The third episode of the season for “Boardwalk Empire” wove a gripping story about a domestic break-in by Chalky and his fellow prison escapee Buck, while Nucky Thompson hosted the patriarch of one of the nation’s biggest political families.
Margaret Thompson re-emerged, faced with the Wall Street fallout of her dealings with Arnold Rothstein. And young Nucky Thompson is first enchanted by the little girl who would become his first wife, Mabel Jeffries.
The episode titled “What Jesus Said” dwells quite a lot on a break-in by escaped jailbirds Chalky White and an unstable accomplice he met on the chain gang named Buck. Buck knows of a house with a safe full of cash because he helped install it (and didn’t get paid for it and holds a resentment). But when they get to the house and eat the food there, they find a mother and daughter and can’t find the safe.
It’s a tough, psychological game that is unsettlingly like the Connecticut home invasion that was made into a strong HBO documentary last year, “The Cheshire Murders” — two desperate characters vs. a mother and daughter trying to survive.
Buck is clearly unstable, but distrusts Chalky for knowing so much about things like telephones and schools — he had talked to the daughter (Olivia Nikkonen) about school and said his daughter Maybelle had been about the same age.
The women try to talk him out of the crime when Buck dozes.
“There’s forgiveness for everyone, that’s what Jesus said,” the daughter advises him.
“Baby girl, Jesus was wrong,” Chalky answers.
As the potential for violence escalates, more is revealed about the safe and its eventually worthless contents. When Buck looks like he’s still going to attack the family, Chalky whacks him with a hammer. The women tell him to take a few dollars and get out. One wonders what’s next for him or whether he’ll make his way back to Atlantic City.
Nucky’s main business is to welcome the sole businessman willing to hear him out in a disastrous New York meeting last week, a Bostonian we learned in the final moments of the scene was named Mr. Kennedy.
While not a bootlegger per se, Joseph Kennedy is a businessman interested in cashing in on the liquor business when prohibition is repealed. He and Nucky get along well, though he is a teetotaler so as to avoid any Irish stereotypes (something that kind of annoys Nucky).
What keeps them from going into business is Kennedy’s perception that Nucky doesn’t care much about family — there’s no kids’ pictures around, he doesn’t even know the exact age of his kids. Kennedy’s brood, meanwhile, is obviously being groomed for big things. For all his high-mindedness, Joe doesn’t mind a good hoochie coochie dance though and enjoys lingering in the club.
Young Nucky, in the 1880s flashbacks that persist this season, is seen being a competent go-fer at the hotel. One of his regular jobs is delivering fresh flowers daily to a love struck man who has a naked woman in his room – who is later found dead from a slit throat. Nucky is told to be quiet about it.
At the same time the youngster is struck by a flirtatious girl his age whose parents are guests. It’s Mabel, who would be the first Mrs. Thompson, seen only in photographs earlier in the series, having killed herself in 1913 after losing their baby son.
Nucky is dreaming about Mabel when his second wife comes visiting at the end of the episode. Margaret had been questioned by her firm and Arnold Rothstein’s widow about her dealings with the gangster. She had been providing inside information in exchange for a free apartment. Mrs. Rothstein assumed she had been another mistress. The two have a heart to heart that’s one of the strongest scenes in the episode — the widow, left broke, intends on suing the woman she knows to be Mrs. Nucky Thompson.
The one thread of mob play involves a visit Luciano and Bugsy Siegel make to Dr. Valentin Narcisse, the dangerous Harlem power broker played by Jeffrey Wright, in his first appearance of the season.
The two want the same drug deal he had with the previous mob boss and offer protection to his Harlem operations, something offensive to Narcisse. He shows them out. Then then send two men to one of his Harlem brothels at the end of the episode where they mow down the inhabitants, as a way to send a message. Obviously they don’t know with whom they are dealing.
There were a couple of other threads that seemed to be the start of new storylines, from a mysterious letter from Nellie Bly (a famous woman journalist of a slightly earlier era, who in fact died in 1922; maybe it’s somebody who is signing her name as Bly as a joke). Also, Micky Doyle hires a bunch of men to work and a young kid talks himself into the group. It looks like he’s going to have more of a story.
In the previews for next week, though, action seems to turn not only on Margaret’s conversation with Nucky but with a Luciano meeting with Capone, in which Van Alden is identified as a former G-man. Also, Patricia Arquette’s delicious character Sally Wheet seems like she is trying to drum up the Cuba business single-handedly and runs into some trouble.