that low-angle shot of Gillian pouring Nucky a drink.” “Gyp and Richard. Hoo boy.” “That fucking shot of Chicago.” A series of exciting things to see and think about.

* Margaret’s DTF.

* Capone puts on his hat realizing he’s the boss now, right? He is a weirdly lovable figure on this show.

* No question whatsoever that that asshole at the iron company was getting an iron in the face. You really have to admire how far the show went into the absurd with that whole sequence. They’re really making very little effort to either make Van Alden less of a mutant or to tie him into the prevailing tone of the rest of the show.

* The Billie situation was easy enough to see coming, particularly when we start getting her “just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world” backstory. Ah well. Goodbye, Nadine Beckenbauer.

* One thing Boardwalk Empire’s detractors miss is its sense of humor. To hear tell, you’d think it was a thing of leaden tough-guy self-seriousness. In reality it’s the kind of show that cold opens on a corrupt-cop ex-con skulking around his yard hiding what you think is evidence or weaponry, then reveals it to be Easter eggs.

* Another thing they miss — and somewhat more understandably, since the show’s undoubtedly too blustery in this regard from time to time — is how focused it is in delineating the violence its violent characters are capable of. This episode was a high water mark for two such portrayals, Richard and Gyp. We’ve learned over the course of the past couple seasons that Richard isn’t quite the dead-behind-the-eyes broken man who once proclaimed that people have no connection to each other. And in this season — this episode — in particular we’ve seen that there’s enough humanity left inside him for him to be genuinely sweet, protective, and even flirtatious, as opposed to a broken man attempting to recreate what that would be like, like Frankenstein’s monster tossing the little girl in the water. But man, when you trigger him, he is ready to go, the most compunctionlessly lethal man on the show. Listen to how he says “He hits you?” when he misinterprets his would-be girlfriend’s line about going at it with her father like prizefighters, or how he says with evident honesty that he’ll kill the guy if he doesn’t let go of Tommy. Richard’s capable of valuing certain individual lives, but that’s a choice he makes on an ad hoc basis. He does not feel that life has any inherent value. I wonder if his lady friend will realize that before it’s too late for her or someone she cares about — that his threat to kill her father wasn’t bluster at all.

* Meanwhile, I feel more and more confident about comparing Gyp to various Sopranos Bad Guys of the Season (I did that, right? I should have), because he’s becoming what dudes like Richie Aprile and Ralph Cifaretto and Phil Leotardo were — comically creepy funhouse-mirror versions of the protagonists’ more nuanced and tortured villainy. So now, on top of his erotic-asphyxiation fetish and wandering through a bloodbath with his dick out and a dog collar around his neck, we get that hilarious mama’s-boy staring match with his mom and the other ladies of the house, and mugging a priest for the poor-box money, and literally screaming at Jesus for not giving him any friends, and learning that his ill-fated attempt to spite Nucky for allegedly snubbing him cost him most of his territory at home, and just completely failing at convincing his boss he’s good for anything but maybe taking down a few of his enemies in a blaze of glory. So this is our answer to how Gyp could possibly have gotten as far as he did: dumb luck, which just ran out.

* Another point in the show’s favor? Its artiness, even when that artiness is self-conscious. Sure, that beautiful shot of the two Mrs. Thompsons as Margaret reveals Nucky’s infidelity, and Eli’s wife’s reaction to that revelation, were heavy-handed, but who cares? It was still a beautiful shot. Unnecessarily so, like the later shot of the flash going off when Richard gets his picture taken on the boardwalk.

* Pretty profoundly anti-war, this show: the patriotic music playing as Tommy discovers the dead son’s toy soldiers, the old man audibly weeping after he shuts himself in his son’s room. Oh jeez, that last bit.

* Remarkably uncomfortable filmmaking, all those lingering and sensual close-ups of Gillian’s hand washing her ersatz Jimmy’s body long after we’ve realized she intends him ill. Injecting him with an overdose of heroin came as a blessed relief compared to the trauma I figured she was about to inflict on that bare flesh.

* I’m glad, by the way, that there was a reason behind this murder, and that she wasn’t simply becoming some kind of Elizabeth Bathory/black widow psychopath.

* How do Richard, and Nucky, handle this obvious bullshit about Jimmy ODing? That’s my big question.

* Another question: In real life, we know that Gyp Rosetti doesn’t kill Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, or Bugsy Siegel. How do they make his quest for vengeance on Masseria’s behalf suspenseful and able to hold its dramatic weight, then? I worry for Margaret’s kids, pretty much. I know I’m supposed to, that this threat has been hinted at for some time this season (giving the dead man’s dog to Margaret, the business with the gypsy man who burned the greenhouse, the son and his knife, the constant references to guards and Margaret asking Nucky whether they’d be in danger, etc.) and could therefore be a misdirect, but I do worry.

Last week’s Boardwalk Empire thoughts today!

* That scene in the Legion Hall gave me that Barton Fink feeling. Not the movie Barton Fink, but a play written by the character Barton Fink — stagey, overearnest, and political, yeah, political! What a funny vibe to go for.

* Some marvelously weird framing in this one: Margaret dismissing her guard who can be seen only through a window on the opposite end of the frame; Billie entering her apartment as viewed from some weird angle on the staircase. Because why not?

* For some reason, the enormous height differences between the singing Boy Scouts made me laugh out loud. That whole scene had this off sense of humor — I love the idea of the thoroughly corrupt Harry Doherty protecting his less than useless old Boy Scout buddy at all costs.

* Amazing how gross and disturbing a mere spanking can be now, isn’t it?

* I was just wondering where the DA played by Julianne Nicholson went! Now we know. Glad to see her.