Back to the future

A lot of smuggling whiskey has been sold since the Boardwalk Empire was baptized by Martin Scorsese - the director put the pilot series for the HBO channel and retreated into a production shadow. During this time, Naki Thompson (Steve Buscami), the chief buttleger of Atlantic-City from the times of the “dry law”, was close to failure many times: cruel competitors pushed on the one hand, insidious loved ones-on the other, the law and order-from the third. The new season immediately makes it clear that the final head of the history of Naki will not be simple, no matter how much he would like it. A man with a machete interrupts the hero’s walk along the sunny cube, and only the intervention of the mysterious stranger saves the skin of Naki.

Yes, the fifth season of the “Underground Empire” ( available for viewing in the “Amediatek” online service ) will be the last for the show, and instead of the usual twelve episodes, only eight are waiting for us. It did not make sense to talk about him immediately after the premiere in early September - half of the plot lines traditionally did not fit in one series. The Underground Empire has always been more than just another description of the workdays of bad guys, both fictional (Naki Thompson, Chalk White) and real (Laki Luciano, Al Capone and others). The series methodically documented the chosen era, sometimes reaching pedantry: to recreate the coastal wooden sidewalk of Atlantic City, the authors built a reduced 91-meter copy in New York, and Martin Skorsze insisted that the boards are exactly the same size as in those days.

Increased attention to details and love for secondary characters made Boardwalk Empire a grandiose and rather clumsy spectacle. I had to wait for half a season, while the engines warm up and the plots are spinning, but it was almost always worth it. However, the spoiled viewer of the HBO channel was different - the ratings slowly decreased every year.

“The final season of the“ underground empire ”looks largely as a new version of the series: clothing, music, colors, cars-now all this has changed dramatically,” said the creator of the show Terens Winter before the premiere, and he did not deceive, because he tried to invent “Boardwalk Empire” . In the language of modern television, this usually means that someone important will have to die. For example, an uneven spy thriller “Homeland” (“Homeland”) last year hung his key hero by the neck - in the coming season (October 5), we will definitely have a completely different story. The legal drama “ The Good Wife” (“good wife”) this spring completely went crazy (in a good way!) And shot one of the main characters right in the courtroom. But at Boardwalk Empire, such a trick was taken back in the second season, killing James Darmodi with a shot in the face. For the final episodes, there was another solution - a jump in time for several years ahead.

1931, great depression is in full swing. On the horizon - the abolition of the "dry law", and Naki feels it. He goes to Havana to get exclusive rights to sell Bacardi Roma throughout the United States as soon as this becomes legally. The blond businesswoman Sally, who conquered Naki last season, helps to arrange a meeting with the owner (Patricia Arquette, in which today it is not easy to find out the fragile sex bomb that Kung Fu-Films watched with Christian Slater all night in True Love Tony Scott).

On the one hand, a time jump is a reasonable move for the series, when you need to force events before the finale and arrange the main figures in the best positions. So, one of the figures can generally brush off the boards without special explanations (goodbye, Arnold Rothstein), the other can finally be turned into a quarrel, like Al Capone. Alongo's funny days are coming to an end: while he selflessly laughs in the penthus of a chic hotel and reviews the novelties of the cinema, casually calling the “little Caesar” and “enemy of society” comedies, below in the lobby gives an Eliot Ness’s press conference. Yes, the same federal agent who will soon send Kapone in jail.

On the other hand, the acceleration that the Underground Empire receives from the chronological jump forward is inhibited by regular flashbacks from the childhood of Naki Thompson. We see that he grew up in poverty, under one roof with a father-father who was firmly applied to the bottle and firmly applied his son. Sister Naki dies of tuberculosis, and the family has no money for the funeral. Dickens notes will only intensify when an ambitious, but honest boy will bring a rich hat to a rich hat and will not touch a large bill in the lining. Here, young Naki will learn the first important lesson - this world does not reward for honesty. And instead of getting a mind from the educational newspaper for children “ Golden Days for Boys and Girls” (his mother sometimes gets a newspaper), Naki gets acquainted with the rich man Commodor and turns the path that Dickens would hardly approve.

So Naki gains a new depth - it was always almost enough for him to stand on a par with other giants of the criminal world on TV. However, this roll in the direction of one hero is too noticeably affecting everyone else - did the authors decide to dig in the past, when there are so many unfinished things in the present? However, anxiety for the series seems unnecessary when Naki sends his enemies a postcard with greetings from Cuba, a knife -knife to the dead body. “Nobody will leave without noise,” the slogan of the final season promises, and it seems that the “underground empire” will go under water on a scale of “Titanic”, or even Atlantis.