By Joe R
Things happen in Chicago -- including Van Alden becoming an actual animated cartoon and laying waste to his equally cartoonish tormenters -- but as always, let's try to think as little of that as possible.
Margaret gets another visit from Mrs. Scherer at the women's clinic, and she wants Margaret to procure a diaphragm for her, so that her husband will stop impregnating her and requiring her to drink spoiled milk for on-purpose miscarriages. Margaret goes around Sister Mary Euphemis to Dr. Mason and requests a pair of diaphragms, actually: one for Mrs. Scherer and one for her, as she's decided to continue shtupping Owen Sleater.
Word gets to Nucky that "Jimmy Darmody" has perished in a tragic bathtub accident, so he goes to the Maison Derriere to find out what the fuck, and he ends up in a passive-aggressive standoff with Gillian that turns into aggressive-aggressive when she throws a drink in his face and blames him for her son's death. She sets out to cut all ties between herself and Nucky, including Lucky Luciano. Later, Gillian reaches out to Gyp Rosetti and not-at-all-casually drops that she knows where Nucky and Rothstein will be meeting later tonight: Babbette's.
Meantime, Nucky and Esther and Means convene to plan Harry Daugherty's downfall, which requires Nucky to sneak into a social club under false pretenses and meet with Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, which he does. He offers Mellon the deal: arrest George Remus and thus place your hated rival Daugherty at your complete mercy, and in return Nucky will run Mellon's now-defunct distillery at a nice, quiet profit. Mellon at first throws Nucky out on his ear, but eventually he calls him up and accepts the offer.
Billie Kent screen-tests for a Hollywood movie and does pretty well. So well that she and her roommate and her co-star decide to get drunk back at her apartment, and when Nucky arrives, this young pup of a co-star is a little too friendly will Billie for his taste, so of course he beats the shit out of him. Nucky and Billie have a huge fight about what they do and don't want from the relationship. The morning, she dyes her hair blonde and he sets her up on an allowance with now strings attached, which is a mixed message that won't ever need to be parsed, because that night, as Nucky and Rothstein and Luciano suffer the hot-aired bloviations of George Baxter on the boardwalk, Billie heads into Babbette's ahead of them ... and is blown sky high when the entire building erupts in a fireball.