Why the 'Boardwalk Empire' finale worked so well

The translation isn't perfect, but Aristotle's main point in a quote to which he's attributed is that poetry is often truer than history, for it captures the universal experience, while history is relegated to a particular time and place.


This is the theme “Boardwalk Empire” has flirted with since it debuted on HBO six years ago. A series that consistently dealt you style in addition to (and sometimes, I would argue in lieu of) substance, Terrence Winter's love song to the era that birthed organized crime in the United States consistently took license with the historical record to bring viewers an intensely personal drama.


Boardwalk struggled to recapture its central conflict after Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson killed his main threat, Jimmy Darmody, at the end of season 2. We were introduced to Bobby Canavale's brilliant Gyp Rosetti in season 3, then Jeffrey Wright's verbose and wily Valentin Narcisse in season 4, who quickly picked a fight with Michael Kenneth Williams' Chalky White. In the interim, Jack Huston's Richard Harrow tried and failed to establish a normal life for himself after putting that rifle in his mouth in season 2, Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon) bumbled his way through a stint in organized crime in Chicago and attracted the attention of Stephen Graham's Al Capone, while Gillian Darmody (Gretchen Mol) descended slowly into an opium-fueled madness that produced some of the series' finest (and creepiest) performances.


It was, to put it mildly, an oft-unfocused mess. While the backdrop of violence, sex and power-grabbing (fueled mostly by the brilliant performances of Vincent Piazza and Anatol Yusef as Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky, respectivey) always kept viewers glued to the screen, the series was billed as Nucky Thompson's rise and fall from power, a theme that seemed to die along with Jimmy in that rain-soaked construction pit.


Thankfully, season 5 successfully recaptured that spirit, introducing us to a younger Nucky as he developed into the “half-gangster” we say greasin' palms and griftin' so many years ago. And in the series finale, that story arc came full circle in a climax that brilliantly thumbed its nose at history and gave us the poetic end Nucky deserved, rather than the quiet death he received in real life.


Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the real life mogul that Nucky Thompson is based upon, lived to 85, dying of old age in Northfield, New Jersey, in 1968. Had the writers chosen to give their title character, who differed from the real Johnson in many ways, such an end, it would have been an affront to the decision to make him the source of his own fall from grace. The final moments of the series finale brilliantly blend the fatal pistol blasts from a young Tommy Darmody with the offer of Gillian to the commodore, Nucky's act of desperation for power that spawns all the events of the series. It's an ending that forms a perfect circle and the closure to Nucky's quest for power – and its convoluted telling – that only art, not life, could produce.