My review of tonight’s premiere is up at Rolling Stone. I compare Joffrey to a Bichon Frisé on its way to the veterinarian to get its anal glands expressed, so there’s that.

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Yep.

I wrote about the season finale of Downton Abbey for Rolling Stone.

Can’t think of very many things I’ve had more fun writing about than this season of this show. Thanks for reading.

Broken record time: I find comedy series confounding to write about, because for me writing about TV is calculating how details of setting and shooting and performance add up to something, but with comedy you can’t solve the equation because the need for jokes is an undefinable variable. The joke needs must be king and it trumps all the usual concerns, even on series with heavy narrative serialization and a lot of dramatic moments the inclusion of which used to create “very special episodes” but which are now pretty common across the board. (Scrubs, an overlooked single-camera comedy trailblazer, did this in literally every episode.) Girls is basically a dramedy that has more in common with Mad Men than with Arrested Development, but it still throws those confounding curveballs, exaggerating specific aspects of the characters and milieu for comedic effect. (“Specific” is key here, of course — it’s not flat-out ridiculous — but still.) But just because I don’t write about it very often doesn’t mean I don’t like it an awful lot.

Judging from twitter and Google Reader posts I tried not to read for fear of spoilers, this past week’s episode, “Another Man’s Trash,” was something of a breakout for the show, and having seen it it’s easy to see why. For starters, TV nerds no doubt have to appreciate the humor in borrowing a bottle-episode structure but having half the cast stuck in the bottle be Patrick Wilson.

But its real brilliance is in creating suspense based solely on the show’s established story structure. We’ve all seen Girls before, and we know that anytime something’s going well for Hannah, someone says something that destroys the magic and brings it all crashing down — she’s getting along great with a job interviewer until she makes a date-rape joke about him; she’s having the coked-up time of her life with her gay ex until he tells her he fucked her female best friend, etc. So you spend her entire lost-weekend idyll waiting for the other shoe to drop…

…and it legit seems like it won’t! Hannah and her handsome doctor Joshua keep having sex — lots of it, all over his splendid house, driven by frank and honest statements of arousal and desire that took her months to get to with her ex-boyfriend Adam, if she ever really got to them at all. They lounge, they joke around, they sit quietly reading and eating, they tease each other, they go to sleep and wake up and do it all again. For once she seems able to accept that she and a romantic interest (substitute “friend” or “professional peer” and it’d be the same deal, for her) are on a level playing field.

Why? At one point Joshua tells her she’s beautiful, and when he asks her doesn’t she think so?, she replies something like yes, but that’s not the feedback she’s used to getting. That’s the key here: Joshua’s very existence is the new feedback. Physically stunning, smart, successful, kind, wealthy — Hannah’s holding her own with someone who’s all these things. One of the reasons I love Downton Abbey and Mad Men so much is their emphasis on how the emotional feedback people receive from their friends and colleagues shapes who they are able to be and become; this is the best feedback loop Hannah’s had in ages. If you’ve ever had one of these whirlwind weekends (or whenever) where your every waking and sleeping moment is consumed by someone wonderful you’re in the process of discovering and being discovered by, you know exactly how powerful, arousing, fulfilling, transforming that feedback loop can be. And don’t mistake me—it’s not at all a situation where “oh, someone good likes me, now I feel validated as a person.” It’s more like she’s thrown herself into the deep end and realized she could swim like a motherfucker all along.

That’s her undoing, of course. She believes herself to be totally safe, so after her inhibitions are worn down by getting all light-headed and passing out in the shower, she lets loose with a torrent of pure Hannah solipsism for which Joshua is completely unprepared. It’s heartbreaking to see how Hannah’s emotional awareness works — how she’s initially totally clueless that she’s coming on too strong, that she’s treating Joshua like a journal rather than a person with his own emotions and agency, that she’s being enormously condescending and dismissive to his life; but how the very moment she senses the possibility of rejection, she picks up on those cues and attacks them like a shark that smells blood in the water. She’s clueless unless and until she picks up on someone reacting negatively to that cluelessness, at which point she becomes an emotional Sherlock Holmes.

It was very funny, very sexy, very specific, and very sad. We’re lucky to have the show that gave it to us.

I sure love writing about this show, and tonight there was twice as much to write about it. Click for my review at Rolling Stone.

It’s hard to review the series premieres of New Golden Age prestige cable dramas because, like most series premieres, they play to the cheap seats. It’s all about hooks and making an impact and keeping butts in seats for subsequent episodes, right? So you begin your series about undercover superspies with Felicity sucking some dude’s dick. You use central-casting KGB and CIA heavies spouting patriotic Cold War boilerplate that hindsight gives us the ability to see right through. You do a lot of stuff where the cute all-American kids eat breakfast and like ten feet away there’s a defector tied up in the trunk with a gimp gag in his mouth. You play it broad, and you hope two things when you do so: 1) That “broad” will get the audiences you want to come back, and 2) That the critics you also want on your side will remember that series no less august than The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and Mad Men (and more recently Girls) started with their broadest episodes, too. Enough landmark series started this way that you almost forget it could be done differently.

But it can, and that’s The Americans‘ problem. The most obvious example is Homeland, which will one day be remembered as the punchline in some inside-baseball “You know what beat the Mad Men season with the Mystery Date/Signal 30/Far Away Places/At the Codfish Ball/Lady Lazarus run of back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back masterpieces for Best Drama?” TV-critic joke, started with a drum-taut yet intriguingly elliptical episode dealing with many of the same subjects but completely devoid of “You’d betray the Motherland?!”-style evil-Soviet dialogue. Oh it got there eventually alright, but it took a season and a half. Twin Peaks‘ pilot was probably the weirdest thing ever to air on network television up till that point but its weirdness, like all of David Lynch’s best stuff and unlike any of his imitators, was rigorously observed, and rooted in empathy for human suffering and a desire to probe what drives us to cause it. (The empty desk in the classroom is the structuring absence of the whole series, really.) Lost‘s opening 10 minutes were among the most thrilling opening-10-minutes of anything committed to film by anyone that decade, but they drew much of their strength from the un-thrilling emotion of panic. Even in the violent black comedies that were the pilots for The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, there were character moments (Tony staring at the painting, Walter talking into the camera) and images (the ducks and the pants, both flying away) that iced anything The Americans did in its premiere despite having, quite unnecessarily, twice as long to do it in.

So I’m left wondering what it is I’m going to get. Will it tighten up and calm down, or is this as good as it gets?

A few things make me worry it’s the latter, and make me worry a lot more than even the broadness does. Top of the list: It’s just way too early to have our undercover anti-heroes Phillip and Elizabeth dance right up to the edge of defecting. Way, way too early. By sticking that right in the premiere — by having Phillip actually start doing it, only to change his mind in order to white-knight for his wife when he finds out the captured defector he’d planned to exchange for a life in witness protection had once raped her — you’ve shown us that at any moment, the characters are capable of solving their story’s equation. This sleeper-agent life is untenable if they want to preserve their lives and their children’s happiness in the face of an increasingly implacable Reaganite enemy? Simple: Turn yourselves in, collect literally millions of dollars, move on and live the life you’re more or less happy living already.

So it falls on Elizabeth to erect an artificial obstacle to the obvious, story-ending solution. Writer-creator Joe Weisberg assigns Keri Russell the thankless task of preventing Phillips eminently reasonable and moral decision to defect by swearing her fealty to Mother Russia and, in the immortal words of Alvy Singer, “screaming about Socialism.” Just as it was unfair of Homeland to make poor Dana Brody a mouthpiece for skepticism regarding the danger of her father’s situation, danger we in the audience knew to be very real, so too is it too much for The Americans to ask of Elizabeth to justify the entire show’s existence with jingoistic horseshit on behalf of a system we know is just years away from collapse anyway

Unfortunately, unlike her fellow ’90s-network-TV refugees cum Great Drama leads Bryan Cranston and Claire Danes, it’s not immediately clear that Russell’s bringing much to the table beyond simply having been cast against type. She’s a stunning human being — that hair, unf; feel guilty she has to straighten it but not that guilty — and the show uses that physicality to make her both convincingly sexy and convincingly powerful and dangerous as a physical combatant, but her shaky Russian accent and emotionally depthless delivery of Russian-villain speeches make the performance and the character feel as hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny. I believe that this Elizabeth could do what she does for as long as she’s done it, but I’m left guessing as to why — particularly when you see what the Soviet system did to her in such astonishingly graphic terms.

About that: Having skimmed some reviews of the show my main takeaway was that it was some sexy-smart spygame stuff, largely on the strength of Russell’s take-charge sexuality. Again, she’s a radiant presence on screen, and her forthright expression of her sexual desires and expertise on that tape recording her husband plays back in particular is totally hot stuff. But is that even really her? Doesn’t Phillip smile despite it all because he’s impressed by how she put on a big show and played the guy? And does it cancel out the rote, seen-it-a-million-times eros’n’thanatos vaudeville routine of Elizabeth and Phillip fucking in their car after disposing of a body? And most importantly, does it square with her sudden and brutal on-screen rape by a higher-up in her KGB training program? Obviously people who have been raped can and do subsequently lead full and enthusiastic and zesty sex lives all the time. But I can’t say that watching these two hours, my takeaway was “Wow, hubba hubba!”

No, if I’m to return to The Americans it’ll be for other things. For starters, it has a sense of humor about itself, a trait almost totally absent from Homeland from day one; this episode is like if Homeland had started out with that marvelously mordant sequence in the woods from Season Two instead of it being a one-off flash of Sopranosism. And unlike that other show, this one appears willing and able to recognize that undetectable superspies with limitless penetration into American life require a suspension of disbelief; that this is totally fine; that you can in fact play with that suspension and wring terrific thriller sequences out of it but only if you acknowledge it exists, otherwise we’ll just go “c’mon, you’ve gotta be kidding me.” I could use a show that treats War on Terror-style paranoia as something of an absurdist farce instead of pretending its manipulations are on the up and up at all times.

I’m also impressed with the quiet work of Matthew Rhys as Phillip. I enjoy the easy confidence with which he slips into other identities — the jocular neighbor, the kind but concerned intelligence officer duping the secretary into giving up secrets, the rough-and-tumble contractor who beats a pedophile up after one of those “secret agent and pedophile” department-store meet-cutes that I’m sure happened to Aldrich Ames all the time — because it’s always clear the confidence is entirely outwardly directed, but inside he’s not quite sure why he’s doing what he’s doing. (Elizabeth is sure, and that’s the problem, because she’s sure about stuff that’s not worth being sure about.) He looks and carries himself like he could be the tougher older brother of a Zach Braff character; his FBI-agent neighbor’s “nice guy, but slightly off” assessment is dead-on.

I’m fond of that neighbor, played by ubiquitous supporting actor Noah Emmerich, as well. Maybe more fond than I have any right to be given how well trod this “well-meaning law-enforcement agent who’s almost got it but not quite” territory is at this point. Coasting on the goodwill generated by everyone from Hank Schrader to Carrie Mathison to Dale Cooper is only going to get Stan Beeman so far, but particularly in those moments where he’s forced to recall an obviously trying stint undercover with a white-power group, he balances expertise and weakness in a way that took all three of those characters some time to arrive at. Again, I think it’s probably too soon to have moved his suspicion of Phillip as far along as the show did, and I’m not sure how they’ll be able to play this thread out for another season, but I’m willing to watch them try. That thread’s what’ll pull me to the next ep. Who needs all those hooks?

I reviewed tonight’s exceedingly sad episode of Downton Abbey over at Rolling Stone. Counterprogramming!

The thing about comfort food is that when someone serves you a piping hot plate of it week after week, you never suspect that one day they’re going to grab it and smash it into your face.

My review of tonight’s episode of Downton Abbey is up at Rolling Stone.

“We all live in a harsh world.” I wrote about whores, Irish, and other undesirables in my review of tonight’s Downton Abbey episode for Rolling Stone.

I freaking LOVED writing about this week’s Downton Abbey. It’s at Rolling Stone. #teamedith

I reviewed the season premiere of Downton Abbey, by which I mean I wrote hundreds of words about two characters kissing, for Rolling Stone.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m continuing my unbroken streak of getting paid to write about Best Drama Emmy nominees and covering the American airing of Downton Abbey for Rolling Stone this season. Here’s a cheat sheet I whipped up to bring folks up to speed, breaking the cast down couple by couple.

Let me also take this opportunity to howl into the void about the delay between the show’s debut in the UK and its rebroadcast here in the States. Thanks to this I’ve had preeeetty much the whole season blown for me, goddammit, just in the process of googling/wikiing around while factchecking this cheat sheet. Please don’t spoil me any further, but yes, I know that that happens, and no, I AM NOT EMOTIONALLY PREPARED FOR IT IN THE SLIGHTEST.

I updated my Rolling Stone list of Homeland highlights to include a couple of strong scenes from the finale. There’s always good stuff in there!

I’d also like to promise everyone that no matter how vitriolic I sounded in my reviews, I ain’t even mad. The worst thing that happens when you watch a bad episode of TV is the feeling that “argh, I just watched a bad episode of TV.” Writing the review forces you to articulate the negativity, but that doesn’t mean I’m angry at the people who made it.

I reviewed the season finale of Homeland for Rolling Stone. I did not like it, I can tell you that much.

Despite my many many problems with Homeland this season there were still a lot of terrific scenes in there, and I wrote about them for Rolling Stone.

One thing I don’t think I mentioned specifically but which bears mention generally is that Carrie and Brody are both really singular characters amid the prestige-drama landscape, and the performances behind them (at least until very recently) have been dynamite. Between them they carve out a lot of new territory for the TV that big-time TV watchers watch, which is a big part of why the show clicked the way it did, and why folks have had so much patience with it.

In the guise of a review of last night’s episode, which appears to have been retitled while it was airing, I present my grand unified theory of what’s wrong with Homeland over at Rolling Stone.

* 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.

It’s usually a pretty bad sign when your Emmy Award-winning drama repeatedly makes me think of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The result is my review of last night’s Homeland for Rolling Stone.

* “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.

I liked tonight’s Homeland a lot more than I liked the last few weeks’ Homelands, and you can find out why in my review at Rolling Stone.

* 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.