All Things:HBO/CINEMAX

Wow...not a whole lot of characters left on Boardwalk...SPOILERS



GOODBYE Chalkie and Van Alden. You will be missed.
 
Boardwalk spoilers:

Solid episode, seems like hell is about to break loose. A bit annoyed by the way Van Alden, who easily is one of my favorite characters on the show, was handled... We've been with him since more or less the start of the show and when he ultimately met his demise it felt like there wasn't a point to it all. Almost like he was a character they decided to keep around because he was popular instead of killing him off when his story came to a natural conclusion. Compare it to Chalky who had a worthy ending with an arc, self-sacrifice and everything. Van Alden punched Al Capone and got his brains blown out. Yeah I understand that it led to the undercover agent being trusted with incriminating documents but I gotta think they could have done something better to wrap up a character as intruiging, multifasceted and complex as Van Alden. It's like what of the story of him being a former agent? His dual nature? His inability to understand and relate to other people? Eli boning his wife? Nah they just ****ing killed him off instead.

Oh well, just one part handled poorly in an otherwise great show.
 
BigBrown said:
Boardwalk spoilers:

Solid episode, seems like hell is about to break loose. A bit annoyed by the way Van Alden, who easily is one of my favorite characters on the show, was handled... We've been with him since more or less the start of the show and when he ultimately met his demise it felt like there wasn't a point to it all. Almost like he was a character they decided to keep around because he was popular instead of killing him off when his story came to a natural conclusion. Compare it to Chalky who had a worthy ending with an arc, self-sacrifice and everything. Van Alden punched Al Capone and got his brains blown out. Yeah I understand that it led to the undercover agent being trusted with incriminating documents but I gotta think they could have done something better to wrap up a character as intruiging, multifasceted and complex as Van Alden. It's like what of the story of him being a former agent? His dual nature? His inability to understand and relate to other people? Eli boning his wife? Nah they just ****ing killed him off instead.

Oh well, just one part handled poorly in an otherwise great show.
Click to expand...

SPOILERS

I get your point...I do, but I saw it a little differently.
Firstly I thought Van Alden was probably meant to go a LONG time ago. Michael Shannon made that too hard to do. Yes, his arc was sooooo far better than even Nucky's, and we watched him just survive. He was always reacting to crap he, through his own bad decisions, kept getting stuck in. You think back to how prideful he was being an agent...and just how bad he failed at every other disguise he tried to assume. In the end, he had Capone's neck in his hands while claiming back his identity. Sure it was abrupt, but it was almost necessary for him to go back to that time when he wasn't an abject failure...at marraige, being a father, a gangster, an iron salesman, a flower arranger/collector...I kinda see his ending as actually being a little more heroic than Chalky's. At least he, in a bungling sort of way, came through. Chalky's sacrifice, while noble...was far from a guarantee that what he sacrificed himself for actually came to be. Either way, the only character(still alive) I really feel any empathy for is Eli. And that won't end well either. Johnny Torreo...who saw that coming, btw?
 
That's a fair point. I thoroughly enjoyed myself when he was screaming in Capone's face that he was a federal agent and I was excited to see where they'd take this crazy man next now that he'd come full circle so to say... but yeah, I didn't get much time to ponder that scenario.

Torrio's gotta go down! Part of me wants to just google and find out what happens to them all but I can't give in to those urges, the show's too good.
 
Just finished watching the Rome series for the fourth time. I'm devastated that it got canned due to budgetary concerns after only two seasons.. I loved this freakin' show!
 
First episode of Sonic Highways was pretty good. Here is a little preview for the next episode

 
Sonic Highways really good so far. Seeing music history of a city each Ep is cool.
 
Spoilers

So I got lost in the flash backs and forwards.. The kid that saved him when he was rolled by the hookers was Tommy? Or was that guy just a Red Herring and Tommy was some random guy on the Boardwalk we'd never seen before this season? Because if the first kid ended up being Tommy I call shenanigans.
 
not-mike said:
Spoilers

So I got lost in the flash backs and forwards.. The kid that saved him when he was rolled by the hookers was Tommy? Or was that guy just a Red Herring and Tommy was some random guy on the Boardwalk we'd never seen before this season? Because if the first kid ended up being Tommy I call shenanigans.
Click to expand...

Nope it was Tommy all along(including with the hookers). He worked his way into the circle of Nucky for the sake of finding out if he was a bad man or a good man, as he said. And the fact that he refused 'tips' for running errands etc. along with tearing up the money Nucky offered him cemented it. Was it convenient? A little. But shenanigan worthy? Not really. What was a little heavy handed was that he shot him under his eye, which is the same place Nucky shot his father.
The one thing I got from reading reviews is the ending. As Nucky was dying it flashed back to him as a kid, finally getting that gold coin that eluded him in the earlier episode. Thought that was pretty groovy. As the flashbacks showed and the entire run in general, Nucky always wanted to be something other than what he was. Always chasing, never appreciating. More I think about the ending and the season in general, the more I appreciate it.
 
Last edited:
Overall I liked the final episode, maybe a bit too heavy on farewell-moments but whatever, it's the series finale. Probably one of the weaker seasons though, it kinda sucks to end on anything but a high point so it's disappointing in that regard. A big problem is that there were barely any likable characters left, previously likable ones like Nucky and Eli, whom I enjoyed greatly as brothers and partners earlier in the show, were now isolated, distant and alone. The whole Cuba business wasn't all that interesting and ended suddenly. The gangster war was summed up in a montage. Characters getting killed off without much of an emotional impact because the show was wrapping up in a hurry. The flashbacks and the kid that later was revealed to be Tommy were things that I didn't love during the season but they both had nice payoffs in the end.

Overall a quality show that I'm sad to see end. Started slow but promising, had a very strong middle and sort of lost a bit of steam towards the end but still excellent.
 
BigBrown said:
Overall I liked the final episode, maybe a bit too heavy on farewell-moments but whatever, it's the series finale. Probably one of the weaker seasons though, it kinda sucks to end on anything but a high point so it's disappointing in that regard. A big problem is that there were barely any likable characters left, previously likable ones like Nucky and Eli, whom I enjoyed greatly as brothers and partners earlier in the show, were now isolated, distant and alone. The whole Cuba business wasn't all that interesting and ended suddenly. The gangster war was summed up in a montage. Characters getting killed off without much of an emotional impact because the show was wrapping up in a hurry. The flashbacks and the kid that later was revealed to be Tommy were things that I didn't love during the season but they both had nice payoffs in the end.
Click to expand...

Your point about Cuba is spot on. I wonder how much stuff got cut when HBO came at them with the offer for 8 episodes instead of 12. From an interview I read

http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-wa...e-winter-on-nuckys-fate-and-the-series-finale

some other plotlines got clipped too. Winter backs up my feelings about Van Alden's death being all about getting back to who he was, as well. I think the show suffered after Gyp Rosetti. Dude was a dynamo, and once he was gone they couldn't get back to that level again. And Nucky and Margaret splitting up took a lot of steam out of the show too. I think if you went back and binge watched the whole thing you might come out with a better feeling overall. They always seemed to be going for the long story, which is why a lot of passages seemed pointless and boring till they payed off. Considering how Dexter and True Blood and to a certain extent Sopranos, played out...I think overall it was a pretty satisfying run.
Dude that played young Nucky...that HAD to be a prosthetic in his mouth...right? Pretty damned good likeness though.

Overall a quality show that I'm sad to see end. Started slow but promising, had a very strong middle and sort of lost a bit of steam towards the end but still excellent.
 
BigBrown said:
Overall I liked the final episode, maybe a bit too heavy on farewell-moments but whatever, it's the series finale. Probably one of the weaker seasons though, it kinda sucks to end on anything but a high point so it's disappointing in that regard. A big problem is that there were barely any likable characters left, previously likable ones like Nucky and Eli, whom I enjoyed greatly as brothers and partners earlier in the show, were now isolated, distant and alone. The whole Cuba business wasn't all that interesting and ended suddenly. The gangster war was summed up in a montage. Characters getting killed off without much of an emotional impact because the show was wrapping up in a hurry. The flashbacks and the kid that later was revealed to be Tommy were things that I didn't love during the season but they both had nice payoffs in the end.

Overall a quality show that I'm sad to see end. Started slow but promising, had a very strong middle and sort of lost a bit of steam towards the end but still excellent.
Click to expand...
Yes, the Cuba thing was neither here nor there. Probably got chopped up as jd mentioned. Good show overall, although to be honest I watched much of it this past season on auto pilot. I watched it since the beginning and I felt kind of obligated to see how it all ended after investing all that time. I doubt I would have been hooked if I started watching this season.
 
David Fincher Will Direct The Entire First Season Of HBO's 'Utopia' In 2015

Chatting with The Guardian, Fincher revealed that he will be behind the camera for every episode of HBO's remake of the U.K. series "Utopia." The project, which has been brewing for a while, was given a series order by the network earlier this year, with "Gone Girl" author Gillian Flynn also on board to produce. The show (which has two seasons overseas) follows a group of people who get their hands on a cult graphic novel called "The Utopia Experiments," which seems to have predicted no shortage of disasters. An organization known only as The Network hunts them down as the group tries to prevent the next disaster predicted in the pages of the manuscript from happening.

“I like the world of it,” Fincher told the paper. “I like the characters – I love Dennis’s [Kelly, creator of the U.K. show] honesty and affinity for the nerds. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of a junior conspiracy theorist because I don’t have time to connect them all! But it’s nice to see that somebody has.”
Click to expand...

Sold.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Now Chirping

Share this page

Back
Top