REVIEW Boardwalk Empire Watch Golden Boy
In the end, Boardwalk Empire went out exactly the way you would expect a gangster story to with a Tommy gun. Yes, it turned out that the young, ambitious drifter that Nucky met earlier this season was in fact Tommy Darmody, returned to Atlantic City to get revenge for lives ended and ruined, and in the processwe have to assume, seeing him dragged away in Nucky's fading visionthrowing away his own. The reveal may not have surprised detail-oriented fans, who been calling Tommy's identity in Internet comments from his first appearance as "Joe Harper from Indiana" earlier this season. But it was a thematically dead-on ending for a series that has, beginning to end, told stories about the old preying on the youngNucky killing Jimmy, the Commodore raping Gillianabuse and sickness passing through the generations like a family heirloom. In the process, Tommy brought Boardwalk Empires tragic circle to a closeits acts of violence, greed and abuse building on one another until they ended in a pile of corpses and torn-up dollar bills. Tommy pulled the trigger. But there was another young man haunting this episode, haunting the entire series, shadowing Nucky's present and his past, who may have done Nucky in as surely as Tommy did. His name Ragged Dick. We never saw him in Boardwalk Empire, of course, because he only existed in books. He was the hero of a series of didactic stories by Horatio Alger, about a shoeshine boy who goes from literal rags to riches through hard work and clean living. He wasn't just a character but a symbol of the culture Nucky grew up in, a time of megafortunes and few safety nets, when poor children were smugly told they could bootstrap themselves into middle-class fortune. Even at the time, Alger's stories were controversial they were mocked by social critics and parodied by satirists. But they were powerful, and they stuck, in ragged Nucky's mind above all. In the first season, Nucky compares young, hungry Jimmy to Ragged Dick in a flashback earlier this season, an older man does the same to young Nucky. In season three, Gyp Rosetti finds the book while poking around Nucky's office last season, Nucky gives a copy to nephew Will another surrogate-son figure. And the spirit of Alger's Ragged Dick runs through the series other references to the sanctimonious fables kids were raised on in Nucky's day, like the children's magazine, Golden Days for Boys and Girls, in the final season premiere, If Boardwalk Empire has had a consistent theme, it's been to systematically, repeatedly undermine this righteous, golden lie. In Nucky's world, being honest and true may not always get you killed, but it doesn't get you glory. The folks standing tallest at the end of the seriesthe real-life characters who would get written into historyare the violent, like Luciano and Lansky, or the conniving, like Joe Kennedy. From the beginning of this season's flashbacks, the Commodore made clear that he thought Nucky's Alger-driven morality was not just wrong, but despicable "You think you deserve something for trying hard," he tells him, contemptuously, like it's the worst human insult imaginable. As we have all season, we know where this flashback is going to lead with Nucky procuring Gillian into "service" to his pederast mentor. His own dad a miserable drunk, Nucky has two fathers, Horatio Alger and the Commodore, and they don't like each other. He wants to be the Honest and True Boy, but the only way not to disappear is to become the Commodore's boy. He makes his choice, and spends the rest of his life trying to reconcile the two. Which is where we met him at the beginning of the seriestrying to be corrupt but not brutishly criminal, to be a bootlegger but work like a legitimate businessman. He would eventually kill and get bloodied, but his preferred weapon was his Magic Bankroll, which he would produce to peel off bills and make problems go away. In "Eldorado," at last, the magic fails him Tommy tears up Nucky's second payoff in his face. "You showed me," Nucky says. Not yet. But he's about to.