weekly reviews - Boardwalk Empire, ep1.03 “Resolution” New Year brings new faces and new tensions to Atlantic City

Boardwalk Empire Review, Season 3, Episode 1, “Resolution”

Directed by Tim Van Patten

Written by Terence Winter

Airs Sundays 9.00pm ET on HBO

If we were all asking ourselves how Season 3′s premiere show would top the dark and bloody finale to Season 2, it took about thirty seconds for the answer to be handed to us. With the business end of a tire iron.

Jimmy Darmody is dead. Nucky pulled the trigger. Not only does that create a certain…tension…for mother-with-incest-issues Gillian Darmody (Gretchen Moll, luminous as ever), it leaves a gaping, antagonist-sized hole in the drama. Without Jimmy to palely plot against father-figure Nucky (was there ever a show more steeped in Oedipal issues than this one?) we might have feared that the story might lose impetus. Sure we have Nucky’s disintegrating relationship with new wife Margaret  – and Margaret’s gradual transformation from colleen to suffragette is one of the most interesting character arcs of the show – along with the equally inexorable descent of straight arrow Nelson Van Alden from federal agent to door-to-door salesman to keep us occupied, but those are just sideshows. What we want is the thing that makes Boardwalk Empire so seductively watchable: the contrast between those luscious, perfect in every detail, period sets and the extreme close up violence.

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