Episode Report Card Joe R: A- | 3 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT No Guts, No Glory
By Joe R | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 10.03.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So that poor soul who stumbled out of the woods last week gets rushed to the hospital. It's in no one's interest but the FBI's that he survive, but Eli is thwarted in a smothering attempt when Van Alden shows up. Later, the Feds "abduct" the poor bleeding bastard, needing him alive just long enough to finger his assailants. Too bad he's not going to make it, so they bring him to a dentist (!), who gives the guy an injection of cocaine (!!) to wake him up. After throwing a Yiddish epithet Van Alden's way, it looks like the guy will take the secret of his attackers to his grave. But have I mentioned that Van Alden is a total sadistic God-warrior nutter? He sticks his hand into the guy's open gut wound (!!!) and gets him to croak Jimmy's name before he ... well, croaks.
Speaking of Jimmy, he's seriously struggling with adjusting to life back home, including being jealous of Angela and the local Sears Portrait Studio photog. With the gutshot ambush victim back in play, Nucky needs to do something with Jimmy, and Nucky gets a visit from Jimmy's ma, Gillian, who leans on the promise Nucky made years ago to keep Jimmy safe. So Nucky (and a baldly jealous Eli) order Jimmy to leave town. After another argument with Angela, Jimmy leaves for Chicago.
The news about Jimmy's part in the ambush also gets out to Rothstein, who sends Lucky Luciano out to kill him. (Of course, Lucky's got problems of his own to deal with, like for instance his gonorrhea and impotence.)
In other news, Margaret gets a job via Nucky as a dresser/model for a chi-chi French boutique run by Miss Jeunet, who is INTENSE. Margaret ends up waiting on Lucy, who recognizes her, then revels in her own nudity some more and is also a bitch.
Finally, as he told Mickey he would, Nucky hands over bootlegging distribution to Chalky White, who argues Nucky up to 35% of the share and also invents the term "motherfucker," at least as far as white folk are concerned. Mickey meets with his Philly gangster partners, who aren't thrilled about Mickey's lost territory. Chalky returns to his warehouse to find one of his employees lynched, not to put too fine a point on it. Nucky and Eli convince Chalky to convince his "people" not to treat it as such, in the interest of not sparking a race riot in an election year. I guess we can take some comfort in Chalky strong-arming Nucky to a 50% split, but it's not much.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously, Jimmy and Al Capone ambushed a whiskey shipment and killed four (or five, who's counting?) bootleggers who were in the employ of Arnold Rothstein. This drove a wedge between Jimmy and Nucky, set Rothstein off, and turned Capone into a dick. Then it turned out that there were five victims after all. And one of them was only mostly dead.
So yeah, after stumbling out and starting Mr. and Mrs. American Handjob last week, our gutshot friend is being wheeled into a hospital ER. He's grunting unintelligibly as he's wheeled past Eli Thompson, who walks in the other direction to meet an arriving Nucky and Jimmy. Nucky can't believe this guy's still alive after three days out in the cold. Eli's theory: "He's fat. He's insulated." Nucky is, as ever, perturbed, and his mood doesn't improve any when Jimmy swears that he thought they killed them all. Not wanting to be seen hovering over this unpleasantness for too long, Nucky tells Eli to "let nature take its course ... help it along if you have to" and to keep him posted. To Jimmy, he says, "You better hope he dies real soon."
A classy-looking guy in a top hat drives a classy-looking stagecoach led by a classy-looking horse down the streets of Atlantic City. For a moment, I'm transported back to my beloved Deadwood. But there are no whores packed into that stagecoach, only crates of Canadian Club. The stagecoach clomps its way into the livery warehouse, where Nucky and Chalky White are there, with Chalky's men waiting to unload the shipment. Chalky establishes his bona fides with his crew, promising to "take it out of y'all's asses" if any of the whiskey goes missing. (Nucky's retort of "Simon Legree" is somewhat lost on Chalky, and yet another example of how uncommonly well-read Nucky is, given the company he keeps.) Chalky surveys the take and tells Nucky with the 500 bottles he's got here, he could "mix it up" and yield 3,000 bottles to sell. How quickly prohibition leads to a diluted and unclean product supply. Nucky offers Chalky an 80/20 split on the profit, saying he provides the product, Chalky and his people will work their "magic" on it. "That's a whole lotta magic for 20%," Chalky observes. Nucky says that's the split he gave to Mickey, but Chalky wants 40. "What happened to 30?" Nucky asks, Chalky says he's charging him 10% extra for thinking he'd take the same deal as Mickey. "Didn't realize you were so sensitive," Nucky says. "Like a baby's ass, motherfucker," Chalky replies. They settle on 35%, then Chalky goes about instructing his crew. Confused, Nucky turns to Eddie: "What's 'motherfucker' mean?"