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Final Season Ruined Great Characters & Ended Terribly

posted 10 years ago by brcforest-71-710695
21 replies | jump to latest

There were lots of great characters on Boardwalk Empire, but the Final Season was disloyal to them and simply wasted or ruined many of them. It was really a very poorly written season, as much as I loved the show before this year.

1) CHALKY WHITE. They wasted possible great stories with his character, just to have him killed by an all around weak character in Dr. Narcisse. There were so many directions his story could have gone in and they gained nothing in killing him off.

2) NELSON VAN ALDEN. Again, they wasted this great character, and made him weaker season after season. When he came in he was tough and a person to be reckoned with, because he did things strong and his own way, but in the Final Season he was basically a scared little man getting pushed around by everyone and almost pleading with people to get by. What happened? He was a great character and they just ruined him and killed him off.

3) MICKEY DOYLE. He was always amusing and his part got bigger over the series, but they basically killed him off and made it no big deal. I don't think his death was even mentioned by another character and he didn't even get shown in a closeup shot when he died. It was like a background character getting killed in a war film.

4) NUCKY THOMPSON. What a horrible way to end this series with Nucky getting killed by a character who was years older than he should have been if they stayed true to their own story, Tommy Darmody. Why did he wait until then to shoot Nucky? There seems no reason other than they were ending the show, so they had him pass up 1000 other chances and not even really have a talk between he and Nucky. Just super super contrived and weak. Nucky was a big character and he absolutely did not need to die at all, let alone be gunned down when unarmed and out of the game by a tiny character he actually helped in life. Sure Nucky killed his father, but his father was a piece of garbage. Nucky helped save Tommy from a life of being molested by his mother, after all.

Actually, they mishandled a lot more than I've mentioned above, but there was no reason for all of these non-epic weak scene endings. There was a whole future ahead of these people, decades in a normal life, surely they could have figured out future lives to put them into without simply killing them all off in poor fashion.

I'm sorry that the Final Season was nowhere close to the standard of the previous seasons. What a disappointing waste.

Oh, well. At least there's still amazing things happening on The Americans.

[–] dallas-hartwell-138-482190 10 years ago

Great write up.

1) I thought Chalky's was the worst. He basically gave up and committed suicide. I never much liked his romance with the younger woman. I always thought of Chalky as a family man. I wanted to see him get vengeance on Narcisse. Instead, he just kind of rolls over. Like the bad guy is going to keep his word? C'mon. Chalky was a fighter - a REAL fighter. He wouldn't have given up like that.

2) What really does not make sense is the fact he saves the Capones' lives in the previous season. He then works loyally for him for several years. Capone may have been a bad guy, but NVA saved his life and he would have been thankful for this. The whole "let's stuff the suitcase with paper" idea was weak. If you fail, you're dead for sure. Then, I'm also disappointed with his wife becoming such a whore. They had the one genuine relationship in this show. She murdered for him. Now she's just "Eh?" What happened there? I felt they had to make NVA's family life crappy so you wouldn't feel so bad for him when he died. He was a tough SOB and they totally watered him down.

3) I thought Mickey would be the last man standing. Every time I saw him on screen, I'd always say "He's still alive?" Lucky would never have the balls to shoot Mickey in that situation. Bugsy? Sure. Lucky? Nope. He was mature and had become interested in the long game, like Meyer. Murdering him there would have caused a shootout.

4) I have no problem with Nucky dying. I don't care too much about the Tommy Darmody thing. The issue is we all saw it coming a mile away. They went for a shocking ending - which I like - but it was the last thing from shocking.

[–] ARNKxx 10 years ago

CHALKY WHITE > Deal with it.
NELSON VAN ALDEN > The story of a mans tragic downward spiral/fall from grace.
MICKEY DOYLE > Puts things in perspective, he's small time - not even worth a close-up
NUCKY THOMPSON > That's life, stranger things have happened.

[–] brcforest-71-710695 10 years ago

"Deal with it"? LOL

They wrote several years of great shows and story lines. They could have gone in any direction with almost every character, but instead they simply killed them off in weak fashion one after the next.

And as noted above by another poster, many of the characters started being written in a way that was in no way consistent with who they were. That's how you ruin a show.

Chalky wouldn't have let a man he hated kill him. He could have killed Narcisse easily, just as others did in the end. It made no sense at all, and again, gained nothing.

Van Alden was one person that completely changed into another person and then started acting nervous, weak, and gutless, and then got killed in idiotic fashion. That was never him, but that's what they did with him on the show. Again, ignoring dozens of interesting futures he could have fallen into.

They kept Mickey Doyle around for years for a reason, and they made him more and more important to Nucky, and then kill him off without even a mention.

It's simply bad writing. There are no arguments to say otherwise.

[–] Hows_yer_arm_john 10 years ago

Agreed. It was all rushed. They couldn't find endings for all the characters with so little time to do it.

[–] brcforest-71-710695 10 years ago

You're right about that, but there's to do with characters than killing them off after having them act weak and dramatically different from who they've shown themselves to be for years.

I'm fine that Nucky got killed, but the way they did it hurts the show as an overall entity.

[–] annab-20 9 years ago

Chalky's position in the community was way too important for him to destroy it so recklessly. There was nothing to stop him having an affair with Daughter and just continuing to go about his life. I loved Samuel, he was only in a few episodes but stood out. A brave man to take on being Chalky White's son in law.

[–] MadinMiddleAge 10 years ago

Well said. I feel sad, seduced, and abandoned by the way it has come to an end. Whether it was HBO or Terence Winter getting bored (which I rather doubt) I think that dedicated viewers deserved another season. Even if the plot turned out exactly the same, there could have been better development. Of course, we all know about the bottom line...money talks, or shuts people up. Sigh.

[–] jdanek007 10 years ago

Great summary of the writers' treasons to the show.

Thank you for the effort you put into preparing this for us.

It's good to know others share my outrage.

[–] NelsonVanAlden 10 years ago

LOL. Your reasons are pretty laughable. Basically your reason for every character is "they didn't do this or that, and just killed him off by a character i didn't like".

Great explanations

[–] brcforest-71-710695 10 years ago

I'm starting to feel sorry for you NelsonVanAlden as your blind again. It is ok to love the show. We all do, but you can't possibly be as clueless as you're coming across to all of us.

And I'm not whining or upset about it. I'm calmly pointing our writing failures. That is why I lay out facts from the show. None of this is personal to me against anyone. They had great writers on this show, but they were clearly rushed in only 8 episodes to finish what they started.

LOL. Your reasons are pretty laughable. Basically your reason for every character is "they didn't do this or that, and just killed him off by a character i didn't like".

Your comment doesn't even make sense. I am laying out why the writing was very poor. I am showing their lack of imagination and pointing out huge flaws in the characters and stories.

They had one answer for everything - kill. Ok so let us say that killing big characters they featured over the whole show is cool - couldn't they have found better ways to do it then have two of them basically commit suicide (Chalky and VanAlden) and use a story and time line that simply rewrites past show events in killing Nucky?

Try and keep up here - I'll lay out SEVERAL THINGS AGAIN for you.

1 - They weren't consistent with their own characters.
EXAMPLE NELSON VAN ALDEN) Van Alden was a super smart and tough hard driven man. He became a weak wimp for no clear reason at all and went down without thinking or fighting - and no he wasn't fighting when he tried to choke Al Capone since he knew he was dead by then. Going down fighting would have been showing up at Al's with a machine gun and bursting in opening fire. OR he could have tried to run. OR, what would have been very very interesting, is if he had used inside knowledge of the government to rob the government and take money or go after some inside FBI cash and then either disappear or go down fighting. He even could have made a deal with the government, gotten docs that helped take down Al, and then redeemed himself. Any of these stories would have been far better than what happened to him, which was basically just written to hurry up and end his story and life since the show was going off air.

2 - In some cases they weren't even consistent in the Final Season with events shown on screen in previous episodes.
EXAMPLE JILLIAN AND TOMMY)
Tommy would have been 13 at the end, yet he was clearly early 20's. Sorry that is a historic level of failure on a show. PLUS, when last we saw Tommy with Jillian he seemed not to recognize her or have any trust in her AND Jillian is a well known murderer and child molester, so to assume that magical events ALL TOOK PLACE BETWEEN THEM OFF SCREEN is simply a joke.

3 - They came up with virtually nothing to do with any of their main gangster characters besides kill them off.
EXAMPLES Nucky, Chalky, Mickey, Narcisse, Van Alden, etc., etc.)
When you kill a big character it should either redeem them, be what they've had justly coming in epic fashion from a long standing enemy, or lead the stories in exciting new directions that were completely unexpected. BUT none of this was done for any of these characters. That is why so many people feel so short changed. We all invested in these characters and were then dramatically let down, if not betrayed.

4 - They killed off the lead character in absurd fashion that wasn't plausible in any way outside of ASSUMING THAT MULTIPLE UNLIKELY EVENTS TOOK PLACE ALL OFF SCREEN. Again, that is the worst form of writing, and I'm certain writers on the show would admit the same in private as clearly their hand was forced.
EXAMPLES Nucky, Chalky)
Chalky basically walked himself into a no win situation with his biggest enemy and then let himself get killed.

If you think that's great writing, 99% of all viewers disagree with you.

[–] soothsayerh3 10 years ago

I thank you for this read because the reasons why you think the final sucked are the same reasons why I am now realizing it was great.

Your whole post sounds like whining on how they killed your favourite characters, but the point of the show is that anyone can and will die, just because you are strong in the game like white or nucky once were, it doesn't make you immortal and you can die over really stupid *beep* A clowny character like mickey doyle would probably have been whacked just on a whim by someone higher up but he managed to somehow claw his way up and play the game just right but then he dies in a whimsical way anyways. About nucky-tommy dialogue being too contrived I agree only about not being shown what memories and motivations does tommy really have, since we are seeing nucky's perspective the whole time. Hard to say if tommy remembers stuff from when he was a kid or if he was in contact with his grandma. Nucky is shown up until the end as a conflicted man who clawed his way up through hard work but then you see the moment where he became truly evil and "sold his soul" by luring gillian into being the sextoy of a pedophile, so his death was a fitting end.

I think the finale was great.

[–] Sophitia36 10 years ago

You missed the point entirely. The problem is not with the fact that favourite characters died, it's how it was so poorly done.

If you think it was well done, well we have a completely different opinion on what constitutes good character development.

The fact is, none of this makes any sense.

[–] Sophitia36 10 years ago

I totally agree with everything you said, OP.

As I've said in another post, Boardwalk has been killing many great characters since Jimmy died in season 2, pretty much.

They certainly have killed many of my favourites (Eddie, Owen, Richard, for instance).
Everytime they did it, I felt sad but at the same time I really admired the great writing. Every single one of those death scenes were incredibly well done. Even the ones involving characters I didn't like so much (Jimmy, or Angela, for instance).

But this season... They start off by killing my last favourite, Rothstein, off-screen, which is so ridiculous no one could believe they were actually going to do it, until it became so clear that we had to admit this was going to happen.

Then, I have nothing to add about the other casualties of season 5, I think you explained everything perfectly well. I felt absolutely NO emotion, except extreme annoyance, at any of those deaths. And yet, I loved Chalky, I loved Nelson, I loved Mickey, and God knows I loved Nucky (I won't include Narcisse, he should have been killed ages ago, that was so overdue and so forced - just this one scene - that I didn't even care).

This season is an absolute disgrace, it is ABSOLUTELY obvious that it is 24 episodes' worth of material crammed up into 8 episodes. Only blind fanboys would still deny it.

Not to mention this is the worst plot twist in history, people had seen this coming from miles away. It was so obvious, I didn't think they were going to do it.

[–] tadaia 10 years ago

1) CHALKY WHITE. They wasted possible great stories with his character, just to have him killed by an all around weak character in Dr. Narcisse...

I stopped reading here