The Old Pervert and Neptune’s Consort

Boardwalk Empire: Paris Green, Season 1, Episode 11

We were misled into thinking that Paris Green had something to do with Angela going to Paris. Besides that, according to IMDB, there were some films back in those days with titles like When Paris Green Saw Red (1918), Paris Green (1920) and So This is Paris Green (1930), but in Boardwalk Empire’s “Paris Green” refers to arsenic, which turns out to be a main ingredient in Commodore Louis Kaestner’s diet, but we weren’t that surprised by this news since we figured Luanne, the maid, wasn’t mixing up Ovaltine in the kitchen.

You might not have known it, but Jimmy Darmody apparently has known the Commodore is his daddy and he even knows the Commodore was 54 and his mother, Gillian, was a mere 13 year old consort of Neptune when he was a twinkle in daddy’s eye.

Jimmy goes to visit the old man after Gillian calls and says death is knocking at the door.

“There’s the boy,” the Commodore says. “Look at you! A proper gentleman.” Cold Jimmy replies that his mother raised him well. Oddly enough, for a dying man, the Commodore is solicitous of the small social graces and offers Jimmy a biscuit. Odder still, Jimmy accepts. But it’s not half as odd as the little casket with the Commodore’s dead dog in it. We guess he’s just keeping the pooch around since he figures he’ll be joining him in short order.

But before he makes his exit, obviously the Commodore wants to hand over the keys to the City to his son and let him know who the true architect was. He drained the swamps, put up the boarding houses and hotels, he made the city — not Nucky Thompson. And he believes that Jimmy can wrest control away from Nucky. The wrong man is running things, according to the Commodore, and he tells Jimmy “You want anything you can lay your hands on and nothing is going to stop you from getting it. I expect nothing less from my son.”

Jimmy suddenly starts to walk out and tells the old man he feels ill. He goes into the bathroom and throws up that grody biscuit.

A little bit later, he’s at his mom’s and they are discussing the situation. Gillian tries to mollify the contempt and disgust Jimmy has for this old pervert who impregnated his mother at such a young age. She brings out a photo taken in 1897 when she met the Commodore. She was “Neptune’s consort,” which was probably on a float in some boardwalk parade. So if she was 13 then, at the turn of the century she would have been 16. It’s 1920. She’s 36 but she still looks younger than that.

When Gillian brings up how Nucky facilitated her first meeting with his old goat of a father, Jimmy calls Nucky a pimp. Gillian says Nucky was “an ambitious young man,” and brings up what a wonderful woman his wife Mabel was and what a tragedy it was (when she died).

Gillian says that the Commodore was always concerned especially when Jimmy went in the war, but she knew he would come back. “Lady Jean told me so,” she says.

“The fortune teller?” Jimmy asks. “Ma — Jesus!”

Then she says she’s going to be with the Commodore because “no one deserves to die alone.”

The doctor is examining the old man, who is “very jaundiced,” as Gillian is feeding him soup. He thinks Gillian is the angel of death, but when the doctor wants to runs some tests and needs to get a little hair sample, the old man thinks the doc is trying to do him in. With Jimmy’s help, the doctor gets the sample and goes off. Richard Harrow shows up to inform Jimmy that the D’Alessio brothers they haven’t bumped off yet are hiding out in Philly and only their mother, some sisters and yet another brother named Adrian, a dentist, have shown up for the funerals of Matteo and Lucien, who are already corpses thanks to Jimmy and Chalky White.

Harrow has a plan. Without so much as batting the only eye he has, Harrow says: “I could kill the mother, the sisters and the dentist. That would make them stick their heads up.”

While Jimmy absorbs this singular approach to their problem, along comes the doctor and wants to speak to him privately. Jimmy tells Harrow they’ll discuss the old sniper maneuvers later. The doctor wants to know who stands to gain from The Commodore’s death. Jimmy says he’s pretty sure he’s not in the Will. “There’s enough arsenic in his body to take down a hippo,” says the doctor.

Jimmy goes to see his mother and asks her what the Commodore is worth. She’s his first suspect obviously and he tells her it’s fine with him. “It really is, whatever you wanna do. The other day I ate a cookie at his house and it made me vomit. And this morning, I found this, tucked down hidden in the rubbish pail,” and he pulls out a can of Paris Green arsenic from his pocket and puts it on the table. But if Gillian has anything to do with it, she’s not telling Jimmy. We must say, however, that Gillian has been the only one throughout the whole episode who seems very certain the Commodore will really die.

Angela in the meantime has been trying to solidify her escape to Paris with little Tommy. The child, who has more lines than ever in Paris Green, doesn’t want to go without his daddy and Gillian. Between her last meeting with Mary Dittrich and her actual departure from the dump she and Jimmy call home, unfortunately, Mary has had a change of heart and taken off with her fractured photographer “in the dead of night.” Angela left Jimmy a note on the bed, in her beautiful handwriting (do you think she went to Catholic school?) and she knows that she needs to retrieve that before Jimmy sees it. The fates have clearly conspired against Angela because when she gets back, Jimmy is already there but the note’s not.

Also in Episode 11: read up on Margaret’s rebellion and how Nucky knew about the Lysol the whole time