By Joe R
Nucky's all alone in his fight against Rosetti and Masseria, so he's got to plan this stuff out perfectly. Aside from planning to run Remus's old operation out of Andrew Mellon's distillery and sending an emissary to Chicago to court Johnny Torrio's support, Nucky sends Sleater to New York with one simple mission: assassinate Joe Masseria. Before he leaves, Sleater and Margaret make their plans to run away, to St. Louis, in fact. Just as soon as this business is settled.
Meanwhile, one of Rosetti's boats dumped its cargo by accident, so liquor bottles are washing up on shore just like in the opening credits. Rosetti's pissed, and gets even angrier when one of his underlings, tries to explain that it might have been irregular wave patterns. You can imagine how much Rosetti enjoys being educated on the subject. Unbeknownst to him, Nucky has sent his (rabid anti-dentiteItalian) ship captain to infiltrate Rosetti's business, and when he contradicts the underling, Rosetti decides the only acceptable punishment for being wrong is to bury him in the sand up to his neck and wait for high tide to roll in. The underling's cousin begs Rosetti for leniency, so as a compromise, Rosetti merely bashes the guy's head in with a shovel. Fun storyline, as always.
In Washington, Jess Smith is cracking up at the impending crackdown at the Justice department. Gaston Means manages to stoke the fires of that crazy, merely so he can point out to Daugherty that their only choice is to take Smith out, which he volunteers to do. Only Means gets caught in Jess's bedroom by Jess himself, but rather than kill his would-be assassin, Jess turns the gun on himself when he realizes that his good-buddy Harry had arranged his murder.
Back at home, Margaret and Nucky are back on very brittle ground, marriage-wise. She blames him for the hell that's raining down on them. Speaking of which, Nucky receives a delivery in the dead of night. It's a giant crate, and when he opens it -- in full view of Margaret -- inside lies the dead body of Owen Sleater. Guess that assassination attempt didn't go so well. Margaret breaks the fuck down, and in a flashback, we see her tell Owen that, as expected, she is pregnant and he's the father.
In other storylines -- and there were only a billion of them -- Richard and Julia go on a date and make out on the beach; the women's clinic gets shut down, though Mason does deliver the diaphragms to Margaret (too late, in her case); Van Alden's Norwegian hooch enterprise runs him afoul of Al Capone; and Chalky White wants to build a jazz club for black performers on the site of the still smoldering crater where Babbette's used to be, but Nucky callously shuts him down.