The Best & Worst Things About "Boardwalk Empire" Season Two

During Boardwalk Empire's first season, the pairing of Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and his extremely young mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) was always electric, but their behavior was also a bit curious; the way Mol, who doesn't look much older than Pitt, jumped into his arms in their first scene together briefly had us thinking she was Jimmy's side piece. This year, the inappropriate relationship alert went from blue straight to red, to the point where we were sure it was going to lead to some gross Oedipal interaction. Then the writers went and pulled the rug out from under us: It already happened! Eww!

"Under God's Power She Flourishes," the tour-de-force, flashback penultimate episode, in which we learn how truly fucked up and tragic Jimmy's life has been, was the season's best episode. And that final scene between Jimmy and his parents...damn. To recap, James started choking his manipulative mother in both a heroin-induced rage and the release of a pent-up fury at her mind games, so the Commodore , man who assaulted her and didn't give her any child support (after she gave birth to Jimmy), suddenly felt the need to defend her and stab his own son through the back with a spear (phallic symbol, of course). Jimmy in turn stabbed his own father, and at his mother's urging "finished it." Wow.

It was definitely more insane than any "Oedipal interaction" we thought was coming, not to mention one of the most satisfying culminations to a long-form story arc on TV this year, or in a very long time.

Michael K. Williams, the man formerly known as Omar from The Wire, was easily Boardwalk Empire's most underutilized asset last year. Thankfully that wasn't the case in Season Two, which started with a harrowing KKK assault on his liquor headquarters and went on to richly expand the character through telling scenes at his home (where the opulent life he has provided his family makes him feel like an outsider) and within the African-American Atlantic City community. It all led to a city-wide strike and his ultimate revenge on the Klan. Plus, he's such a boss that he can exert his power to get Dunn Purnsely beat up in jail and then flip him into his right-hand man, just like that.

We like to think of ourselves as intelligent TV viewers, but we dare you to keep up 100% with all the different alliances made this season. First, Nucky (Steve Buscemi) and Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg) are with Waxey Gordon. Then Jimmy's with Manny Horvitz (William Forsythe). Wait, now Jimmy's with Gordon? Oh, now Horvitz wants to meet with Nucky. The head of harbor patrol meets with Jimmy and the Commodore about shipping their liquor in and blocking Nucky's. Then he meets with Nucky to pledge his loyalty.

Don't even get us started on trying to figure out exactly who third-person speaker George Remus is down with. The intricacy and politics between the various crime syndicates are intriguing and all, but it got a little dizzying. Clearer partnerships next season, please.

We also consider ourselves to be sophisticated TV viewers. We don't need every episode to feature a dirty-double cross, throat slitting, or two lesbians getting viciously murdered, but holy crap this season dragged at points. Even episodes that did feature one or two of those attention-grabbing moments inched along at a snail's pace.

We love spending time with Boardwalk's characters, so it's rare that we're actually bored per se, but looking back this season could've reached the same satisfying conclusion while trimming one or two fatty episodes. The episode that featured Margaret's son's confirmation was so heavy-handedly religious that we feared we accidentally changed the channel to Showtime and happened across an episode of Dexter's current terrible religion-themed season.

Most would put him on their worst list, and, yeah, his whole illegitmate baby, warden-like relationship/business agreement with Lucy (Paz de la Huerta) rarely affected the main plot, but dude is so odd and creepy that it was always compelling, in large part to Michael Shannon's great performance. Plus, there was that hilarious attempted arrest scene, which also played up one of this series' larger themes: Sometimes, attempts at redemption aren't enough to erase one's sins. Everyone pays.

We'd be questioning Shannon's continued contribution to the series, but the mob history afficionados have already pointed out that his new home is conveniently in Cicero, which, historians, if Boardwalk sticks to the real-life past, will eventually become a significant crime hub for Al Capone (Stephen Graham).

Jack Huston's first appearance as Richard Harrow, the badly-scarred, Frankenstein's Monster-esque war veteran, late last season was magnetic; since then, the character has evolved into an instant fan-favorite. Huston was in fine form this year as Jimmy's dutiful number two, while also striking up a genuine friendship with Jimmy's wife, Angela (Aleksa Palladino).

We sure are glad he fought through his pain and didn't pull the trigger on himself in this season's all-around excellent "Gimcrack And Bunkum" episode, but what will he do now that his only two friends are dead? It's a credit to Huston, and Michael Pitt, that we wouldn't be mad if he avenged their deaths, no matter what that might mean for Nucky. Anyone who's stuck with just Gillian has our prayers, though.

Don't get us wrong, it's a real thrill to see Jimmy and Nucky interacting with some of the most notable real-life gangsters of the 1920s, especially a young Al Capone. But when they're so integral to the plot as they were this season, it's hard to get worked up about any conflict they're in when history tells us that the universe has other plans for them. However, once this show runs its course, we smell a potential spinoff for either the rise of Capone or the formidable duo of Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) and Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza).

Now Manny, on the other hand, is a character with loose, if any, ties to history, and as such is a much more exciting antagonist. How so? To the point where the finale's shocking Nucky-Jimmy scene could remain a huge surprise since it wasn't implausible that Manny would die there. Not to mention, the guy is a total badass. We're extremely sad to see Jimmy go, but we'll definitely take Manny's survival as a consolation prize if it means we get another sequence like the scene where he ate an assassin's shotgun blast and finished the dude with a cleaver to the dome.

Margaret (Kelly MacDonald) has always been a fascinatingly complex character; this season, she became doubly interesting with the added sub-plots of her lust for Owen (Charlie Cox), Nucky's new right-hand, the revelation of her Irish family's presence in America, and her willingness to play the role of gangster's wife, like when she stole Nucky's ledger for him while the police raided his office.

But then her daughter coming down with polio ignited a fiery Catholic guilt that became a little bit too much towards the end. It seemed like an easy excuse to stir up conflict between her and Nucky. Things between the Margaret and Nucky have the potential to be very interesting next year, though, especially after the slick move she pulled in the final minutes of the season, signing over her land deed to the church.

Well, if Jimmy's gott to go then at least they left a halfway compelling guy in his former job position. When he's not bedding the women of the Thompson household, Owen Sleater has proven to be just as able a goon as Jimmy was, but his devotion to the IRA cause, as well as his tryst with Margaret, put him in a position to shake things up in a different way than Jimmy did. We're still laughing at his slick double entendre innuendo to Margaret: "You wanted me after Mr. Thompson, right?"

There was no way that Nuck wasn't going to get away scot-free from his murder trial, but we sure hope we haven't seen the last of dogged prosecutor Esther Randolph (Julianne Nicholson) just because of Nucky's dirty victory. Loosely based on U.S. Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Esther stepped in to fill the absentee Van Alden's shoes as Nucky's opponent on the right side of the law, and she was actually much better at it. Driven and just plain good at her job, she also had whip-smart, dry sarcasm that kept up with Nucky's top notch quips. Please, Terrence Winter, let her thirst to put Nucky away keep her in AC next year.

We love Sons Of Anarchy, but with both finales airing the same week it's hard not to draw comparisons. Both seasons featured internal beefs amongst their core characters that seemed to be building to one logical sentiment: There can be no peaceful co-existence. One show had the balls to actually pull the trigger, while one managed to simultaneously shake things up and maintain the status quo. Yes, the former is Boardwalk Empire.

The crazy thing about Boardwalk's devastating season finale, however, is that its big moment wasn't even the story's obvious conclusion. Ask us a couple weeks ago and we would've bet the rent money that the season would culminate with Jimmy and Nucky, both desperate and in over their heads, forming an uneasy alliance. Looks like we would've been homeless.

R.I.P. James Darmody. Your life was a preordained tragedy of Shakespearean, even Greek levels. We don't know what the show will do without you, and, in fact, it could quite possibly be as doomed as you were in your absence. Time will tell if Terrence Winter and his writers pay the price for their boldness, or if this was the necessary step to the evolution of Enoch Thompson as a full-time gangster. No matter how equal the screen time may have seemed, it's Buscemi's show. All we know for now is that we'll be muttering "to the lost" before we drink our first shot this weekend.