In the Flesh: Boardwalk Empire Season 5

“I care about you, and I care about the family we’re going to have together,” says the young, ambitious Enoch “Nucky” Thompson to his wife Mabel. “That’s all I care about.” Mabel is begging him to help the young vagrant Gillian Darmody, twelve years old and on the run from the abusive staff of a brutal Christian orphanage. Nucky is reluctant, too preoccupied by the idea of his budding nuclear family to see the one that’s fallen into his lap. And so, to put it bluntly, he sells the girl to get himself ahead. He sells her to his boss, Louis “the Commodore” Kaestner, a domineering pedophile whose power games have left Nucky, who sees the man as a surrogate father, shaken and uncertain of his place in the world. Within a few years Nucky’s wife will be dead, his prematurely born son along with her, and in his own good time he’ll betray Gillian’s son to his death in turn. He’ll use his nephew as a political pawn, spend his brother like a phony check time and time again, and lose every woman he ever cared about to his own scheming and squabbling.

In the fifth season premiere, ‘Golden Days for Boys and Girls’, eleven-year-old Nucky dives for gold thrown from the pier by the Commodore and others like him, rich men showing their largesse as impoverished boys fight for a glint of precious metal beneath the booming waves. Unlike his TV contemporaries Walter White and Tony Soprano, Nucky is a child of almost Dickensian poverty, growing up under the iron fist of his violent drunkard father and in the shadow of his sister Susan’s death, missing meals as often as he gets them, scrabbling in the muck for any way to get ahead. And then he does, and he finds he can’t stop, that there’s no bottom to the pit inside him, that he’ll always be that starving boy clubbing rats for supper in the lumber yard. It’s why he sold Gillian into sexual slavery, and it’s why he traded her son Jimmy for the favor of a Philadelphia gangster. A starving boy does what he has to to survive, to feed his family — except there is no family, only hungry shades in the vague shape of one. How do you feed what doesn’t exist?

The final season of Terence Winter’s show is full of eerie stillnesses and silent voids, from the dark beneath the waves of the Atlantic to the dark oculus of the room above the Old Rumpus strip joint. In the series finale Nucky is shown an early television in a pavilion of blue velvet like something straight out of David Lynch, a grainy recording of a woman singing staring back at him from the billowing dark. Each thoughtfully-composed shot is as ravenous as Nucky was in his boyhood, as yawningly empty as the bare, drab house where he grew up. Even his new fortune comes from nothing, a stock market bait and switch involving shorting a competitor’s company. The void is calling Nucky Thompson, soft and sibilant. It hisses in the darkness of the trade pavilion. It crackles over dead phone lines and echoes from the walls of emtpy buildings. It’s the ghost of Daughter Maitland’s voice lulling Chalky to sleep every night in his prison cell until one day he realizes he’s forgotten what she sounds like, that the voice in his head is a voice from nowhere.

Gone are the epic gun battles and protracted action sequences of earlier seasons. The one showdown to which we’re privy mostly involves Nucky trying desperately to keep his own men from returning fire as those of rival gangsters Lansky and Luciano casually murder his friend and bodyguard in front of him. In fact the whole season is a sort of desperate damming of breaches, a series of harried attempts to prevent hell from breaking loose. The loyal soldiers and protectors of bygone days are gone. Eddie’s empty window. Jimmy’s lonesome grave. Richard Harrow dead under the boardwalk, his own dream of a family gone forever, his own maimed face one of those spectral absences around which so much of the show is structured. There’s no one to fight for and nothing left to fight over. Repeal of Prohibition is on the horizon. The mobs are closing ranks, adopting uniform rules. Nucky’s no longer looking for a way to win; he’s looking for a way out.

Only there isn’t one. There hasn’t been one since he sold that little girl to take out a mortgage on a family that would never be, since he threw away happiness in exchange for that glint of gold beneath the waves, the smeared sunlight dancing in the dark around him. “I’m gonna be a grandfather,” his own father slurs drunkenly, pointing a gun at Nucky’s head. “And you don’t even want me to know? Like I was never even here at all?” Here’s a man who clung, in his own violent, resentful way, to his family, who would go on loving and hating his children his entire life, trying to lever himself up out of his deathbed to go attend to the adult son he’d brutalized as a boy. He had what he wanted right in front of him, but he couldn’t touch it. He couldn’t hold it. In his own way, Nucky repeats this sin. That Winter brings the entire show back around to that original act of betrayal, that selfish exploitation of one child in hopes of ensuring the future of another, is as daring as the season’s flawlessly executed flashback sequences. It’s a gamble to so much as mention child abuse on television, much less to build an entire season of a prestige drama around it, but Winter clearly understands that nothing else in Nucky’s life is as important as that single moment. After it’s over, the rest is written in stone.