Boardwalk Empire Recap: “Spaghetti & Coffee”

The following recap contains spoilers

by Veronique Medrano:

Boardwalk Empire Recap: “Spaghetti & Coffee”
Original Air Date (HBO): Sunday September 23, 2012
Season 2 Episode 2

My goodness! This episode was a jumbly-noodly-mess, and this isn’t a insult by any means. If anything this episode is bringing some other memorable faces back into the picture, and making them interact with our new folks in New JOysey (New Jersey). This recap covers the characters to follow, and while other recaps give you the run down of the episode from start to finish, I want to cut the fluff filler and give you that sweet diabetes goodness. So before we enter let me remind everyone, just so ya won’t forget, that the following recap contains spoilers (i.e: info about the episode that you may not want to know before watching).

Goldfish. Yes, that bugged me. Poor little thing getting switched into a tiny cup doesn’t seem to add up to anything , but we’ll talk about that later. I promise!

Damn, ever since Gyp Rossetti’s entrance into the world of Boardwalk Empire, there is an underlying tension in every one on one interaction he has with ANYONE. The one person I see that he doesn’t have this relationship is his second-hand man. It almost seems like he has been with Rosetti long enough to know what sets him off, and how to quickly deflate the shit-storm he brings. His interaction with the cops, the townsfolk, and the gas attendant borderline on something big headed our way.

Nucky and Billie Kent, feel weird to me. I know what this episode is trying to do to me on the subject of this relationship, but damn it doesn’t feel any less weird than when I first saw them going at it at the end of Episode 1. I mean every scene with them together feels like he’s playing house. The sex-life he wants to have, the distance between him and his liquor business, the openness in communication with her about his past. Of course, maybe I’m the only one, but at times it goes from a lover relationship to that of a father and his child. We can see that Nucky is getting pretty attached to this girl, but what really throws a red flag of caution into the air is her statement ” I said I’d never tell, and you said you’d never ask.”  This and Billie’s prior actions make us realize her eyes aren’t just set on Nucky Thompson, and that relationship  wasn’t meant to get serious. Just a curious tid-bit before we move on…could she betray him for the right price?

Praise the Gods! It was good to see Chaulky White back in the show. The internet may have been abuzz as to where the hell he was, but I was comfortable with the fact that if they haven’t killed him on screen or mentioned it in one way or another he was still in the ring to fight another round. His storyline is not an all out bubbly mess. It is a simple yet clean cut story that brings us back to the era, and the place that we were are in. Throughout the episode it seems like we are watching a vaudeville film, that doesn’t clearly stick to the era it is meant to portray. Chaulky’s situation with his daughter Maybelle is common of the era, to a degree. While African Americans are able to get schooling in the North, there is still this naivety that his daughter shows to her betrothal.

Maybelle is under the impression that ‘interesting men’ like her father are qualities she should seek in a husband. Chaulky on the other hand, makes it abundantly clear after having his second-hand man beat the living daylight’s out of a hoodlum who slashes her future betrothed’s face, that ‘interesting’ is a very loose term. Her defiance against her father’s wishes may continue on, but for now it seems that Maybelle got a much needed reality check.

Goldfish time! After romping through the streets of New York, Nucky must pay a visit to his middleman. A small amount of bitchy banter, and here is where we meet the man with the Goldfish. His name is Mr. Means, and does this guy remind me a lot of Varys from Game of Thrones. The man has information about everything going on everywhere. which annoys Nucky when Mr. Means shows off his informational power when he states who exactly Nucky has planned to meet later in the day.  He is someone to keep an eye on for the rest of the season ’cause his overflow of information will be something that may come in handy for Nucky or his adversaries.

Finally, we find ourselves back at the premise of our tale.  Spaghetti & Coffee. This dish served to Gyp Rosetti, before his run in with Eli (Nucky’s brother), Mickey, and his goons, proves to be an interesting look at the man himself. So far, we see that he does not get hot-blooded while in the presence of a young lady, and he is between pissed off and amused. I’m never quite sure what is in his head or what he wants to do, and maybe that is what he is supposed to be : “the wildcard”. His subsequent action to block a shipment of booze to New York, is setting up for what we hope will be a bloody battle in the near future…very very near.