Boardwalk Empire: 21 Recap

Boardwalk Empire Season Two Episode 13

The title of the premiere episode of Boardwalk Empire Season 2 was “21,” a reference to the year 1921, not a winning hand of blackjack. Things were looking up after the election of Nucky Thompson’s puppet, Edward Bader, last season, but conspiracy was already in the air. As the show opens to the 1920s tune “After You Get What You Want (You Don’t Want It), we’re reintroduced to the characters: Jimmy Darmody and Richard Harrow are delivering some hootch to Chalky White. Nucky is making like Elvira. He’s “Up All Night” with a nude woman sitting on his lap, shaking her tatas. Nucky’s brother Eli is examining his gunshot wound in the mirror, all the arsenic is out of the Commodore’s system and now he must be planning a hunting safari, because he’s trying out a huge spear. Agent Van Alden with a bouquet of flowers, meets up with his wife, Rose, to celebrate their 13th wedding anniversary.

The montage ends with Margaret waking up alone and Nucky’s manservant Eddie showing his boss the time. Nucky is no pumpkin, it’s almost 8 a.m. When he gets home, Margaret is having the devil of a time getting Teddy to come out from under the table to go to school, while Emily is howling at the table. Margaret shows Nucky Teddy’s little bruised hand. He got whacked with the ruler by Sister Bernice. She wasn’t gentle about it, that’s for sure. Margaret barely gets a chance to complain about Nucky staying out all night when he’s off again to get some sleep at the office, where presumably there’s a lot less going on.

Chalky in the meantime is at his warehouse when there’s a knock on the door. They open it to see a dying black man collapse with the Ku Klux Klan right behind him. The hooded figures start machine gunning the warehouse, then move in with rifles. We thought Chalky was going to play dead, but instead he lays there with his eyes wide open and one of them tells him “Purity, sobriety and the white Christian’s Jesus,” and is about to pull the trigger. A woman shoots him, someone shoots her and they grab the injured Klansman and run out the door. Chalky picks up the rifle and picks off a Klansman.

At his new home, Jimmy orders up ham and eggs. His mother, Gillian, tells Angela she’ll make them — she knows how he likes them. When Jimmy asks his son if he wants to go shoot some seagulls, Angela protests that he’s too young. Gillian seconds Jimmy’s reply that he was even younger than Tommy when he started shooting gulls with Nucky. Angela tells Gillian she really wishes she’d knock off the interference. “Oh, sweetie, I would never,” Gillian says sweetly, “You’re his wife … I was only trying to help you as your husband’s mother. Boys will be boys, after all.”

This is how we find out Angela and Jimmy got married. Then, just to let her new daughter-in-law know just how close she and Jimmy are, the unconventional mother-in-law shares this tidbit: “You know, when Jimmy was a baby and I would change his diaper, I used to kiss his little winkie.” Angela has the appropriate look of thems that cannot quite believe they heard what they just heard.

Van Alden comes across Agents Zowicki and Clarkson wrestling at the post office and yells at them. Then he introduces his wife and they give her a tourist guide. He tells them he’ll be staying at the Hotel Metropole if they need him. “Save the roughhouse for your own time,” Van Alden warns them. He takes his wife sightseeing in a rolling chair on the boardwalk, but she is shocked at the sights and stares incredulously at the incubator babies . She declines a side-trip to Margate to see the hotel shaped like an elephant. When she finds out her guide lists the taverns and houses of ill-repute, she says maybe it’s better that they can’t have children. “This world, Nelson.”

In Chicago, Torrio and Capone are discussing cutting Nucky out of their bootleg operations with an attorney named George Remus (The King of the Bootleggers). “Who really likes Nucky Thompson anyway?,” Remus says.

Nucky is cooking up ways to make money with Bader and cronies, buying land cheap and selling it back to the State of New Jersey. Later, he’s putting a wad of cash away when Eddie tells him about Chalky shooting the Klansman. Nucky takes his brother Eli to Chalky’s house. While Chalky’s son, Lester, tickles the ivories, his beautiful and gracious wife, Lenore, offers them lunch. They ask for some privacy and Eli says “you shot a white man.” Chalky is unimpressed. His losses were far greater: 4 dead and half a dozen others wounded, including a woman. Chalky says they are supposed to be protected from those “ofays. “I’m done with this shit,” Chalky says. and warns Nucky to “school these crackers” but Nucky says he’s the only thing keeping Chalky from a lynch mob. Nucky warns him to stay in the house and rebukes Eli for not having the Klan under control. “That is one uppity shine,” Eli says of Chalky.

Eli, Jimmy and the Commodore continue with their plot to bring down Nucky. Gillian is lurking outside the door as usual. “He’ll see what real power is,” the Commodore says. Nucky must be getting the scoop on these goings-on from her, since later he gives Jimmy an opportunity to spill the beans. He warns Jimmy that his father is a “very duplicitous man.”

Nucky talks to both communities, black and white. He tells the black folks that the Klan are “hooded cowards” and the white folks that “no one need fear for their safety … in the face of the obstreperous Negro.” As he tells his white audience they will teach these colored a lesson with an “iron fist,” a man bursts in and announces the man Chalky shot just died at St. Mark’s. Nucky instructs Eli to find Chalky and place him under arrest “for his own safety.”

Later, in the midst of making plans to take Margaret and the kids to see “The Kid,” Eddie tells Nucky there’s a call he has to take care of. It’s not the quick meeting he thinks it will be. He is arrested for election fraud and Margaret and the kids end up watching the film alone.

More on Teddy’s Dilemma:

Margaret goes to school to deal with the overzealous disciplinarian, Sister Bernice. Margaret relays Teddy’s claim that he did nothing. “Then you’re raising a liar, Mrs. Schroeder,” Sister Bernice informs her, and tells her that Teddy was playing with matches in the coatroom in a school full of children. Margaret wants to know if Teddy is getting the boot, but it seems Nucky is good friends with Father Brennan. Later, Nucky has a talk with Teddy who thinks he’s going to get a beating with the belt. His real dad, Hans, obviously used this method when he wasn’t knocking Margaret around. Nucky tells him he’s not going to beat him and gives him a desultory lecture on how Teddy needs to mind his mother. “No more misbehaving,” he says, pulls out an enormous wad of cash and peels off $20 for the boy to go the Sweet Shoppe. Way to go, Nucky. Now Teddy knows he’ll get paid if he misbehaves. Plus Nucky didn’t even ask him WHY he was playing with matches in school, even though he’s had time to at least consider the reason might be that Teddy saw Nucky set his father’s house on fire.

More on Van Alden’s Anniversary:

Speaking of duplicity, Van Alden told his wife, Rose, they couldn’t stay at his boarding house because it’s “men only,” but he’s got pregnant Lucy stashed over there and he’s been giving her money. Lucy asks him to lie down with her a while, calling him daddy, but he clearly finds her revolting and tells her she needs to sleep in her own room.