The Waiver Wire

Throughout the third season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, our writers will discuss the ins and outs of each episode. Please beware of spoilers.

An episode like this one has me pretty excited for the rest of this coming season.  This was all about really setting up some storylines that I feel will start to take off these next few episodes.

The first one that I wanted to touch on was of course Gyp Rosetti and his meeting with Joe Masseria.  We all know that Gyp was becoming a pretty big target for Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and Nucky Thompson, but now Joe Masseria will be getting involved to back Gyp.  This will be extremely important as it seemed like both Luciano and Rothstein did not want to get into a war with Masseria.  Now that looks like it may not be possible to avoid something like that.  We saw a desperate Gyp trying to plead for his life and it seemed to work out for him as Masseria will likely use him as a weapon against everyone else.  This may also allow Masseria to stay behind the scenes and not go into a full war if it looks like this is just Gyp acting alone.  The question will become who Gyp tries to attack first and we have seen him lose his cool over something little so I imagine there will be no holding back.  I expect him to really hurt Nucky and possibly go after his family as well.

Another development we saw was the Eli and Nucky relationship.  It finally seems like Eli may have worked his way back into Nucky’s good graces as he got a promotion.  This all came from the family reunion that they had as I am sure that must have convinced Nucky to throw Eli a bone.  Although I still think there will be some serious trust issues between the two of them considering their past.  With Eli stepping up into a bigger role I fully expect him to be a lot more careful than Mickey Doyle with the business.

A character that has really come to annoy me, but may start to play a bigger role from here on out is Gillian.  She finally came to the realization that Jimmy is in fact dead by killing someone who looked just like him.  I have literally hated everything to do with her this season as I did not see the point to have her even have a decent size role.  Now she may finally get back to her ways of trying to figure out a way to gain some power in Atlantic City.  I said a while ago that her and Gyp will at some point come together to figure out a way to attack Nucky and I feel like we may see that sooner rather than later.

The best thing that happened in this episode well actually that did not happen was that there was no more additional time spent on the Margaret and her sessions at the hospital.  I understand that she is an important character, but I would really like it if she took a backseat to some of the better storylines in the coming episodes.