![]() In retaliation, Jimmy stabs his father in the stomach with his switchblade. His chokehold is released only when the Commodore pierces his back with an ornamental spear (typical). But when Gillian suggests that in a month’s time Tommy won’t even remember who Angela was, Jimmy fulfills every viewer’s fantasy by lunging at his mother’s neck and screaming, “I’ll remember!” over and over again. By the end of the episode though, he has returned to the Commodore‘s mansion, sitting in a stupor while Gillian does her needlepoint and breezily discusses funeral arrangements. Even with this backstory, she remains the innocent victim of a drastically twisted family.īack in 1921, a disconsolate Jimmy has been holing up in a hotel room, ignoring his mother’s phone calls and getting drunk and high – the latter courtesy of Lucky Luciano‘s nascent heroin business. Revolted by what he’s done, he escapes into the Army, giving Angela’s name as his only next of kin. Jimmy awakens the next morning to find his mother gone. “There’s nothing wrong with any of it!” she reassures Jimmy as their bodies intertwine, a train loudly rolling by outside. Jimmy weakly attempts to leave by moving his lips toward his mother’s forehead, but her mouth obstructs his path. Gillian falls onto the bed and caresses her son’s face. Toss in a vulnerable Gillian (“I’m the loneliest person on Earth”), and you have a recipe for one of the most sickening moments in television history. Jimmy starts of the scene half-naked thanks to a bloody shirt. From the moment the two enter the room, you can feel what’s coming. One beatdown later, Jimmy has kissed his Princeton career goodbye and has accompanied his drunk mother back to her boarding house. Strange, because Gillian appeared visibly jealous by Angela’s presence, too! Later that evening, when Gillian emerges with her dress strap askew, Jimmy confronts his teacher, who didn’t realize that Gillian was his mother: “Your life is pretty Jacobean all by itself,” Pearson snickers, alluding to Webster’s time period. In the time it takes for Angela to spill that she’s pregnant, Jimmy gets all hot and bothered over his English professor, Mr. Gillian pays her son a visit at Princeton and is introduced to his new girlfriend at a school mixer. When he wasn’t going to bed with townies, Jimmy was studying the works of John Webster, subconsciously relating to Webster’s characters by expounding on the idea of a mother teaching her son “things that aren’t of any use.” Also, the fact that Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi contains an incest subplot was not incidental. We find out what drove him to leave Princeton University and fight in the Great War – and we answer the question about his relationship with his MILF-caliber mother that’s been gnawing at us since last season.īack in the late 1910s, Angela was just a sweet-faced local waitress who enjoyed hopping between the sheets with a floppy-haired student from Atlantic City. ![]() But once it became clear that much of Jimmy’s story line was being told in flashback, it was a thrill to see a long-haired Angela back onscreen. The entire episode was Freud’s Oedipus complex writ large: Jimmy slept with his mother and killed his father, promptly replacing Angela‘s brutal murder as the show’s most disturbing development to date.Īfter last week’s episode closed with Angela and her female lover shot to death by Manny Horvitz, it was a little confusing to see actress Aleksa Palladino’s name in the opening credits. But it wasn’t his fault in “Under God’s Power She Flourishes,” Boardwalk Empire‘s penultimate episode of this season: when it comes to story lines, incest trumps federal charges. For all the jokes that Steve Buscemi made during his Saturday Night Live hosting gig about his move from character actor to leading man, he still couldn’t avoid playing the supporting role this weekend.
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